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U.S. Dilemma. One way or the other, the U.S. is committed to defend all six colonial powers (though not their empires). Its stake in their colonies is large: from the old empires, American industry gets much of its rubber, palm oil, cocoa, tin, copper. There are dozens of U.S. air bases in colonial territories. U.S. atomic power depends heavily on Congo uranium.
Standing as a great third party, the U.S. finds itself caught in the middle—between struggling colonial peoples who look to U.S. leadership to set them free, and the empires themselves, who are still its strongest allies. The U.S. dilemma is serious, wrote Dr. Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University. "We must bend every effort to convince the European governments that we are not trying, out of sheer, fuzzy-minded liberalism, to aid and abet those who want to give their empires away. On the other hand, we dare not let ourselves be put in the position of trying to prop up the decaying structures of last-century imperialism . . ."
U.S. Policy. What the U.S. needs is a new set of measuring rods by which to judge its own self-interest in the clash between awakening colonial peoples and their imperial masters. Henry A. Byroade, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, recently provided such a set. West Pointer Byroade laid down two guiding principles that henceforth will shape U.S. attitudes towards colonialism: progress and order.
The U.S., said Byroade, recognizes that "the disintegration of the old colonialism is inevitable. We believe that much blood and treasure may be saved if the Western world determines firmly to hasten rather than hamper . . . orderly evolution to self-determination." But the U.S. will not sponsor independence simply for its own sake. "We want [colonial peoples] to maintain their independence against the new Soviet imperialism. We do not want the vast labor and pain expended in the struggle for freedom to be wasted by the premature creation of a state that will collapse like a stack of cards at the first hint of difficulty . . ." In short, the progress must be real, and to be real, it must endure.
Order, the second principle, means that the U.S. expects that a newly independent people will not prove a menace to its own minorities, or a nuisance to its neighbors. The U.S., Byroade suggested, expects new nations to be capable of 1) meeting their obligations to all other nations, including the old empires; 2) tackling their age-old problems of poverty, disease and social discrimination; 3) protecting human rights.
Whatever newborn nation resolves to do these things will be helping itself. And in so doing, it can count on the U.S.
-India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Korea, Israel, Jordan, The Philippines, Libya. </Footnote>
<Footnote> * A fact which may have occurred to Winston Churchill when he once interrupted a debate on constitutional reform for Malta with the remark that the House of Commons might just as well discuss a constitution for a battleship.