The Major responsibility facing the Congress, indeed the entire country, is the maintenance of a strong and vigorous foreign policy. The function of that policy, of course, is to protect the security of the United States, to keep the peace if possible, and to retain on the side of the free world the balance of power. A foreign policy is constituted of many ingredients. Certainly of fundamental importance to its success is our military strength; for even though it is unused, its potential adds significance to our every action. The truth of this axiom is readily apparent from a study of the post-war foreign policy of the Soviet Union. For no country in the recent history of the world, with the exception perhaps of Hitler during the Munich crisis, has used the threat of a powerful army equipped for instant war with more effectiveness than have the Russians. It has been the factor which has won them in the critical years from 1945 to the present time success after success, though not a single Russian soldier has been forced to sacrifice his life during this period. It is equally apparent that military strength is a vital ingredient of an effective American foreign policy. To our failure to possess it in 1950 can be attributed in great measure the beginning of the Korean War and many other setbacks to our hopes and aspirations in the last 9 years. Thus the maintenance of a military potential second to none is of fundamental importance not only for defense in case of war but for the peacetime security of the United States.
Today the President submitted to the Congress a military budget which reflects the fiscal aspects of the fundamental shift in the implementation of our foreign policy which was indicated by Secretary Dulles in his speech earlier this week before the Council on Foreign Relations here in New York. This change in policy had momentous implications for all Americans and should be so understood; for, while it may decrease the prospect, as has been argued, of successive Koreas scattered throughout the world, it may also, if our warnings are not heeded, increase the possibility of the United States being forced to become involved in atomic action. Secretary Dulles gave clear warning to the Chinese and Russian leaders, in his speech in New York, that if they should begin another limited Korean-type war the homeland of neither the Chinese nor the Russians would be a sanctuary from direct atomic attack by the strategic air force of the United States. Mr. Dulles stated "the way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing." Secretary Dulles and the leaders of the present administration have obviously concluded that the West can no longer afford to fight a series of marginal wars or successive police actions which sap our strength and neutralize our friends. It is preferable, they believe, to face the enemy with prospects of all-out warfare, rather than drift through years of perpetual discord and struggle.
Basically this represents a change in our approach to the problem of containing the expansion of the Soviet Union, which has too often tended, as Secretary Dulles pointed out, to be merely a reflex action to Soviet initiative. Our policy of containment originated in 1947 when the Communists, in defiance of the World War II agreement between the Russians and Winston Churchill, attempted by intensive guerilla action to seize control of Greece, which had been placed under the protection of the free world. In response to this threat, President Truman came before Congress and, by requesting assistance for Greece and Turkey, originated the Truman doctrine. Later that year there was spelled out in the Foreign Affairs Quarterly, in an article by Mr. X, later identified as George Kennan, the leading Soviet expert in the American State Department, a comprehensive and detailed analysis of what steps would be necessary to prevent the Soviets from seizing strategic areas in the world, areas vital to our security. The implementation of this policy called for the building of strength in those areas surrounding the post war Soviet zone of control, stretching in a great half moon from Norway down through Greece and Turkey to the Middle East across to the Orient through Japan to Alaska. The purpose was to prevent gradual deterioration in our position and a consequent increase in the relative strength of the Communist bloc, resulting finally in a situation where the Communists could face the prospects of war with a certitude of victory.
Though the immediate threat then was in the Eastern Mediterrean, the general challenge was not alone to the Greeks and Turks, and it became obvious that further assistance in other areas was necessary. Thus, in 1948 economic assistance to Western Europe on a massive scale was started through the Marshall Plan. We realized at that time, with the atomic monopoly held by the United States, that the chief threat to our security was not a military one, but rather from the danger that the standard of living of the people of Western Europe would fall below the marginal level, and that active and vigorous Communist parties within those countries would profit from their hardships. By 1949, however, it was apparent that, although the Communist challenge was world-wide, our assistance was concentrated. The Communist threat became especially heavy in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Dominated by colonial powers for more than a century, with a large percentage of their people unable to read or write, with an average income in many of the areas of $40 or $50 a year, and a life expectancy in the poorest country of 25 or 26 years, the people of this great region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the South China Sea offered a ready target to Communist infiltration. To give them some confidence that under a free system they could hope for a better life, to counter the Soviet subversion and propaganda, the United States initiated programs of technical assistance and propaganda, for all the countries along the Soviet underbelly. These programs, of course, are still in effect and have had, in some areas, significant results.
