Recently it has been fashionable to dismiss Woodrow Wilson as a visionary. And yet his vision was rooted in a higher realism, a clearer sense of the nature of reality, than that of almost any of his contemporaries. Over and over again Wilson warned us that if we rejected his vision and seceded from the emerging world community, we would not only "break the heart of the world" 75 but would pay for our failure in blood. "There will come, sometime," he warned us, "in the vengeful providence of God, another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men of [from] America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the people[s] of the world.” 76

But the habits of isolationism were still strong and its advocates skillful and determined. We had acted generously enough, they said, in sending our boys overseas to "solve Europe's problems." Now it was time to bring them home, to keep them home, and to accept the call for a return to normalcy.

And so Woodrow Wilson was repudiated and his League of Nations rejected. America, which could have provided the spirit and the sinews necessary for the beginnings of world order, turned its back on the future.

I believe that the historical judgment of 2000 A.D. upon America's withdrawal from world responsibility in 1919 will be severe.

Now let us consider the second great area of decision, which grew out of the challenge of the Chinese revolution.

In 1911, after 2,000 years of remarkable continuity, the Chinese Empire came to an end. It collapsed under the combined effects of internal decay and the impact of the West. With it collapsed the ideology of Confucianism, which had acted as a social cement for much of China's long history.

Since the mid-18th century, Americans had had a special regard for the Chinese people-had had many close connections with China. American merchants, missionaries, doctors, and teachers had traveled to China by the thousands. Additional hundreds of young Chinese had graduated from American universities. With our acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and the announcement of the "open door" policy which soon followed," America became a Pacific power with an officially declared interest in the preservation of China's territorial integrity.

At the birth of the Chinese Republic we were admirably positioned to understand the physical and psychological needs of the emerging new China and to exert a positive and perhaps decisive influence over economic and political developments there. Yet we were so busy watching the soaring stock market, listening to our new jazz bands,

Address by President Wilson before the Senate, July 10, 1919, on the treaty of peace with Germany, signed at Versailles, June 28, 1919; the quotation appears on p. 633 of Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. V (New York, 1927). Address by President Wilson at the Statler Hotel, St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 5, 1919; the quotation appears ibid., p. 548.

77 See the instruction, dated Sept. 6, 1899, sent by Secretary of State John Hay to the American Ambassadors in Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1899, pp. 129-130).

and enjoying the benefits of our booming economy that only a handful of farsighted Americans were even conscious of the challenge.

When in 1920 and 1921 Sun Yat-sen urgently pressed us for substantial loans with which to further the unification and economic development of China, we abruptly turned him down.78 And so, following a similar turndown in the capitals of Western Europe, a now desperate Sun Yat-sen turned to the new Communist government in Moscow for the help which the Atlantic nations had denied him.

Although the Bolsheviks were in conflict over the internal problems generated by their own revolution, the Kremlin recognized the stakes which were being played for in China and eagerly grasped the opportunity. Had not Lenin himself asserted that the road to Paris runs through Peiping and Calcutta? 79

By 1923 Soviet technicians, Soviet political advisers, and Soviet capital began flowing into China.

At the Washington Disarmament Conference the year before, the Harding administration compounded our failure to understand China's desperate economic needs. By agreeing to dispense with a major part of our new Navy in return for Japan's agreement to accept some limitations on her own forces, we abdicated our power position in the western Pacific and opened the door for the series of Japanese aggressions which led to Pearl Harbor 19 years later.

In

But more opportunities and more blunders were yet to come. 1927, when Sun's successor, Chiang Kai-shek, turned against the Communists and outlined his plans to establish a modernized nonCommunist state, we were granted another opportunity to retrieve past mistakes. But once again America-fat, contented, far away, and secure-failed to understand the challenge.

