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In the decades after World War II, we undertook our first sustained period of peacetime world leadership with a supreme self-assurance fortunately matched by overwhelming material superiority. And we faced an antagonist whose political system and actions on the world scene explicitly threatened the very existence of our most cherished principles.
In a period of seemingly clear-cut divisions, we saw little need for an explicit definition of the national interest. We saw economic problems around the world of the kind we had solved successfully in our own country, and sought to overwhelm them with the weight of resources, assuming that economic progress automatically led to political stability. In short, without making a conscious design to do so, we were trying to shape the world to our design.
Our postwar policy was marked by great achievements.
America found within itself extraordinary capacities of vision and creativity. Leaders of both parties and many backgrounds−Truman and Eisenhower, Vandenberg and Marshall, Acheson and Dulles−built a national consensus for responsible American world leadership based on both principle and pragmatism. The recovery of Western Europe and Japan, the creation of peacetime alliances, the shaping of the global trade and monetary system, the economic advance of newer and poorer nations, the measures to control the nuclear arms race−these constitute an enduring record of American statesmanship.
OUR CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE
We face an equally great challenge today. America is thrust into the role of global leadership with a dual responsibility. We must maintain our security and global peace by the traditional methods of power and diplomacy. But we know that nuclear war could destroy civilization, and therefore we must go beyond traditional foreign policy to shape a world reflecting the imperatives of interdependence and justice.
We remain the strongest nation and the largest single influence in international affairs. For 30 years our leadership has sustained world peace, progress and justice. Our leadership is no less needed today, but it must be redefined to meet changing conditions. Ours is no longer a world of American nuclear monopoly, but one of substantial nuclear equivalence. Ours is no longer a world of two solid blocs and clear-cut dividing lines, but one of proliferating centers of power and influence. Ours is no longer a world amenable to national solutions, but one of economic interdependence and common global challenges. Ours is a world where moral affirmation can be carried out only through stages, each of which is by definition imperfect.
Thus for the first time in American experience, we can neither escape from the world nor dominate it.