Geography gives them a central position. They are both a European and an Asian power, with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital areas in the free world around them. So situated, they can use their armies and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series of threats, or inducements, to such widely dispersed places as Western Germany, Iran, and Japan. These pressures and attractions can be sustained at will, or quickly shifted from place to place.

Thus the Communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and division in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed teaches them must come: The time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the Communist plucking.

This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history. This is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the world, the glass through which they see the rest of us. They seem really to believe that history is on their side. And they are trying to boost "history" along, at every opportunity, in every way they

can.

I have set forth here the nature of the Communist menace confronting our Republic and the whole free world. This is the measure of the challenge we have faced since World War II-a challenge partly military and partly economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every level of human endeavor and all around the world.

It has been and must be the free world's purpose not only to organ ize defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations. outside the iron curtain, but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces of growth and progress in the free world, to so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow stronger over the years, and the Soviet Empire, not the free world, will eventually have to change its ways or fall.

Our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed to meet two requirements.

The first of these had to do with security. Like the pioneers who settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order-the only environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish.

Did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies and weapons? Of course it did not; side by side with this urgent military requirement, we had to continue to help create conditions of economic and social progress in the world. This work had to be carried forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the

nonmilitary aspects of the Communist drive for power, but also because this creative effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of world we as freemen want to live in.

These two requirements-military security and human progressare more closely related in action than we sometimes recognize. Military security depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful political order; conversely, the confidence that makes for economic and political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to military conquest.

These requirements are related in another way. Both of them depend upon unity of action among the free nations of the world. This, indeed, has been the foundation of our whole effort, for the drawing together of the free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to their progress but to their survival as free people.

This is the conviction that underlies all the steps we have been taking to strengthen and unify the free nations during the past 7 years. What have these steps been? First of all, How have we gone about meeting the requirement of providing for our security against this world-wide challenge?

Our starting point, as I have said on many occasions, has been and remains the United Nations.

We were prepared, and so were the other nations of the free world, to place our reliance on the machinery of the United Nations to safeguard peace. But before the United Nations could give full expression to the concept of international security embodied in the Charter, it was essential that the five permanent members of the Security Council honor their solemn pledge to cooperate to that end. This the Soviet Union has not done.

I do not need to outline here the dreary record of Soviet obstruction and veto and the unceasing efforts of the Soviet representatives to sabotage the United Nations. It is important, however, to distinguish clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the Charter and the mechanisms of the United Nations to give that principle effect. We must frankly recognize that the Soviet Union has been able, in certain instances, to stall the machinery of collective security. Yet it has not been able to impair the principle of collective security. The free nations of the world have retained their allegiance to that idea. They have found the means to act despite the Soviet veto, both through the United Nations itself and through the application of this principle in regional and other security arrangements that are fully in harmony with the Charter and give expression to its purposes.

The free world refused to resign itself to collective suicide merely because of the technicality of a Soviet veto.

The principle of collective measures to forestall aggression has found expression in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro,' the North Atlantic

1 1 Infra, pp. 789-796.

Treaty,' now extended to include Greece and Turkey, and the several treaties we have concluded to reinforce security in the Pacific area.3 But the free nations have not this time fallen prey to the dangerous illusion that treaties alone will stop an aggressor. By a series of vigorous actions, as varied as the nature of the threat, the free nations have successfully thwarted aggression or the threat of aggression in many different parts of the world.

Our country has led or supported these collective measures. The aid we have given to people determined to act in defense of their freedom has often spelled the difference between success and failure. We all know what we have done, and I shall not review in detail the steps we have taken. Each major step was a milepost in the developing unity, strength, and resolute will of the free nations.

The first was the determined and successful effort made through the United Nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of Iran in 1945 and 1946.*

Next was our aid and support to embattled Greece, which enabled her to defeat the forces threatening her national independence."

In Turkey cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free world."

In 1949 we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the North Atlantic Community and to a number of other free countries." The Soviet Union's threats against Germany and Japan, its neighbors to the west and to the east, have been successfully withstood. Free Germany is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations, and a partner in the common defense. The Soviet effort to capture Berlin by blockade was thwarted by the courageous Allied airlift. An independent and democratic Japan has been brought back into the community of free nations.10

9

8

In the Far East the tactics of Communist imperialism have reached heights of violence unmatched elsewhere, and the problem of concerted action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more difficult.

Here, in spite of outside aid and support, the free Government of

1 Infra, pp. 812-815.

2 Infra, pp. 853–854.

3 See infra, pp. 873-875, 878-880, and 885-886.

For a brief summary of the Iranian case in the United Nations, see The United States and the United Nations: Report by the President to the Congress for the Year 1946 (Department of State publication 2735; 1947), pp. 33-34; the details appear in the issues of the Department of State Bulletin of Dec. 2, 1945, p. 884; Dec. 9, 1945, pp. 934-935; Mar. 17, 1946, pp. 435-436; Mar. 24, 1946, p. 483; Mar. 31, 1946, p. 529; Apr. 7, 1946, pp. 568-573; Apr. 21, 1946, pp. 620-621 and 657-660; Apr. 28, 1946, pp. 706-709; May 5, 1946, pp. 752-753; May 19, 1946, pp. 849-850 and 853-854; June 2, 1946, pp. 941-942; and June 9, 1946, p. 987.