In 1931 the Japanese Army moved into Manchuria. Firm American action there might still have checked Japanese aggression and given China a chance to emerge as an independent and politically stable nation. But again the opportunity was lost.80

At the League of Nations in Geneva, crisis-weary Britain and France refused to act. And in spite of Secretary of State Stimson's earnest efforts to assert American leadership from Washington, our Government remained content with moral lectures and the ineffective doctrine of nonrecognition.81

There is no need to dwell on the grim and unhappy story of China since 1931. The 1930's found us caught up in our own problems, unwilling to provoke the naval power of Japan or to give the wobbly Chinese Government the assistance it needed so desperately.

No one knows precisely when we finally lost our capacity to influence events in China. Some observers assert that as late as 1941 a comprehensive American military, political, and economic effort might have

78 See ibid., 1920, vol. I, pp. 605-674, and ibid., 1921, vol. I, pp. 346-404. This phrase is attributed to Lenin with such variants as "We will come to Paris by way of Peking"-"The road to Paris lies through Hong Kong and Calcutta"-"The way to Europe is through Asia"-"Asia is the key to Europe." 60 See Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan, 1931-1941 (2 vols.). 81 See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1931, vol. III, and ibid., 1932, vols. III and IV.

provided an effective democratic alternative to communism. By the end of the war, however, it had become clear that nothing less than massive American military intervention could change the course of events.

In view of public weariness with war and crises and the efforts of political leaders in both parties to cater to this natural state of mind, the necessary action was not even debated.

So it was that we failed to meet the second great foreign policy challenge of our century. May I add that we Americans will live with the consequences of this failure for many generations to come.

The third challenge was one which we belatedly but effectively recognized and met.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a powerful sense of history. He understood that we had sprung from Europe and were irrevocably a part of Europe. He understood that a Europe under Nazi domination would mean a world in which America's own freedom would be fundamentally challenged.

Beginning with his "quarantine the aggressor" speech in 1937,82 Franklin Roosevelt began gradually to move the American people toward a similar understanding.

In early September 1939, when the Nazi Panzer divisions and Stukas struck suddenly across the Polish border, our first instinct was withdrawal into isolationism. The Neutrality Act, curbing shipments to the Western European nations,83 expressed our national mood.

Yet the old myths of self-sufficiency were weakening. We were beginning belatedly to recognize the interdependence of nations that Woodrow Wilson had pleaded with us to accept. And so in Britain's darkest and finest hour we came to her support.

In the following years American industry and military power provided the decisive power that crushed the totalitarian forces which American membership in the League of Nations might have kept from exploding into aggression in the first place.

The fourth challenge began to take shape soon after the end of hostilities in Europe. Western Europe's cities were in ruins from years of bombing and street fighting. Food, fuel, and building materials were inadequate. The entire European economy was on the verge of collapse, with mounting inflation everywhere.

In the meantime, a few hundred miles away in East Germany and Poland, stood nearly 200 Soviet Army divisions ready and able to roll, almost unopposed, to the English Channel.

The American people, returning instinctively to our isolationist tradition, had been looking forward eagerly to a crisis-free future of peace and plenty. We had disbanded our armies, put our ships in mothballs, converted our defense factories to peaceful production, and settled down again to enjoy the world's highest living standard. Then, suddenly and alarmingly, thoughtful Americans began to sense the

82 Address of Oct. 5, 1937; text in Press Releases, vol. XVII, pp. 275-279.

83

Public Res. 54, 76th Cong., approved Nov. 4, 1939; 54 Stat. 4.

new threat to world peace which was rapidly taking shape across the Atlantic.

The initial Soviet pressure was aimed at Greece and Turkey. The British, who for 200 years had provided the shrewd diplomacy and military power that had effectively blocked Russia from the Mediterranean, were no longer able to meet the challenge. Simultaneously all through Western Europe, Communist parties which had been effectively associated with the underground resistance to nazism were vigorously on the move to sow confusion, to establish united fronts, and ultimately to seize power.

