Comment on John P. Hardt and George D. Holliday, 'East-West Financing by Export-Import Bank and National Interest Criteria'.

摘要

The legal framework in which the Export-Import Bank extends its operations to trade with the USSR and Eastern Europe requires a prior Presidential determination that such action with respect to a particular country is in the national interest. Hardt and Holliday set themselves the goal of helping to formulate a more rigorous set of criteria to define the national interest in any given transaction coming before the Bank. For this purpose, they suggest six ways in which U.S. private corporate and U.S. national interests in particular transactions might diverge and a number of other situations in which a community of interest might obtain. Presumably, avoidance of the pitfalls in the first set of considerations and concentration on transactions with the benefit characteristics of the second set would assure protection of the national interest. The basic notion of making explicit the criteria by which national interest is assessed in Eximbank's operations with the Socialist area is an admirable one, and Hardt and Holliday have performed an important service in beginning the discussion of the particular criteria that should apply.