Page:Foreign Relations of the United States 1948 Volume 1 Part 2.djvu/37

Rh form of counter-force; but it considers that if alliance is to be effective it must be based upon real community of interest and outlook, which is to be found only among limited groups of governments, and not upon the abstract formalism of universal international law or international organization. It places no credence in the readiness of most peoples to wage war or to make national sacrifices in the interests of an abstraction called "peace". On the contrary, it sees in universal undertakings a series of obligations which might, in view of the short-sightedness and timidity of other governments, prevent this country from taking vigorous and incisive measures for its own defense and for the defense of concepts of international relations which might be of vital importance to world stability as a whole. It sees effective and determined U.S. policy being caught, at decisive moments, in the meshes of a sterile and cumbersome international parliamentarianism, if the univeralistic concepts are applied.

Finally, the particularized approach to foreign policy problems distrusts the theory of national sovereignty as it expresses itself today in international organization. The modern techniques of aggressive expansion lend themselves too well to the pouring of new wine into old vessels—to the infusion of a foreign political will into the personality of an ostensibly independent nation. In these circumstances, the parliamentary principle in world affairs can easily become distorted and abused as it has been in the case of White Russia, the Ukraine and the Russian satellites. This is not to mention the problem of the distinction between large and small states, and the voice that they should have, respectively, in world affairs.

This Government is now conducting a dual policy, which combines elements of both of these approaches. This finds its reflection in the Department of State, where the functional (or universalistic) concept vies with the geographic (or particularized) in the framing and conduct of policy, as well as in the principles of Departmental organization.

This duality is something to which we are now deeply committed. I do not mean to recommend that we should make any sudden changes. We cannot today abruptly renounce aspirations which have become for many people here and abroad a symbol of our belief in the possibility of a peaceful world.

But it is my own belief that in our pursuance of a workable world order we have started from the wrong end. Instead of beginning at the center, which is our own immediate neighborhood—the area of our own political and economic tradition—and working outward, we have started on the periphery of the entire circle, i.e., on the universalistic principle of the UN, and have attempted to work inward. This has :595-593--763