At this critical moment we were fortunate to have in our State Department a man with a deep-seated sense of Europe's past and our relation to Europe's future. I refer to Dean Acheson, who perhaps more than any other American understood the nature of the challenge and our responsibility to meet it. We were equally fortunate in having as our Secretary of State in 1947-48 General George Marshall, a towering figure of integrity and intelligence. In Harry Truman we had a President whose raw courage and unswerving sense of purpose will assure him a privileged position in the history of our times. And in Congress there were Vandenberg of Michigan, Herter of Massachusetts, Russell of Georgia, Fulbright of Arkansas, and many other men. of vision and toughness-Republicans and Democrats alike-who understood what was required of us and who did not hesitate to act.

84

The men and the crisis came together, and the result was a brilliant creative national effort that checked the Soviet military, political, and economic threat, rebuilt the foundations of a new free Europe, and almost certainly saved us from a third world war. The Truman Doctrine for the defense of Greece and Turkey 8 was followed by the Marshall plan for the economic and political recovery of Western Europe.85 Then came the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the military defense of Western Europe 86 and the dramatic Berlin airlift, with which we demonstrated that we Americans and our allies had the will as well as the resources.87

In 1949 as the fresh challenge of the newly free, desperately poor, yet largely uncultured nations began to emerge, we again broke new ground through the point 4 proposal for a constructive partnership with Asia, Africa, and Latin America.88

These were years of brilliant, creative, nonpartisan response to an unprecedented challenge. They were years in which our leaders led and the American people, aroused and informed, responded with the dedication and intelligence which mark a great nation.

We come now to the fifth and greatest challenge in this series of

See A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941–1949, pp. 1253-1267.

85 See ibid., pp. 1268-1327.

80

See American Foreign Policy, 1950–1955: Basic Documents, pp. 812-873.

87 See Germany, 1947-1949: The Story in Documents (Department of State publication 3556), pp. 202-274.

88

See A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941-1949, pp. 1366-1372.

momentous situations which have so sharply tested us Americans in the first 60 years of this century.

This fifth challenge is now only gradually coming to be understood. But unless we muster the determination and the means to cope with it, the price of failure may be even more costly than our failure to understand the challenge posed by the growing interdependence of nations after World War I and the upheaval in China which followed it.

In the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, world peace could be said to rest almost exclusively on the balance of power in Europe. Since the end of the Second World War, this has been fundamentally changed. Hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans who once responded to orders from London, Paris, and The Hague have won their freedom. The emergence of these new and underdeveloped nations inevitably has created a wholly new challenge for the American Government and its people.

This situation with its new and far broader dimensions has been further compounded by the fact that this revolutionary development has occurred at precisely the time when modern technology is rapidly widening the already highly explosive gap between the rich white minority, on the one hand, most of whom live around the North Atlantic basin, and the poor colored majority, on the other, who live largely in the southern hemispheres.

Meantime, moving toward the forefront in world affairs is the new Chinese giant, intent on overnight industrialization, with 650 million dynamic people, a doctrinaire, aggressive leadership, inadequate natural resources, and a tempting power vacuum in southeast Asia, which is rich in the petroleum and rice producing lands that China needs so urgently.

Finally, there is the Soviet Union, with a steel capacity of 60 million tons, an annual rate of industrial growth nearly three times our own, graduating twice as many engineers and scientists, and with enormous power in nuclear weapons and conventional military forces. Since her clumsy efforts in China in the 1920's, the Soviet Union has come to understand the decisive importance of the underdeveloped areas. In recent years her leaders have developed a new flexibility, new subtlety, and new economic and political skill in dealing with them.

Now any one of these current developments which affect national power so profoundly would be enough to tax to the utmost the skill, strength, and patience of our country. Together, they pose the greatest challenge that any society has ever faced, a test of our values, our nerves, and our intelligence.

What will be our national reaction to this ultimate test of our capacity to survive and to prosper as a free society?

Three courses are open to us-to lash out in reckless frustration, to withdraw into a futile isolationism, or confidently to accept the challenge and muster the means, the patience, and the will to proceed with the task of building a free-world community.

The first two would almost certainly doom us to catastrophic failure Only the third offers the possibility of a more just and peaceful world.