It is a struggle as old as recorded history; it is freedom versus tyranny.

For the dominant idea of the Soviet regime is the terrible conception that men do not have rights but live at the mercy of the state.

Inevitably this idea of theirs—­and all the consequences flowing from it—­collided with the efforts of free nations to build a just and peaceful world.  The “cold war” between the communists and the free world is nothing more or less than the Soviet attempt to checkmate and defeat our peaceful purposes, in furtherance of their own dread objective.

We did not seek this struggle, God forbid.  We did our utmost to avoid it.  In World War II, we and the Russians had fought side by side, each in our turn attacked and forced to combat by the aggressors.  After the war, we hoped that our wartime collaboration could be maintained, that the frightful experience of Nazi invasion, of devastation in the heart of Russia, had turned the Soviet rulers away from their old proclaimed allegiance to world revolution and communist dominion.  But instead, they violated, one by one, the solemn agreements they had made with us in wartime.  They sought to use the rights and privileges they had obtained in the United Nations, to frustrate its purposes and cut down its powers as an effective agent of world progress and the keeper of the world’s peace.

Despite this outcome, the efforts we made toward peaceful collaboration are a source of our present strength.  They demonstrated that we believed what we proclaimed, that we actually sought honest agreements as the way to peace.  Our whole moral position, our leadership in the free world today, is fortified by that fact.

The world is divided, not through our fault or failure, but by Soviet design.  They, not we, began the cold war.  And because the free world saw this happen because men know we made the effort and the Soviet rulers spurned it—­the free nations have accepted leadership from our Republic, in meeting and mastering the Soviet offensive.

It seems to me especially important that all of us be clear, in our own thinking, about the nature of the threat we have faced-and will face for a long time to come.  The measures we have devised to meet it take shape and pattern only as we understand what we were—­and are—­up against.

The Soviet Union occupies a territory of 8 million square miles.  Beyond its borders, East and West, are the nearly five million square miles of the satellite states—­virtually incorporated into the Soviet Union—­and of China, now its close partner.  This vast land mass contains an enormous store of natural resources sufficient to support an economic development comparable to our own.

That is the Stalinist world.  It is a world of great natural diversity in geography and climate, in distribution of resources, in population, language, and living standards, in economic and cultural development.  It is a world whose people are not all convinced communists by any means.  It is a world where history and national traditions, particularly in its borderlands, tend more toward separation than unification, and run counter to the enforced combination that has been made of these areas today.