427 



widening the range of consumer purchases, and for the food from its two 

 oceans. As a great power it seeks to be wherever the Americans can be, and in 

 so doing it is learning that it is the greatness of power itself and not the declared 

 purpose of power which causes apprehension, that it is an expensive and haz- 

 ardous role to play, and that it cannot win universal friendship in a world of 

 national interests. And Soviet power in the world, especially the communist 

 world, requires the containment, voluntary or involuntary, of China. Thus, 

 Peking, having wished to expel one policeman from Southeast Asia, has suc- 

 ceeded in establishing two. If America has decided it cannot be the world's one 

 policeman, with the burden of cost and of criticism the role entails, there is now 

 a second policeman, if it can afford the cost and accept the criticism. And in the 

 mutual vigilance of the United States and the Soviet Union, and in the climate 

 of being assessed by the smaller power, may lie a temporary pattern of power, 

 till a cooperative, collective, regional, self-policing force emerges in Southeast 

 Asia. 



In short, he concludes, "international, regional, and national prob- 

 lems overlap." 96 



Clearly, an important aspect of the regional defense alliance is its 

 scope. If limited to strictly security considerations, a regional pact 

 would seem vulnerable to changes in national interest or control. Pre- 

 sumably, this view motivated President Johnson's attempt to couple 

 the concept with that of regional development. Said the President 

 (in part) : 



We recognize that our strength, our size and our great wealth may impose a 

 very special obligation upon us in the transition to the new Asia. But we also 

 recognize that the cooperative tasks of assistance and defense will be assumed 

 more and more by others, and we hope by collective regional groupings as the 

 nations of Asia develop and build their own strength and their own abundance. 87 



It may be that the most durable regional alliances are those in which 

 the national interest of the participants is served by economic as well 

 as (or perhaps rather than) security benefits. It is noteworthy that the 

 Mekong Project did not constitute a regional defense alliance in any 

 formal sense, although disruption in one part of the Basin would be 

 likely to cause repercussions in other parts. 



But the question arises as to what groupings of nations can provide 

 both shared interest in defense and shared interest in development. 

 Should the grouping encompass both developed and developing states, 

 for example, or does this invite the danger of a progressive economic 

 "neo-colonialism"? One possible answer would involve a regional core 

 of developing nations, with a multilateral tier of developed nations 

 lending economic support — with or without military support. 



Regional Development as an Instrument of Foreign Aid 



The natural advantages of a geographic approach to economic de- 

 velopment assistance abroad appear to be matched by the political ad- 

 vantages. From the geographic point of view, capital resources can be 

 focused and concentrated. From the political point of view, the effort 

 can be represented as functional rather than evolved out of the diplo- 

 matic calculus of competing preferential trade and investment, 



Experience of the United States with domestic regionalism has been 

 mixed, but the outstanding: example of the TVA demonstrates what 

 can be accomplished by the systematic, planned development of a 

 coherent geographic region under the leadership of a well-supported 



88 George Thompson, "The New World of Asia," Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1, (October 1969), 

 pp. 37-13,8. 



97 "Additional Oocumentation on President Johnson's Trip," p. 816. 