Towards the end of 1949 it became obvious, however, that the Soviets were concentrating on building up and maintaining the most powerful military forces in the world, forces which, as I have said, provided power and support to their diplomacy and propaganda, encouragement to their supporters and a constant threat to their enemies. In 1949, therefore, we initiated the North Atlantic Treaty, which not only provided for mutual cooperation in building up military forces in the West, but also resulted in the United States' guarantees of the territorial integrity of all NATO powers. We hoped by this means to avoid the mistakes of World War I and II where doubts about our ultimate actions were sufficient to encourage the Germans to commence military action without fear of the United States. It was our hope that the warning of United States' retaliation in case of a Western European invasion would offset the weakness of European armies at that time and would prevent the Russians from marching to an easy victory. Even today, after three years of build-up, a build-up substantially slower than our earlier hopes for the NATO forces, this threat of American retaliation remains the chief defense of the Continent of Europe.
Since then the military guarantees of NATO have been widened; we are attempting to include within a mutual defense pact the major countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. The day may come when neutralism ceases to hold itself out as a practical alternative for many of the peoples of Asia and our system of mutual guarantees will become world-wide.
But until this is accomplished, the new policy announced last week faces grave difficulties and dangers. It would be difficult, for example, for the United States to commence atomic retaliation against communist aggression in Burma, if Burma had from the beginning of the cold war shown uninterest in the cause of the free world and opposed vigorously any action that would result in closer defense arrangements with us.
But this prospect of a unilateral world-wide Monroe Doctrine for the Atomic Age is only one of the complications of the new policy. A second complication, that of the limitation on atomic weapons against current communist tactics, is suggested by the present war in French Indochina. The war there has been proceeding with growing intensity since 1945. The burden has been borne almost totally by the French who have lost more officers than yearly graduate from the French military academy at St. Cyr. The French fight there against the communist forces of the Viet Minh, the native armies led by Ho Chi Minh, who despite his record as a lifelong communist, has influence penetrating all groups of society because of his years of battle against French colonialism.
French Indochina offers a sharp contrast with the struggle in Korea. There we were supporting a courageous and valiant native government in their desire to be independent of the Communists. In French Indochina, because of the decades of heavy and unilateral control that the French have maintained over this Colony, the native people too often tend to regard the French as the real oppressors, and the rebel forces, even though Communist, as liberators. Thus the natives have played, unlike the South Koreans, a relatively small part in the war against the Communist; the burden has been carried chiefly by the French with an increasingly large investment in military assistance by ourselves, and the prospects of a Communist defeat become more distant. The pressures in France are growing steadily for cutting their investment and loss, and either withdrawing or working out an arrangement for a negotiated peace with the leaders of Viet Minh - a peace, I must add, which will in my opinion ultimately and inevitably result in Communist domination in French Indochina. For Indochina is probably the only country in the world where many observers believe the Communist-led element would win a free election. Moreover, since the end of the Korean war, the Chinese, who were hard pressed in the fighting - probably more hard pressed than we ever imagined at the time - have now been able to catch their breath. Their assistance to the forces of Viet Minh is thus steadily growing, and they themselves, and this is a most significant fact, are steadily increasing their own military strength. Some observers believe that within two years the Chinese Communists will have developed over 150 modern divisions. They will then become, after the Soviet Union and the United States, the greatest single military power in the world, lacking only an atomic arsenal and an industrial capacity to sustain it, to put them in the first rank. This power will be under the direction of native leadership which has increasingly evidenced aggressive and rapacious intentions towards the countries along their southern border.
