Monday, 7 November
Liang Zengxi and his wife called. Gave him my opinion about his restaurant and he agreed with me on the price of food.
Walter Lippmann wrote that the USSR is acquiring a diplomatic base in Egypt. The political effect of the arms shipments is to buy the influence of the Egyptian army, which controls the Egyptian Government. Beyond this lies the project of massive Soviet economic assistance to build the great dams of the Nile River. The Soviet Union will now be present and participating on equal terms in the diplomacy of the Middle East. She has very shiny cards.
1) She is able to incite and support nationalist passions which are predominantly anti-Western.
2) She has a reserve of obsolescent arms with which to win over the local army leaders.
3) She is ready to take the agricultural surpluses of these primitive economies in payment, on easy terms, for industrial equipment.
4) And being herself the shining example of an under-developed country, which has developed itself quickly, she knows how to talk the language of the politicians, the intellectuals and the technicians of the under-developed nations.
The Soviet incursion with Egypt may prove to be a set back for the influence of the West second only to what happened on the mainland of China a few years ago. The Soviet Union has landed in Egypt just as Mr. Dulles and Mr. Macmillan were completing their pacts to contain the Soviet Union. She is not contained but moves forward not by marching its army but by carefully conceived political and economic and ideological campaign. Why has Mr. Dulles rushed around the world making these pacts? Because he is unwilling to ask and unable to get from the Congress the money to conduct the kind of realistic diplomacy which the Soviets are conducting in Egypt and elsewhere. The under-developed countries, among which Egypt is a key country, are determined to develop themselves. There is the Western way and there is the Communist way. The Western way requires the investment, with no great prospect of a quick or large return, of big capital funds. The Communist way is to use force and is less humane. But for that very reason it is cheaper. Nevertheless it, too, requires capital funds. But the Soviet Union can trade these funds against the agricultural surpluses of cotton and rice which the under-developed countries cannot sell in the western world.
This is very interesting and quite true.