5 A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 753–782 and 1252-1267.

Ibid., pp. 902-906, 1252-1261, and 1265–1267.

7 Ibid., pp. 1356-1364.

8 Infra, pp. 1709-1728.

A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 934-939, and Germany, 1947-1949: The Story in Documents (Department of State publication 3556; 1950), pp. 202–274. 10 Infra, pp. 425-441, 2405, and 2425-2427.

1

China succumbed to the Communist assault. Our aid has enabled the free Chinese to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of Formosa. In other areas of the Far East-in Indochina,3 Malaya,* and the Philippines our assistance has helped sustain a stanch resistance against Communist insurrectionary attacks.

5

The supreme test, up to this point, of the will and determination of the free nations came in Korea, when Communist forces invaded the Republic of Korea, a state that was in a special sense under the protection of the United Nations." The response was immediate and resolute. Under our military leadership the free nations for the first time took up arms, collectively, to repel aggression.

Aggression was repelled, driven back, punished. Since that time Communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict, in spite of honest efforts by the United Nations to reach an honorable truce. The months of deadlock have demonstrated that the Communists cannot achieve by persistence, or by diplomatic trickery, what they failed to achieve by sneak attack. Korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will and the endurance to match the Communist effort to overthrow international order through local aggression.

It has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and human suffering, but it has made it plain that the free nations will fight side by side, that they will not succumb to aggression or intimidation, one by one. This, in the final analysis, is the only way to halt the Communist drive to world power.

At the heart of the free world's defense is the military strength of the United States.

From 1945 to 1949 the United States was sole possessor of the atomic bomb. That was a great deterrent and protection in itself. But when the Soviets produced an atomic explosion as they were bound to do in time-we had to broaden the whole basis of our strength. We had to endeavor to keep our lead in atomic weapons. We had to strengthen our Armed Forces generally and to enlarge our productive capacity our mobilization base. Historically, it was the Soviet atomic explosion in the fall of 1949, 9 months before the aggression in Korea, which stimulated the planning for our program of defense mobilization.

What we needed was not just a central force that could strike back against aggression. We also needed strength along the outer edges of the free world, defenses for our allies as well as for ourselves, strength to hold the line against attack as well as to retaliate.

A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 691-728, and United States Relations with China with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (Department of State publication 3573; 1949).

Infra, pp. 2448-2471.

Infra, pp. 2363-2369.

See Malaya: Trouble Spot in Southeast Asia (Department of State publication 5061; 1953).

A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 881-885, and infra, pp. 873-877 and 2355-2359.

See infra, pp. 2536-2625.

See statement issued by President Truman, Sept. 23, 1949, announcing evidence of an atomic explosion in the U.S.S.R.; A Decade of American Foreign Policy, p. 1123.

We have made great progress on this task of building strong defenses. In the last 21⁄2 years we have more than doubled our own defenses, and we have helped to increase the protection of nearly all the other free nations.

All the measures of collective security, resistance to aggression, and the building of defenses, constitute the first requirement for the survival and progress of the free world. But, as I have pointed out, they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and maintain economic and social progress in the free nations. There can be no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it. There can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social collapse. For these reasons our national policy has included a wide range of economic measures.

1

In Europe the grand design of the Marshall plan 1 permitted the people of Britain and France and Italy and a half dozen other countries, with help from the United States, to lift themselves from stagnation and find again the path of rising production, rising incomes, rising standards of living. The situation was changed almost overnight by the Marshall plan; the people of Europe have a renewed hope and vitality, and they are able to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would have been impossible a few years ago.

4

3

Now the countries of Europe are moving rapidly toward political and economic unity, changing the map of Europe in more hopeful ways than it has been changed for 500 years. Customs unions," European economic institutions like the Schuman plan, the movement toward European political integration, the European Defense Community, all are signs of practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity. The countries of Western Europe, including the free Republic of Germany are working together, and the whole free world is the gainer.

2

It sometimes happens, in the course of history, that steps taken to meet an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be apparent at the time. This, I believe, is the meaning of what has been going on in Europe under the threat of aggression. The free nations there, with our help, have been drawing together in defense of their free institutions. In so doing they have laid the foundations of a unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies of this period of history. We may, at this close range, be but dimly aware of the creative surge this movement represents, but I believe it to be of historic importance. I believe its benefits will survive long after Communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy

memory.

1 See A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 1268-1327.

2 See articles by Howard J. Hilton, Jr., “Benelux-A Case Study in Economic Union," Department of State Bulletin, July 31, 1950, pp. 181-188, and "The European Customs Union Study Group," ibid., Aug. 14, 1950, pp. 251-255; also, press communiqué of July 28, 1950, on the Sixth Session of the European Customs Union Study Group, ibid., Sept. 4, 1950, pp. 393–394.

3 Infra, pp. 1039-1097.

Infra, pp. 968-971, 1001-1012.

Infra, pp. 1107-1198.