Next was our aid and support to embattled Greece, which enabled her to defeat the forces threatening her national independence.

In Turkey, cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free world.

In 1949, we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the North Atlantic Community and to a number of other free countries.

The Soviet Union’s threats against Germany and Japan, its neighbors to the West and to the East, have been successfully withstood.  Free Germany is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations, and a partner in the common defense.  The Soviet effort to capture Berlin by blockade was thwarted by the courageous Allied airlift.  An independent and democratic Japan has been brought back into the community of free nations.

In the Far East, the tactics of communist imperialism have reached heights of violence unmatched elsewhere—­and the problem of concerted action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more difficult.

Here, in spite of outside aid and support, the free government of China succumbed to the communist assault.  Our aid has enabled the free Chinese to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of Formosa.  In other areas of the Far East-in Indo-China, Malaya, and the Philippines—­our assistance has helped sustain a staunch resistance against communist insurrectionary attacks.

The supreme test, up to this point, of the will and determination of the free nations came in Korea, when communist forces invaded the Republic of Korea, a state that was in a special sense under the protection of the United Nations.  The response was immediate and resolute.  Under our military leadership, the free nations for the first time took up arms, collectively, to repel aggression.

Aggression was repelled, driven back, punished.  Since that time, communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict, in spite of honest efforts by the United Nations to reach an honorable truce.  The months of deadlock have demonstrated that the communists cannot achieve by persistence, or by diplomatic trickery, what they failed to achieve by sneak attack.  Korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will and the endurance to match the communist effort to overthrow international order through local aggression.

It has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and human suffering, but it has made it plain that the free nations will fight side by side, that they will not succumb to aggression or intimidation, one by one.  This, in the final analysis, is the only way to halt the communist drive to world power.

At the heart of the free world’s defense is the military strength of the United States.

From 1945 to 1949, the United States was sole possessor of the atomic bomb.  That was a great deterrent and protection in itself.