Trade Tactics

Until last Thursday special licenses from the Department of Foreign Commerce were required to export Easter egg dye, hair tonic, dentures, and baby bibs to the Soviet Union. these and 700 other significant non-strategic commodities are now absolved from the licensing requirement and may be freely shipped to the Soviet bloc by American traders. By this action the Administration is attempting to pacify domestic exporters and foreign especially British, critics who have been charging the U.S. with obstructing world trade and have been agitating for increased U.S. commercial relations with Russia.

The Administration's condescension cannot pass as a real attempt to increase the volume of this country's trade with the Soviet bloc. Non-strategic goods previously requiring licenses for export were granted them almost automatically. No shortening of the "strategic" list has occurred. Commerce Secretary Weeks states that the action is a step towards meeting President Eisenhower's Geneva objective, "to create conditions which will encourage nations to increase the exchange of peaceful goods throughout the world." But the little progress that the new change will make is, as U.S. exports claim, actually infinitesimal.

Increased U.S.-Soviet trade is desirable on several important counts. If the free world is, as it seems, bound to accept a prolonged state of coexistence with the Soviet Union, healthier commercial intercourse between East and West will lead to a less tense and precipitous atmosphere. Rehabilitated US-USSR trade would also allow other non-Soviet nations to relax their trade relations with the Soviet bloc, and could provide them with new markets free of the prohibitive dollar-gap difficulty.

The U.S. traders desire to deal with the USSR is shown by the rise in licensing applications over the past few years. From $1,776,000 in 1951, the value of these requests jumped to $8,788,543 in 1955.

The real barriers to increases in US-Soviet trade far surpass licensing requirements. The "strategic" classification itself is so stringent as to prohibit exportation of anything Russia seeks to import. In addition to keeping out of the USSR anything helpful to Soviet military potential, export controls also ban commodities which could in any long-run, remote way be useful to Red industrial development. Naturally Russia has little yearning for baby bibs and dentures, so there are declared non-strategic. With supply and demand stubbornly entrenched back to back, US-USSR trade had consequently dwindled to practically nothing. An unencouraging US official attitude insures the total paralysis of US-Soviet trade.

To eliminate these obstacles the Administration must yield considerably. It must change its strategic classifications to release commodities which do not directly and significantly contribute to Soviet strength. Accompanying these releases should be a stipulation tying Soviet purchase demands to American export items, to compel Russia to accept consumer items if she is to receive newly-released goods from the U.S.

Before any effective increase occurs, the U.S. will have to show itself willing to initiate significant measures to release the cramp in East-West commerce. The latest "relaxation" is nothing but a scrap thrown to clamoring critics in an effort to pacify them. Much more will have to be done before the Administration can pose as anxious to thaw frozen channels of trade.