Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
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 non-military 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 free men
want to live in.
These two requirements--military security and human progress--are 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 seven 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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