Suchergebnisse

There can be no yielding to force on the question of Berlin; but, before eventual force is met with force, any interference with Western access to West Berlin should be laid before the court of world opinion in the United Nations. There can be no satisfactory solution to the problem of a divided Berlin except in the broader context of a solution to the problems of a partitioned Germany and a divided Europe. The first steps toward such a solution consist of military and political disengagement in Central Europe. Military disen gagement means the gradual, carefully controlled withdrawal of foreign forces, a limitation of indigenous armaments within the evacuated area and the debarment of any state or states within the evacuated zone from military alliance with East or West. Political disengagement means an East-West hands-off agreement—that is, a renunciation by the Western powers and the Soviet bloc of any interference in the political or economic future of the militarily neutralized states. Without such mili tary and political disengagement there can be no reunification of Germany and no gradual liberation of Eastern Europe from coercive domination. The process envisaged will necessarily be slow, with each step tested by experience. The important thing is to get it started.

Address before the Am. academy of political and social science, Philadelphia, Pa., Apr. 10-11, 1959. Reprinted as a 16-page pamphlet by Current affairs press; 25c.

The United States faced its greatest postwar op portunities for constructive leadership toward peace not in Eu rope but in Asia—it held the future of most of Asia in its hands and dropped it. The Truman administration had no Asian policy at all, except with respect to China and Japan. Its China policy was disastrously wrong. Its policy in Japan must await the verdict of history. The Eisenhower administration has pursued a fatally wrong policy throughout Asia. Our two great errors of commission were: involvement in the Chinese civil war and the rearming of Pakistan. Our great error of omission was our failure to utilize the ten years in which the United States alone had the ability to supply economic aid to the newly independent Asian nations. We now face dangerous Communist competition. The problem we face falls into two parts: how to stop doing the wrong things in Asia and how to start doing the right ones. The first category requires a new China policy and a new policy toward Pakistan. Correcting our errors of omission requires a new approach to the economic problems of Asia.

Address before the Am. academy of political and social science, Philadelphia Pa., Apr. 11-12, 1958.

Our foreign policy over the past ten years has been no success: Communist expansion has not been halted, the non-Communist world is not united, and peace is no closer. Why? We are ill prepared for world leader ship by our ignorance of geography, languages, and history, that is, by a parochial world view borne out of indifference produced by a feeling of impotence and frustration. Having power we have little notion of how to use it. We moralize too much, confuse legalism with morality, and often exhibit self-righteousness obnoxious to other peoples. Our leaders, unwilling to risk unpopularity by adopt ing a flexible and imaginative foreign policy, have become prisoners of a public state of mind, created largely by their own propaganda.—Ed.

Address before the Am. academy of political and social science, Philadelphia, Pa., Apr. 5-6, 1957.