Evening star., 1961-12-31
OUR FOREIGN POLICY
FOREIGN POLICY
The Blessings Of Liberty Today

The outlook for continued IL
berty Of free peoples In the light
Of the pOst-World War ii di-
plOmatic revolution was dis
cussed by Prof. Samuel Flagg
Bemis before the American His
tOrical Association on Friday.
DIR. Bemis, Sterling Professor
Emeritus Of Diplomatic History
at Yale University, was deliver
ing his presidential address be-
fore the Association at its an
nual dinner at the ShOreham
Hotel. The summary and con-
clusiOn Of the speech follows:
Once again, after the complete
defeat and surrender of the Axis
Powers in 1945, the New World
seemed safe, as it had seemed so
safe after the First World War,
and there was again a disposition
to Withdraw our forces from Eu-
rope and Asia and this time to
trust our destiny to a new league
Of nations. The United States
pinned its hopes to the flag of the
United Nations-to quote PreSi-
dent Truman. This illusion of
safety was short lived. To use the
words Of James B. Conant: "The
coup d'etat in Prague, the Berlin
Blockade. the Korean War dem
onStrated the kind of world in
which we lived, a divided world;
and the division was broad and
deep. The issue was freedom"
The Soviet HarveSt-apt phrase
Of LANCER and Gleason-at the
end Of the Second World War
introduced the latest and most
sud den new configuration of
power. Accompanying this latest
geopolitical shift, the most revolu-
tionary change for the strategy of
American defense and diplomacy,
Is the following complex of phe-
nomena completely altering the
position of the United States in
the world:
ID The scientific and techno-
logical revolution of our times
which muShroomed into the atom
&c age at Alamagordo at $50 am,
on July 16, 1945.
(2) Disintegration Of the old
empires Of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries - German,
japanese, Italian, British, French.
Dutch and Belgian-and replace
ment Of their colonies by many
new nations with Western ideas
and desires but also weak enough
to produce widening vacuum
of power.
(3) Substitution of new Red
imperialism controlling and op-
pressing adjacent satellites even
more imperiously than the West
ern empires ever ruled their over
seas colonies in Asia and Africa.
1t is a new and bitter system of
colonization, now spreading to
the Western Hemisphere in de-
fiance of the Monroe Doctrine.
ca The risen tide Of color.
90 Regrouping of the former
world powers subsidiary to two
opposing superpowers that face
each other and each others allies
on three fronts; at the hither
rim Of the two great oceans at
each end of a new geopolitical
axis bending over the North Pole.
60 Potential military suprem-
acy Of Soviet Russia, allied with
Communist China, on the World
Island.
CD The end Of the freedom of
the seas, and the threatened naval
supremacy of Russia sallying forth
from her land mass to the great
oceans with powerful fleet of
submarines and all the implica-
tionS Of offshore nuclear lombard
ment Of our cities on both coasts
as well as destruction of surface
vessels, whether obsolete navies or
helpless merchant marine.
90 A balance of terror in the
air and in space beyond the at
mosphere which still preserves a
precarious balance between free
dom and slavery in the world.
Population Explosion
Beyond these revolutionary fac
tors in the shifting international
configuration Of our times is an
other even more dynamic factor
of incalculable implications: the
great population explosion of the
pullulating peoples of this globe.
To meet the rapidly developing
picture of the atomic age, the
United States after the Second
World War embarked on a diplo-
matte revolution. It repledged it
self, within the newly chartered
Organization of American States,
against intervention by any one
state, directly or indirectly, within
the internal or external affairs of
another American state, or by any
group Of states except in accord
ance with existing treaties, one of
which was the Inter-American
Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance of
1947. At astronomical expense it
lavished upon friend and foe, for
their rehabilitation beyond the
standards of 1899 and for their
armament or rearmament, a sum
of billions Of dollars greater than
the total ever extracted in all for
mer wars from the vanquiShed by
the victors-and the stream flows
on and on toward over a hundred
billion dollars. It developed dis
parate and subtly qualified re-
gional, and bilateral, defensive
alliances with at least forty-four
nations within the United Nations,
based on the putative historical
lessons Of past world wars.
History taught, so the argument
ran, that if the Imperial German
government had realized that the
United States would become iden-
titled with Great Britain and her
allies, there would have been no
war in 1914; that if the United
States had been a member Of the
first League of Nations there