NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY


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   Why was this?
   First, because if the Russians, contrary to expectations, did attack
 militarily, there was really little that we or -anyone ielse could do about
 it. We had decided to demobilize. Strength adequate for real military
 containment in Europe !and Asia could not conceivably be built up
 without reviving the military power of Germany and Japan, which
 we ,were not prepared to do. We might do some things to make such
 an attack less likely; butt we were not the Russians' keepers-we had
 no real control over their motives or their conduct--jand if they grasped
 for ,the sword, there was no way we could really prevent the results
 from being a-new sort of shambles for European civilization.
   Secondly, because there -was a chance that with our encouragement
 sufficient forces of resistance could be mobilized in the non-communist
 world to prevent communist political pressure from having successes
 of catastrophic, dimensions at this juncture. As for the more distant
 future, no one .was wise enough ato tell. But if five or ten years of peace
 could be gained, there was always a possibility that by that time some-
 thing would have happened to diminish the intensity of the commu-
 nist threat ,and that the world might then somehow work its way
 through, without catastrophe, to an international order of greater
 stability and security.
   This, at any rate, was the best chance. War was no acceptable alterna-
 tive. Nor was the idea of some overall agreement- with the Soviet
 leaders. A patient and wary policy of reinforcing resistance to Soviet
 political pressures, wherever there was anything ,to reinforce, and by
 whatever means 1we had of doing this, was dictated by the limits of
 the possible. It was not guaranteed to work. But it was the only thing
 that held out any real possibility of working.
   The implications of such a policy, from the standpoint of the
 actual conduct of our affairs, were profound and varied. To understand
 the logical inter-relationships of the various phases of diplomatic
 action which it demanded called for considerable subtlety and breadth
 of understanding. Not all the elements of our public opinion, or even
 of our government personnel, possessed these qualities. Because the
 Russian !attack, ideologically speaking, was a global one, challenging
 the ultimate validity of the entire non-communiist outlook on life,
 predicting its :failure, and playing on the force of that prediction as
 a main device in the conduct of the cold war, it could be countered
 only by a movement on our part equally comprehensive, designed to
 prove the validity of liberal institutions, to con-found the predictions
 of itheir failure, to prove thata society not beaholden to Russian com-
 munism could still 'work". In this way, the task of combatting com-
munism became as broad as the whole great range of our responsibili-