We not only recognize the economic benefits that free-world nations can get from an expanding East-West trade in peaceful goods; we also bear in mind the possibility that trade contacts can help to improve relations among peoples.
But in hoping for and working toward that end, we are not thereby accepting the belief that international trade inevitably and automatically leads toward peace. Hitler’s Germany expanded its foreign trade right up to the outbreak of World War II. We must view with skepticism the Communist propaganda line on trade and peace, for we know what their trading objectives and methods are. East-West trade as now constituted is carried on not with private individuals in the Soviet bloc but with agencies of Soviet-bloc governments.
International trade in general can be a broad highway toward better living standards and more peaceful relations. It has served humanity well. There should be more of it. But it takes two to trade, and trade is not necessarily a road to peace unless both parties wish to make it so.
Trade Within the Free World
Toward the close of the 6-month period under review, the President’s Commission on Foreign Economic Policy (Randall Commission) was hard at work. There was a great amount of public discussion, continuing into 1954, concerning ways in which the United States and other free-world countries could eliminate or reduce the obstacles that hinder the international exchange of goods.
The Commission, issuing its report in January, had much to say on the reduction of trade obstacles.
The Commission also included a section on East-West trade, recommending that the United States not object to more trade in peaceful goods between Western Europe and the European bloc.
These two subjects, trade liberalization and East-West trade, are connected with each other. When businessmen in free-world countries are hindered—either by trade barriers or other artificial causes—from selling products in other free-world countries, they are more prone to seek markets in the Soviet bloc.
To a certain extent this aggravates the problem of maintaining adequate strategic trade controls and the problem that some free-world countries have of avoiding undue dependence on the Soviet bloc.
It would be impractical to seek the elimination of all trade restrictions within the free world but it is important to reduce unjustifiable barriers and it is also important to take whatever other steps are possible to develop new markets and new sources of supply.