92. Memorandum for the Record0
SUBJECT
- Burden-sharing
In a brief conversation after the meeting of the Acheson Advisory Group1 on February 22, Mr. Rostow made the comments below in response to a question about the concept of burden sharing especially in the field of aid to less-developed countries. He also said that he had made similar points in his talk with Kristensen.
Mr. Rostow said that he believed it was most important that we not permit the “statisticians” to dominate any burden-sharing exercise. He thought that any burden-sharing operation should be under firm political direction so that the outcome of the exercise will make political sense. However, the help of economists and statisticians should be sought in order to provide an adequate factual basis for whatever general conclusions are reached. In other words, the operation should involve an [Page 200] interaction between political authorities, who should be clearly in charge, and technical experts, who would provide a factual rationale for the conclusions reached.
It is unlikely that the first attempt at arriving at an adequate burden-sharing arrangement would result in agreement. The necessary next step will undoubtedly be the establishment of a small, high-level, independ-ent “Wise Men’s” group, which would, it is to be hoped, reach impartial conclusions regarding the overall nature of the Western effort and the proper distribution of the burden.
Mr. Rostow also said that he thought representatives from selected less-developed countries should be invited to participate with any OECD burden-sharing operation. Mr. Rostow felt that the representatives should be drawn from “hard criteria” less-developed countries. In other words, we should not have representatives from countries which simply would bid for excessively large aid from the Western world, but by countries like India which have in the past established realistic criteria and which would be interested in seeing the criteria kept on a realistic basis.
I mentioned to Mr. Rostow my views on the danger of attempting to combine into a single operation burden sharing on both aid to less-developed countries and sharing of the common defense burdens. I pointed out that combining them into a single exercise in this way could well mean that the Europeans would bargain off their defense responsibilities against their responsibilities to provide economic aid to less-developed countries and that this would undoubtedly work to the detriment of their defense efforts. Since it may well be that we will be attempting to persuade the Europeans to increase their defense efforts, particularly their conventional forces, and since this will require them to allocate increased resources to defense, it might therefore be seriously detrimental to our efforts in the defense field if a single joint economic aid and defense burden-sharing exercise were attempted.