I BELIEVE that we have been losing round after round in the cold war, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and that, at virtually every point, the initiative still lies with the hordes of international Communism.
At the close of World War II, our forces stood triumphant on land and sea and in the air. We had at our command the mightiest array of military power in history. The flags of freedom were unfurled on every continent.
Had we had the understanding and the will, our diplomacy, backed up by this military and moral power, could have assured the freedom of the peoples of Europe and Asia and laid the basis for a stable peace. Of this I am convinced.
Yet, the past 16 years have witnessed a calamitous retreat from victory. We have suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of international Communism. We have retreated from position after position; we have committed folly after folly.
It is not in the tradition of the American people to accept defeat, or to respond to threats and bullying with mere paper protests. That is why they are restive today. Our people are convinced that the trend of the post-war years must be reversed and can be reversed. The past several years, however, have seen this trend accentuated and accelerated.…
If we have been losing the cold war, if we have thus far found it impossible to seize the initiative at any point, this is because of three basic failures.
First of all, we have failed to face up to the unpleasant fact that we are locked in a life-and-death struggle with an implacable enemy.
Second, we have failed to face up to the fact that this enemy wages war in an infinitely subtle and infinitely complex manner, that the so-called “cold war” is not a simple condition of hostile confrontation, but a mortal conflict waged by a thousand different means—a war in which the enemy offensive is integrated on every plane of human activity, the economic, the political, the diplomatic, the psychological, the social, the cultural—a war conducted by stealth and subversion and subtle psychological techniques.
Our third basic failure in the cold war is that we have been amateurs fighting against the most highly skilled and ruthless and dedicated professionals.
Because of the persistent innocence of our attitude, we have been horrified by each new act of Soviet aggression and perfidy—as though aggression and perfidy were not essential characteristics of international Communism. On the other hand, we have shown ourselves willing, over and over again, to forget the lessons of the past, to respond to each new Soviet blandishment, to negotiate new treaties in good faith when old treaties are terminated by Soviet bad faith.
The Soviets have bewitched us into accepting the division of the world into a “peace zone” and a “war zone.” The “war zone” embraces all those countries and territories that have not yet succumbed to Communist rule; and in this zone, according to the arbitrary, one-sided rules which we have apparently accepted, the Communists are free to seek power by military aggression where this is possible, and by subversion and infiltration where military aggression is not feasible.
The “peace zone” is synonymous with the Communist land empire. From this zone, the cold war is excluded. Against this zone, no matter how newly acquired these territories may be, counterattacks are forbidden.…
But above all, we have been paralyzed in situation after situation by our own sentimentality, by our almost passionate desire to believe that the Communists do not really mean what they say, that they cannot be as evil as they appear to be, that coexistence with them is possible, and that the cold war can be liquidated by making this or that concession.
If we continue to fight the cold war under these arbitrary rules and with these self-imposed limitations, it is historically inevitable that we shall lose it. If the Communists always attack and we always defend, even if we were successful in repulsing most of the Communist attacks, the ultimate victory of Communism would be a mathematical certainty.
That is why Khrushchev and the other Communist leaders are so arrogant today. That is why Khrushchev asked the assembled leaders of world Communism last year to synchronize their watches for the final assault on world capitalism. That is why Khrushchev could tell his comrades that despite his age, he still hopes to see the hammer and sickle of Communism triumphant over all the countries of the world.
Khrushchev and his comrades may well be right, if the free world does not succeed in freeing itself from the illusions and wishful thinking that have heretofore characterized its conduct, if it persists in refusing to face up to the total irreconcilability of Communism and Western civilization.
There is too great a tendency to accept Communist revolutions as irreversible and Communist regimes as permanent. This attitude lies at the root of our failure to take effective measures to deal with the Castro regime in Cuba.
The phenomenon of total dictatorship has, in fact, produced the phenomenon of the “total revolution,” in which entire peoples, including the military forces under supposedly Communist direction, have revolted against their Communist masters.
