What I have just said applies to our strength as a single country.  But we are not alone.  I have returned from the recent NATO meeting with renewed conviction that, because we are a part of a world-wide community of free and peaceful nations, our own security is immeasurably increased.

By contrast, the Soviet Union has surrounded itself with captive and sullen nations.  Like a crack in the crust of an uneasily sleeping volcano, the Hungarian uprising revealed the depth and intensity of the patriotic longing for liberty that still burns within these countries.

The world thinks of us as a country which is strong, but which will never start a war.  The world also thinks of us as a land which has never enslaved anyone and which is animated by humane ideals.  This friendship, based on common ideals, is one of our greatest sources of strength.

It cements into a cohesive security arrangement the aggregate of the spiritual, military and economic strength of all those nations which, with us, are allied by treaties and agreements.

Up to this point, I have talked solely about our military strength to deter a possible future war.

I now want to talk about the strength we need to win a different kind of war—­one that has already been launched against us.

It is the massive economic offensive that has been mounted by the communist imperialists against free nations.

The communist imperialist regimes have for some time been largely frustrated in their attempts at expansion based directly on force.  As a result, they have begun to concentrate heavily on economic penetration, particularly of newly-developing countries, as a preliminary to political domination.

This non-military drive, if underestimated, could defeat the free world regardless of our military strength.  This danger is all the greater precisely because many of us fail or refuse to recognize it.  Thus, some people may be tempted to finance our extra military effort by cutting economic assistance.  But at the very time when the economic threat is assuming menacing proportions, to fail to strengthen our own effort would be nothing less than reckless folly!

Admittedly, most of us did not anticipate the psychological impact upon the world of the launching of the first earth satellite.  Let us not make the same kind of mistake in another field, by failing to anticipate the much more serious impact of the Soviet economic offensive.

As with our military potential, our economic assets are more than equal to the task.  Our independent farmers produce an abundance of food and fibre.  Our free workers are versatile, intelligent, and hardworking.  Our businessmen are imaginative and resourceful.  The productivity, the adaptability of the American economy is the solid foundation-stone of our security structure.