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guards are clear. A U. S. commitment can be a cost-effective way to enhance the security of friendly coastal nations, open new channels to their military establishments, and enhance their ability to contribute to the overall safety and environmental health of the oceans. Politically, progress toward regional coast guards can be an important building block in the larger edifice of regional cooperation, enhancing trust and mutual confidence through shared efforts in dealing with problems in an area of national security that is politically not very sensitive. Finally, any effort that helps the receiving states to husband and protect the resources of the sea is a significant contribution to their national wealth.
What can the United States do in its own security and economic development policies to encourage states to share their experiences, their resources, and their knowledge in protecting the ocean and its resources? The United States should revise its security assistance legislation and practices to eliminate restrictions against aiding maritime law enforcement or channeling security aid through entities other than individual recipient governments. Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act remains a legal bar to the provision of much needed Coast Guard or Navy assistance to foreign maritime law enforcement. U. S. legislation now limits channeling aid through multistate regional organizations. But there are few better ways of enhancing the credibility and authority of an organization than by making it a conduit for the flow of vital outside resources.
Similarly, the United States, as a major donor, should make more of its aid in maritime matters contingent on the development of healthy regional approaches. But often the heavy emphasis in the foreign policy bureaucracy on bilateral channels—‘ ‘clientitis” in State Department parlance— remains a natural point of resistance to a broad regional approach. Not surprisingly, this preference for the bilateral is too often mirrored in the policies of the individual aid-receiving states themselves.
Other benefits besides aid can be channeled through t e regional entities. The United States possesses a vast array of experience, information, and technology of imine potential value to other Third World maritime states. These are nonmonetary resources, which could be chan neled through a multilateral maritime organization ra than to individual states, providing the organization w valuable information on ship sightings, oil slick trajectory projections, migration of fish and other marine life* a data on piracy and smuggling in the region. .
Evidence shows that other major Western aid donors the Third World find the regional approach no less coin pelling, given their even greater need to optimize their ai • As the experience in the Eastern Caribbean shows, United States is often in a position to take the lead arnon donors in a genuine multilateral promotion of a regi°n ' rather than bilateral, approach to maritime law enforce ment and security.
Multilateral encouragement for the development of rc gional coast guards may well have a less troubling po11 cal coloration for the receiving states than would a pr0 gram conducted and financed by the United States alone- In West Africa, where ties to the British and Fre£c_ former colonial powers remain strong, and where the E ropean Economic Community is a major donor, Britts French-U. S. cooperation would blunt suspicions of U- ; objectives while helping to overcome the natural susp1 cions between anglophone and francophone Afr>c;1 states.
In Southeast Asia or the South Pacific, Japan is a natu ral source of resources and expertise in the movement tn ward regionalization. But suspicions of the Japanese re main strong among the area’s states. A partnership am°d the United States, Australia, and Japan, three states w1 ^ genuine maritime interest in the region, would be m°r acceptable politically.
There are many opportunities for the United Statestl
Caribbean Coast Guard
Prior to October 1983, the Caribbean was undergoing another of its historical periods of benign neglect by the United States. Even though the Reagan administration’s Caribbean Basin Initiative was an effort to stimulate business and thus friends in the Caribbean, political- strategic considerations were largely being ignored.
Despite Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s leftist leanings and coup in 1979 in Grenada, the United States seemed unwilling or unable to exert positive influence over the Eastern Caribbean.
With Bishop’s death in 1983 and the subsequent U. S.-led multinational military intervention, the United States was forced to make some decisions about what it wanted to do, in both the short and long term, in the Caribbean.
Thus, the catalyst for the transformation of the “good idea” of a regional coast guard into a fait accompli was the U. S. involvement in Grenada in October 1983. As has been the case in the past, it took a crisis in the region to direct U. S. interest in an area that is justifiably of great national concern.
Nonetheless, once the national attention was focused on the East' ern Caribbean, things began to hap pen quickly. Within six months, ten U. S. Coast Guard personnel had been given permanent change of station orders to various Easter11 Caribbean islands. Construction on three patrol boats for Eastern Caribbean nations was nearly completed, and tentative plans for ad tional vessels had begun.
By the first anniversary of the military intervention in Grenada, the first three vessels had been delivered to Antigua, Dominica, an