Under these circumstances, we must ask how the new Dulles policy and its dependence upon the threat of atomic retaliation will fare in these areas of guerrilla warfare. At what point would the threat of atomic weapons be used in the struggles in Southeast Asia - in French Indochina - particularly where the chief burden is carried on the one side by native communists and on the other by the troops of a Western power, which once held the country under colonial rule? Under these conditions at what point would our new policy come into play? All observers agree that it is vital to the security of all of Southeast Asia that Indochina remain free from Communist domination, for if Indochina should be lost undoubtedly within a short time, Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia and other now independent states might fall under control of the Communist bloc in a series of chain reactions. Such an occurrence obviously would have the most serious consequences for all the Middle East and Europe, and indeed for our own security. Thus French Indochina may well be the keystone to the defense of all of Asia.
But if the Chinese do not intervene directly, and merely increase their supplies to the native Communist forces, and send informal "volunteer" missions to assist in the training of troops and the handling of more complicated equipment, at what point would it ever be possible for us in the words of Secretary Dulles to employ "massive retaliatory power"? It seems to me that we could be placed in a most difficult position of either giving no aid at all of the kind that is necessary to bring victory to us in that area, or the wrong kind of aid which would alienate the people of great sections of the world who might feel that the remedy was worse than the disease. Of course, Mr. Dulles feels that the threat of attack will prevent the brush fires from starting far more effectively than could subsequent efforts to assist the forces of freedom in each of these areas against the well entrenched communist guerilla or native armies. But once the brush fire begins to spread, and particularly if it spreads through a series of localized combustions, then the new policy might be confronted with a serious dilemma.
The third question presented by Mr. Dulles' policy involves the constitutional and political nature of our government. Under the Constitution the President must seek the consent of Congress for a declaration of war; and even in the absence of a formal declaration, congressional consent would be required before such a drastic step could be taken as ordering our strategic air force into action against a country who might retaliate with bombs on our own citizens. And yet, if the President goes to the Congress and asks their consent, does he not give a warning to the enemy of our intentions, a warning that might under present conditions permit retaliation on us before our own blow became effective? Here again you can see that the "new strategy" most recently announced by the Secretary of State has implications of the utmost seriousness. We will not now, as formerly, resist aggression wherever it occurs. Now the United States is being committed to instant retaliation against the aggressor anywhere we choose with any weapons we choose. Now we are making it clear to the Communists that an act of aggression will be followed by retaliation by the United States on the home territory of China or Russia. Thus, we have witnessed how far the United States has come since the neutralism of the 30s.
Some may ask whether the American people have been able to adjust their thinking so rapidly and so extensively as to support a policy which, under a broad interpretation, could call for instant atomic attack upon the homeland of any aggressor against any country in any part of the world.
I would not maintain for a moment that the policy of containment which has undergone steady revision and improvement since 1946 should not be constantly and critically re-examined. But, the people of the United States in their consideration of the new policy enunciated by the President and Secretary of State Dulles, with all of its implications concerning our military manpower and our relations with other nations, are entitled to the fullest answers of at least these three basic questions:
First, what would be the relationship of this policy to any attacks upon those nations who may at that time be neutral or unfriendly in their attitudes toward a defensive alliance with the United States?
Second, of what value would atomic retaliation be in opposing a Communist advance which rested not upon military invasion but upon local insurrection and political deterioration?
Third, does this new policy depend for its success on the relinquishment by Congress of its traditional, though time consuming and well publicized power to consent to our involvement in all-out atomic war?
Foreign policy, is of course, a bi-partisan affair; and I do agree with Secretary Dulles' general objective of preventing a series of exhausting, though localized, engagements of military manpower. Nor do I seek Congressional interference in the Executive's responsibility for the conduct of our foreign affairs. On the contrary, I would oppose any constitutional amendment or other attempt to restrict that executive responsibility. But I think that all of us have our own responsibility to call attention to what we believe to be the implications of those policies into which we might otherwise drift without a public awareness of their significance. In this country, one of our most fundamental rights is to petition and question the Executive and Legislative branches of the Government about the policies which they pursue. I raise these questions tonight, not only for the consideration of high officials of our government, but also because no foreign or domestic policy can be effectively maintained in a Democracy such as ours unless it is understood and supported by the great majority of the people. In an era of supersonic attack and atomic retaliation, extended public debate and education are of no avail once such a policy must be implemented. The time to study, no doubt, to review and revise - is now. For upon our decisions now may well rest the peace and security of the world - indeed the very continued existence of Mankind.
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