Viva Mexico? - US aid to Mexico - Column

National Review, Feb 20, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

During the extensive debates on Marshall Plan aid the senator from Missouri rose with what came to be known as the Kem Amendment. It stipulated that no U.S. aid could be sent to any country engaged in trade with the Soviet Union. This would have meant, just to begin with, the exclusion of Great Britain. There was a great uproar. Opponents attacked this as rank political chauvinism. For all that Great Britain was on its knees, it was nevertheless entitled to chart its own destiny. Kem and his supporters replied that, yes, it was the business of Parliament to decide in what direction to go, but that the United States Treasury was not bound to finance the resuscitation of the Soviet Union.

Well, the Marshall Plan carried, and within a year or two the government of Clement Attlee was ousted by the opposition, led by Winston Churchill. Economic policy angled over to the right, though it did not reach full stride until Mrs. Thatcher came in, 28 years later.

What is crystallizing in Congress in discussions of Mexico is very close to the same old argument. There are two important differences. One is that Mexico is not a country exhausted by a long war in which we were a later arrival. The second is that whatever happened within Britain could not have pressed directly on the U.S. inasmuch as we have between us an Atlantic Ocean, while between Mexico and the U.S. there is only the Rio Grande.

Now enthusiasts for Mr. Clinton's Marshall Plan for Mexico are absolutely correct when they say that the United States simply cannot isolate itself from the effects of an economic earthquake. Governor George Wallace attracted much attention when during the civil-rights demonstrations in the Sixties he announced that protestors who lay across the road to deter state trucks he could easily handle by simply instructing the truck drivers to continue in motion. His statement got him the cocky admiration he looked for, but a chill set in among even those opposed to civil disobedience. The feeling was that some things simply aren't done. The difficulty of guarding a frontier was raised to high visibility in fiction by Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, in 1975. There the scene was of the imminent arrival of tens of thousands of boatloads of Indian refugees in France. What would France do about the problem? Deal with the refugees as the Germans dealt with the Allies on D-Day?

Not only did Mr. Clinton evoke the spectacle of tens and even hundreds of thousands of Mexicans swamping the border. He spoke of the possibility of a worldwide economic collapse. There is, obviously, no way in which the United States would escape the consequences of a worldwide depression. If nobody out there has money to buy things, what would Americans who produce for foreign consumption do?

Now there are the usual problems with Clinton. For one, nobody really believes him, or is even certain that he believes his own caterwauling. But what truly dismays is the surprise by which we were all taken. You cannot reasonably blame Japanese geologists for their failure a week or two before the event to warn of an impending earthquake centered in Kobe. But why should the economic world, with all its trained observers, have failed to notice the danger signals in Mexico? Why should it require more than one Apple computer to deduce that an economy in which savings had dipped by 50 per cent, whose government was churning out paper currency, whose population was glutted with credit-card purchases, whose foreign investment had quadrupled, was - in trouble.

Then there is the deep resentment of the snake-oil Clinton, telling us that the whole Rescue Mexico venture would not result in a dime's cost to the U.S. taxpayer. And then they ask, not unreasonably, In behalf of whom are we really making this sacrifice? Sure, to save Mexico. But saving Mexico means guaranteeing the banks and foreign investors the integrity of their portfolios. There is no general appetite to back up loans made to Mexico by high-rolling lenders. And yet there is no mechanism for doing the one without doing the other.

Modern Mexico is a proud country. It made just about every wrong step conceivable since its bloody beginning in 1929. In recent years, under President Salinas, it was beginning to come to life. But instead of breathing freely, it went on to take artificial respiration. How much gasping will Mexico have to go through to achieve normal metabolism, and what is the job of government, other than staying out of the way?