That the phenomenon of “total revolution” is not a freak or historical accident is demonstrated by the fact that we have had four such uprisings over the past nine years—in East Germany, in Poland, in Hungary, and in Tibet.
If such a total revolution against Communism were to take place in Cuba, its immediate success would be assured for the simple reason that the Soviet Union and Communist China would be in no position to intervene in Cuba as they did in Hungary and East Germany and Tibet.
I believe that Cuba is not only a place where we can seize the initiative and strike an effective blow for freedom; I believe that the security of our nation and of the hemisphere make it essential that we embark upon this initiative without delay and without equivocation. I believe that freedom can be restored to the Cuban people if we are prepared to give our unstinting support to the Cuban forces for liberation, in Cuba and abroad, and if we are prepared to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to proclaim a partial blockade directed against the shipment of Soviet military equipment and personnel to Cuba.
And if we act successfully in Cuba, it will have an impact that goes far beyond the confines of our hemisphere. I think it no exaggeration to say that the restoration of freedom to the Cuban people might very well mark the beginning of the end of the slave empire that the Kremlin has built up in Europe and in Asia.
The first step toward the building of an effective foreign policy, the indispensable step, is to accept the basic facts of our existence as they are, and to clear away the illusions.
If we can free ourselves from the illusion that Communism and Western civilization can get along, we will give up vain hopes of an easy way out and begin to make the stupendous effort in the field of free world armament and mobilization that must be made.
If we can free ourselves from the illusion that the temporary easing of this or that individual crisis will bring about an era of good feeling or another “spirit of Camp David,” we will scrap the patchwork foreign policy of the past which has been essentially a policy of short-term reactions to Communist initiatives, and adopt instead a consistent, long-range program aimed at expansion of freedom and defeat of Communism.
If we can free ourselves from the illusion that Communism is accepted by its subject peoples, we will institute policies aimed at encouraging resistance behind the Iron Curtain with the consequent demoralization of the Red empire.
If we can free ourselves from the illusion that Polish Communists or Yugoslav or Cuban Communists are any less the enemies of freedom than Kremlin Communists, we will stop pouring out our substance in aid to Red dictatorships, which have received more than $4 billion from the American people in recent years, and instead divert that aid to those allies who are manning the front lines of freedom.
Freed from the illusion that the hard-core Communists who rigidly dominate the Communist world can be influenced by friendly demonstrations on our part, we will bring to an end all practices which blur and obscure the nature of the life-or-death struggle that has been forced upon us.
Freed from the illusion that we improve the world climate by soft-pedaling our criticism of Communist infamy, we can for the first time institute an effective program of bringing to the world the truth about the Communists, by each day dragging them before the bar of world opinion, indicting them again and again for the atrocities and crimes they have committed in enslaving one billion human beings, and convicting them in the minds of men for what they have in fact made of themselves, the moral outcasts of humanity.
Freed from the illusion that the way out of each enemy aggressive act is a coalition government which includes Communists, we will at last recognize that the government which includes Reds today will be controlled by them tomorrow, and that there is no substitute for standing firm against aggression from the beginning.
Freed from the illusion that the Communists are seriously interested in negotiating a just peace or indeed in seeking any honorable common objective with us, we will never again fall for such a ruse as the nuclear test ban negotiations which paralyzed our own technological development for three years while our enemies secretly moved ahead.
Freed from the illusion that the Communists can take part in any international organization or court without either poisoning it or subverting it to their ends, we will begin to think less and less in terms of divisive worldwide international organizations and more and more in terms of free world cooperation and unity.
Freed from the illusion that there is some easy way out of the present crisis of civilization, we will adopt a policy of strength, of risk, of sacrifice, of effort for every American.—U. S. Senator THOMAS J. DODD of Connecticut, in remarks to American Society for Industrial Security in Washington.
