Foreign trade is a political as well as an economic weapon in the hands of the Soviet Communist state. By way of illustration, in 1948 it was possible for the Kremlin first to reduce and then to cut off all trade between Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia as a part of the attempt to bring Marshal Tito to his knees. The attempt failed, but the Yugoslavs suffered serious economic difficulties before they could readjust. Even earlier, the world had seen how the Kremlin refused to allow the Eastern European countries to benefit from the flow of Western goods that could have been theirs under the Marshall plan--another evidence of how the state's objectives took precedence over the people's needs. The Kremlin in its propaganda made much of Western trade restrictions. But the West's limited controls over the shipment of strategic goods did not come into existence until long after the Kremlin had begun using trade as a cold-war weapon. Even then these Western controls, far from being aggressive actions against peaceful trade or against the welfare of populations, were common-sense measures of economic _defense_, designed only to foster Western security by withholding from aggression-minded governments the important war-building materials that would make aggression easier. On the other hand, the Kremlin's long-term objectives in its economic relations with the free world are far more than defensive. They have a dual character: strengthening the bloc and weakening the free-world powers. These objectives can be summarized as follows: 1. To feed the economy, especially the industrial-military base, with imports that help the bloc become more powerful and less dependent on the free world. 2. To drive wedges among free-world nations at every opportunity. 3. To increase the reliance of free-world nations on the bloc for markets or supplies, and thus make the free world more vulnerable to bloc pressures. =West Has Never Barred Peaceful Exports= The Kremlin, while coldly managing the East-West trade of its domain in the manner described, always had its propagandists and fellow travelers out beating the drums and making a continual outcry against the security trade controls of the West. The main line of the propaganda was that trade was equivalent to peace and prosperity, and that the Soviet bloc always stood ready for unlimited trade, but that the Western "economic blockade" barred the way. In each country the businessmen were constantly handed the false but inflammatory story that they were being shamefully discriminated against by their government and that the businessmen of neighboring countries were less subject to restrictions. Western Europe as a whole was treated to an alluring picture of a vast prospect of East-West trade, beyond all factual probability in view of Soviet policies.