East-West Trade Trends: Mutual Defense Assistance Control Act of 1951 (the Battle Act); Fourth Report to Congress, Second Half of 1953United States. Foreign Operations Administration
History
East-West Trade Trends: Mutual Defense Assistance Control Act of 1951 (the Battle Act); Fourth Report to Congress, Second Half of 1953
United States. Foreign Operations Administration
Military assistance; Mutual security program, 1951-; United States -- Commercial policy
The foregoing can be recognized, as among the things being attempted in
the Soviet "trade offensive" of 1953-54. They did not fall in separate
compartments, but were woven together in a central plan and they
contributed to one another. They were not so new as some of them might
look at first glance. The long-term objectives which they served were
not new at all.
=Their Practices Haven't Changed=
Some new tactics have been adopted, as we have seen. But even many
tactics have more of an old look than a new. Soviet-bloc business
practices still clash with Western concepts of normal, peaceful trade
relations.
Soviet-bloc representatives have access to many free-world factories,
visit docks and inspect merchandise destined for the bloc, maintain
offices in commercial centers, receive technical materials from
libraries and business firms, and pick up voluminous statistics on
free-world resources, production, exports, and imports.
The governments of Soviet-bloc countries do not reciprocate.
Although they entertain delegations of diplomats and businessmen and
occasionally allow individuals to visit certain places when it serves
their purposes, the Western business community in general is barricaded
out of their cities, factories, and countrysides, and the peoples of
the bloc firmly locked in. Disclosures of even the simplest facts and
figures about their economies is a serious crime. They do not enter
into the customary international agreements for the protection of
patents. Though they claim to have invented almost everything, much of
their industrial progress is based on piracy of Western inventions and
technology, from the tiny Moskvich automobile to the jet engine. They
have failed to settle promptly and adequately claims for confiscation
of Western properties and for lend-lease assistance. Furthermore the
terms on which they often seek to trade omit customary guarantees
of fair dealing. For example, the U.S.S.R is still trying to insert
clauses in its East-West contracts requiring that any dispute between
the Soviet Government and the free-world businessman be arbitrated by
the Chamber of Commerce of the Ministry of Foreign Trade--an organ of
the Soviet Government. And as we have already seen, they make every
effort to circumvent the export controls of other nations; they pay
citizens of those nations to violate the laws of their governments.
The best way to characterize the Soviet "trade offensive" is that the
Soviet rulers have improvised for their trade structure a new facade
of papier mache but have not reconstructed the interior. In changing
circumstances the Kremlin was seeking effective ways of accomplishing
the same traditional objectives of feeding its industrial-military
machine and weakening the free world.
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