All of these efforts at home give meaning to our efforts abroad. Since the
close of the Second World War, a global civil war has divided and tormented
mankind. But it is not our military might, or our higher standard of
living, that has most distinguished us from our adversaries. It is our
belief that the state is the servant of the citizen and not his master.
This basic clash of ideas and wills is but one of the forces reshaping our
globe--swept as it is by the tides of hope and fear, by crises in the
headlines today that become mere footnotes tomorrow. Both the successes and
the setbacks of the past year remain on our agenda of unfinished business.
For every apparent blessing contains the seeds of danger--every area of
trouble gives out a ray of hope--and the one unchangeable certainty is that
nothing is certain or unchangeable.
Yet our basic goal remains the same: a peaceful world community of free and
independent states--free to choose their own future and their own system,
so long as it does not threaten the freedom of others.
Some may choose forms and ways that we would not choose for ourselves--but
it is not for us that they are choosing. We can welcome diversity--the
Communists cannot. For we offer a world of choice--they offer the world of
coercion. And the way of the past shows clearly that freedom, not coercion,
is the wave of the future. At times our goal has been obscured by crisis or
endangered by conflict--but it draws sustenance from five basic sources of
strength:
--the moral and physical strength of the United States;
--the united strength of the Atlantic Community;
--the regional strength of our Hemispheric relations;
--the creative strength of our efforts in the new and developing nations;
and
--the peace-keeping strength of the United Nations.