The gestation, birth, and continuing life of the new states of Asia and Africa, through all their vicissitudes, are in large measure the work of intellectuals. In no state-formations in all of human history have intellectuals played such a role as they have in these events of the present century.

In the past, new states were founded by military conquest, by the secession of ethnic groups led by traditional tribal and warrior chiefs, by the gradual extension of the power of the prince through intermarriage, agreement, and conquest, or by separation through military rebellion. In antiquity, the demand that subjects acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor was no more than a requirement that the legitimacy of the existing order be recognized.

In NATO's early days statesmen spoke glowingly about subordinating national military interests to a truly international “balanced collective force,” a goal similar to classic free trade in its promise of mutual gain secured at the cost of dependence upon foreigners. Naturally, in so nationalistic a field as defense, achievement fell far short of this sweeping aspiration. But we are ill-placed now to belittle either the slogan or the degree to which we realized an international division of military labor. Nowadays the slogan is “interdependence,” but in practice this seems to mean performance deviating still more widely from the goal of integrated defense.

Nothing pricks one's curiosity more than the inner operations of a power system. And in the case of Russia the incentive to speculate on “what really goes on” in the councils of the Kremlin is enhanced by the supersecrecy in which the highest level of Soviet politics is enveloped, by the dramatic shifts of policy and sudden displacements of leading personalities, and by a natural apprehension about the operations of a totalitarian regime which may at any moment threaten or transform our daily lives.

In the underdeveloped countries—where live most of the world's people—the hope for economic progress now flames with great intensity. The new international capital facilities of the postwar period, the new programs for sharing modern science and technology, the new interest of wealthy lands in progress in the poor countries—all these present the latter with an opportunity to be rid of the poverty and squalor of their material existence. Their eyes naturally turn to the more developed countries for capital and technical knowledge, and for ideas.

In the four and a half years ending December 31, 1958, the United States exported close to $6 billion of surplus agricultural commodities under various foreign disposal programs, the most important being the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, known commonly as P. L. 480. These P. L. 480 exports included the barter of American surpluses for imports of strategic materials, foreign relief shipments and donations and, most significantly, sales for the local currency of importers. This last type of transaction, which is without precedent in world trade, has enabled the United States to dispose of some 3.3 billion dollars' worth of surpluses in agreements made with 28 nations, and the major part of the foreign currencies generated—that is, some $2.1 billion—has been earmarked for economic development purposes in the receiving countries. Surplus disposal thus not only has become a primary means of promoting United States agricultural exports, but has acquired a major role in our foreign aid programs as well.

Problems of national security are in no sense novel for the application of economic analysis. Adam Smith, in a well-known passage in The Wealth of Nations, was concerned with the allocation of resources between “defense” and “opulence”—what we would call the problem of the size of the national security budget. There has been great interest among economists, especially during and following the First and Second World Wars, in problems of industrial mobilization during war, including the associated problems of economic stablization. In fact, to many economists during the past generation this set of mobilization problems constituted the economics of defense. Books were published with titles like Economics of Defense that dealt with little else.