If we are to strengthen our national security, expand our influence, and play the role in world affairs for which our history has prepared us, in the face of the political, economic, and ideological challenge which is now being generated by Moscow, we shall need to consider our relations with the world from a far broader perspective. Out of this broader perspective we must hope that a new majority consensus will emerge which recognizes the fact that we live in a world that is a community and which is prepared responsibly to support policies flowing from that premise. If this consensus fails to develop for want of communication, or effective leadership, or inadequate political organization, or for whatever reason, or if it develops too late to be effective, the implications for our own and for future generations of Americans are not pleasant to contemplate...

Yet an increasing group of articulate and thoughtful observers holds that if the adoption of this difficult and more positive approach to our present global dilemma is dependent on the workings of the democratic process in America and elsewhere, we must despair of it. The inherent characteristics of democratic government, they insist, make it impossible for nations so governed to choose the hard course. Those in power, in order to maintain their positions, must continuously cater to the domestic interests and whims of a fragile and shifting numerical majority. Inevitably these interests, even in critical periods such as this, will reflect. short-term needs and desires which cannot be adjusted responhibly to long-term objectives.

With this dark and pessimistic view of the futures of free societies, I must dissent. I do not, of course assume their continued success and growth. But I wholeheartedly deny the inevitability of their failure. I believe that our future now, as in the past, will be largely what we make it. Obviously the forces which now challenge us are far more formidable than any our predecessors knew. Yet this does not alter the basic premise; it simply means that the task ahead is that much harder and the outcome that much more decisive...

It is not the failure of our democratic form of government as such, here or elsewhere in the West, that accounts for the present narrow approach to foreign policy which is at bottom the disease that worries so many observers. It is the failure of our American leadership in political life and out of it to recognize the requirements of our fast changing world, to use our democratic techniques to help form a new consensus appropriate to the new challenge, and to call convincingly on the moral resources of our people...

The American people, I deeply believe, want something more than mere survival or even a quick and easy plan to destroy our adversaries. Indeed, every time they have been offered some national responsible, higher sense of purpose they have grasped it and understood it.

The Marshall Plan, at least when it was first announced, was not proposed to the American people as simply another exercise in Maginot wall-building. On the contrary, it was presented as a genuine attempt to treat the world we live in, or at least the nations of the Atlantic Basin which are historically and culturally closest to us, as a community.

And this program, almost alone among our post-war foreign policy activities, it seems to me, evoked a sense of commitment and excitement in the nation at large. This, I think can be attributed to the fact that it did open up, however briefly, a new view of our relation to and place in the world. Despite the fact that subsequent events obscured this initial conception, and may even be said to have diverted the plan from its original purposes, it has never quite lost in the public mind the sense of satisfaction and even excitement which surrounded its birth.

Whether all this will convince anyone who is unwilling to believe, I do not know. For me it has the effect of profoundly reinforcing the view I would be inclined by nature to take...

In 1947, Henry L. Stinson wrote: "No private program and no public policy, in any section of our national life, can now escape from the compelling fact that if it is not framed with reference to the world, it is framed with perfect ability." This view-point has not been confined to the Atlantic Seaboard and Mr. Stinson, or to such headline names as Paul Hoffman, Henry Ford, and John J. McCloy.

The membership of the local Councils on Foreign Relations and other groups which are seeking to develop fuller and more informed participation among the citizens in foreign policy-making bears no consistent relationship to the present majority-minority alignment in the country or to political party preference. Public opinion polls invariably show that businessmen are now the most internationally-minded economic group.

Indeed, the foreign policy views of many industrialists and bankers whose hatred of Roosevelt is still smoldering are now closer to those of Walter Reuther than to the Republican leadership in the Senate. The new consensus on foreign affairs may include some strange bedfellows!...

Moreover, as Mr. George Kennan has shown us in his book, The Realities of American Foreign Policy, a healthy understanding with other people abroad may indeed depend to a considerable degree upon our continuing energetic efforts to put our own house in even better order and to keep it that way. Hence, to promote a viable free world with freedom having the breadth of definition which it rightfully deserves, we must renew our efforts to make that definition a reality at home. A new consensus based on world recruits for this concept who in a different period clung to a laissez-faire aproach.

Yet with all this, one may expect some of the groups as yet "underprivilleged" economically or in terms of social status to dissent from an increasing national emphasis on economic and political concerns abroad. There may also be resistance from some people of old American stock and of moderate means whose sense of economic and social security has been challenged by the rise of vigorous newcomers whose families came more recently from Europe; similarly, from those who maintain unreasoning resistance to the ideal of equal rights for all, regardless of race or color...

This sketch of the social and economic groups which may merge into a new majority alignment or dissent from it is necessarily brief, incomplete, and tentative. It is clear in any event that neither of the two political parties can in itself provide the completely effective political instrument for such a majority. As with the earlier shifts in basic alignment we have discussed, a new grouping that is really adequate to the world challenge is almost certain at many points to cut across existing party lines and the narrower interests now reflected in them.

Because of deep-seated political habits, organization, and laws, which protect the position of the two established parties against newcomers, the emergence of a new political party as the Republican party developed in 1856 seems out of the question, except perhaps in the spiritual as well as material upheaval that might develop out of a nuclear war. Therefore, the new majority will almost certainly be based on one of the existing parties, as on two of the three previous occasions in our history when a new consensus was forged from established political groups...