In January 1949, President Harry Truman delivered
the first U.S. inaugural address of the cold war. "Each period of
our national history has had its special challenges," he
declared.
"Those
that confront us now are as momentous as any in the past. Today
marks the beginning...of a period that will be eventful, perhaps
decisive, for us and for the world."
Truman had presided over the first use of atomic
power in anger and the founding of the United Nations, the World
Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He had witnessed
the descent of the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe, and had
begun aiding reconstruction of Western Europe with the Marshall
Plan. He now urged the formation of what would become the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And he called for the
first-ever peacetime foreign aid programme for poor nations.
Thus was born the modern project of foreign
aid—the giving of advice, grants, and loans to help poor
nations. From the start, its motives were
complex—geopolitics, missionary zeal for democracy and
capitalism, and a genuine desire to alleviate suffering. Lenin had
rightly condemned the West for exploiting poor nations for their
resources and enslaving their people. To contain communism, Truman
apparently believed, the West had to meet that criticism head-on by
aiding, not just exploiting, poorer nations. With a helping hand,
he now argued, those nations could become wealthier, democratic,
more like the United States. In short, they could "develop."
Half a century later, in April 2000, thousands of
protesters from an international movement called Jubilee 2000
locked arms and ringed the very spot where Truman
spoke—indeed, ringed the entire U.S. Capitol—to
dramatize how lending programmes he fathered had gone badly awry.
The human chain, they explained, symbolized the "chains of debt"
that financially enslave poor nations to rich ones. Some poor
countries now spend more servicing their debts to rich countries,
debts mostly accumulated in the name of development, than they
spend on providing basic social services. For example, in
1977 Zambia devoted 40 percent of its national budget to foreign
debt and only 7 percent to basic social services.