The great and dominant objective of United States foreign policy is to build and preserve a just peace.  The peace we seek is not peace for twenty years.  It is permanent peace.  At a time when massive changes are occurring with lightning speed throughout the world, it is often difficult to perceive how this central objective is best served in one isolated complex situation or another.  Despite this very real difficulty, there are certain basic propositions to which the United States adheres and to which we shall continue to adhere.

One proposition is that lasting peace requires genuine understanding and active cooperation among the most powerful nations.  Another is that even the support of the strongest nations cannot guarantee a peace unless it is infused with the quality of justice for all nations.

On October 27, 1945, I made, in New York City, the following public statement of my understanding of the fundamental foreign policy of the United States.  I believe that policy to be in accord with the opinion of the Congress and of the people of the United States.  I believe that that policy carries out our fundamental objectives.

1.  We seek no territorial expansion or selfish advantage.  We have no plans for aggression against any other state, large or small.  We have no objective which need clash with the peaceful aims of any other nation.

2.  We believe in the eventual return of sovereign rights and self-government to all peoples who have been deprived of them by force.

3.  We shall approve no territorial changes in any friendly part of the world unless they accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned.

4.  We believe that all peoples who are prepared for self-government should be permitted to choose their own form of government by their own freely expressed choice, without interference from any foreign source.  That is true in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

5.  By the combined and cooperative action of our war allies, we shall help the defeated enemy states establish peaceful democratic governments of their own free choice.  And we shall try to attain a world in which nazism, fascism, and military aggression cannot exist.

6.  We shall refuse to recognize any government imposed upon any nation by the force of any foreign power.  In some cases it may be impossible to prevent forceful imposition of such a government.  But the United States will not recognize any such government.

7.  We believe that all nations should have the freedom of the seas and equal rights to the navigation of boundary rivers and waterways and of rivers and waterways which pass through more than one country.

8.  We believe that all states which are accepted in the society of nations should have access on equal terms to the trade and the raw materials of the world.

9.  We believe that the sovereign states of the Western Hemisphere, without interference from outside the Western Hemisphere, must work together as good neighbors in the solution of their common problems.