US Presidency
1961

We need those imports to give our industries and defense establishments the raw materials they require at prices they can afford and to keep a healthy pressure on our own producers and workers to improve efficiency, develop better products, and avoid the inflation that could price us out of markets vital to our own prosperity. Finally, let me make it clear that I am not proposing a unilateral lowering of our trade barriers. What I am proposing is a joint step on both sides of the Atlantic, aimed at benefiting not only the exporters Of the countries concerned but the economies of all of the countries of the Free World. Led by the two great Common Markets of the Atlantic, trade barriers in all the industrial nations must be brought down. Surely it will be said that the bold vision which produced the EEC will fall short if it merely transfers European protectionism from the national to the continental level.