Our post-war objective has been in keeping with this great idea.  The United States has sought to use its pre-eminent position of power to help other nations recover from the damage and dislocation of the war.  We held out a helping hand to enable them to restore their national lives and to regain their positions as independent, self-supporting members of the great family of nations.  This help was given without any attempt on our part to dominate or control any nation.  We did not want satellites but partners.

The Soviet Union, however, took exactly the opposite course.

Its rulers saw in the weakened condition of the world not an obligation to assist in the great work of reconstruction, but an opportunity to exploit misery and suffering for the extension of their power.  Instead of help, they brought subjugation.  They extinguished, blotted out, the national independence of the countries that the military operations of World War II had left within their grasp.

The difference stares at us from the map of Europe today.  To the west of the line that tragically divides Europe we see nations continuing to act and live in the light of their own traditions and principles.  On the other side, we see the dead uniformity of a tyrannical system imposed by the rulers of the Soviet Union.  Nothing could point up more clearly what the global struggle between the free world and the communists is all about.

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.