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.

But it is also a world of great man-made uniformities, a world that bleeds its population white to build huge military forces; a world in which the police are everywhere and their authority unlimited; a world where terror and slavery are deliberately administered both as instruments of government and as means of production; a world where all effective social power is the state’s monopoly—­yet the state itself is the creature of the communist tyrants.

The Soviet Union, with its satellites, and China are held in the tight grip of communist party chieftains.  The party dominates all social and political institutions.  The party regulates and centrally directs the whole economy.  In Moscow’s sphere, and in Peiping’s, all history, philosophy, morality and law are centrally established by rigid dogmas, incessantly drummed into the whole population and subject to interpretation—­or to change by none except the party’s own inner circle.

And lest their people learn too much of other ways of life, the communists have walled off their world, deliberately and uniformly, from the rest of human society.

That is the communist base of operation in-their cold war.  In addition, they have at their command hundreds and thousands of dedicated foreign communists, people in nearly every free country who will serve Moscow’s ends.  Thus the masters of the Kremlin are provided with deluded followers all through the free world whom they can manipulate, cynically and quite ruthlessly, to serve the purposes of the Soviet state.