Through the development of nuclear weapons, both the United States and Russia have achieved the power largely to destroy each other and indeed much of life upon this earth in a matter of weeks.

Following Stalin's death and the development of the nuclear stalemate, new Soviet leaders have seized the political, economic, and ideological initiative by launching a program to isolate us from the peoples and natural wealth of Asia and Africa, and ultimately from South America and even Europe, and thereby to strangle our military and economic capacity.

Liberal democracy, the ultimate triumph of which Western leaders since the seventeenth century have taken for granted, is thus mortally challenged by a new social and political order that bids persuasively for the favor of mankind with dynamic new techniques of education, ideology, and technology.

Calcutta's Reaction

Our reaction to this global challenge has been such that 38 per cent of the people questioned in a recent Calcutta poll selected the United States as the nation most likely to start World War III, while only 2 per cent selected the Soviet Union and 1 per cent the Peoples Republic of China.

There is irony, if not yet tragedy, in the contrast between the issues which these interrelated forces are creating--questions involving no less than the survival or destruction of our Western society--and those which are likely to engage our principal political energies in the election of 1956.

This does not mean that an effective new majority consensus cannot be developed that is competent to cope with these questions. It simply means that they have not yet been brought within the range where the political processes which create such an agreement are operating. The attention of the political parties has remained focused, in a manner I have already described, upon diminishing areas of disagreement within the broad political consensus that emerged in response to the domestic crisis of the 1930's. Because of this failure to grasp the significance of the newer and infinitely more momentous challenge, the power and influence of America and its Atlantic allies is now in jeopardy....

Future Directions

I started this discussion with a disclaimer of any prophetic gifts, and I shall not attempt to divine the makeup of the new majority and its time of appearance, much less the precise content of its base of agreement. It may be possible, however, to suggest some directions in which we might search for a political consensus appropriate to the challenge which we face, and some of the shifts in the present majority-minority alignment which may be required to produce it...

We may expect, then, that any new majority-minority political grouping will develop around a different interpretation of America's relations with the rest of the world. In this sense it is likely to depart even more sharply from its immediate predecessor than the three which we have already examined.

For, as we have seen, each of these three major groupings has been primarily concerned with domestic affairs. This is true even of the present alignment, although our discussion in the second lecture showed that agreement on certain lines of action abroad was a substantial component of that alignment...

The majority in both parties which has supported our foreign policies over the fifteen years has thus far largely conceived of them as a series of arrangements which will fend off the aggressive and intrusive forces in the world outside and leave us free to work out our own American destiny in our own way. Implicit in such a concept is the persistent conviction that foreign affairs, except when war is imminent, are largely a marginal consideration.

When it becomes evident that this series of political alliances and economic arrangements, which was designed to free us for our proper domestic concerns, is contiuing to take a major and increasing share of our energy and our resources without providing the security which we have presumably bought and paid for, we feel frustrated and cheated and many of us embark on a search for culprits.

Now on this rapidly shrinking planet, which we share with the Russians, Chinese, and others, the traditional quick, total solutions which we Americans have always demanded in foreign affairs are simply not available. Not only is any such narrow objective for American foreign policy impossible of attainment, it is, indeed, self-contradictory. We cannot be in the world and not of it, no matter how great our wealth and power. Inevitably this must become clear to more and more of our people.

A Broader Perspective