AHTER 1953 Dwight D Eisenhower - Imperatives o

There is only one real peace now, and that is peace for all time. Now there are three imperatives of peace, three requirements that the prudent man must face with unblinking realism. The first imperative is the elementary necessity of maintaining our own national strength, moral, economic, and military.

And he's still my conviction as I wrote in 1947, the compelling necessities of the moment leave us no alternative to the maintenance of real and respectable strength, not only in our moral rectitude and our economic power, but in terms of adequate military preparedness.

Our economic power, as everyone knows, is displaying a capacity for growth which is both rapid and sound, even while supporting record military budgets. We must keep it growing. But moral strength is also essential. Today we are competing for men's hearts and minds and trust all over the world.

In such a competition, what we are at home and what we do at home is even more important than what we say abroad. Here again, my friends, we find constructive work for each of us.

What each of us does, how each of us acts, has an influence on this question. Now the second imperative of peace is collective security. We live in a shrunken world, a world in which oceans are crossed in ours, a world in which a single-minded despotism menaces the scattered freedoms of scores of struggling independent

nations, to ensure the combined strength of friendly nations is for all of us an elementary matter of self-preservation, as elementary as having a stout militia in the days of the flintlock. Again the strength I speak of is not military strength alone.

The heart of the collective security principle is the idea of helping other nations to realize their own potentialities, political, economic, and military. The strength of the free world lies not in cementing the free world into a second monolithic mass to compete with that of the Communists.