The Changing Character of the Challenge

I was invited to speak here as an individual prior to my joining the State Department Policy Planning Council, a body whose task is to think about the future. This is inherently a speculative and contingent undertaking which ranges beyond the limits of established policy. We on the Council are not executors of United States policy. It is scarcely necessary to add, then, that the views I express here are my own. Before discussing more specifically the relationship between the United States and the eastern half of Europe, let me begin by outlining what, in my opinion, are some of the more fundamental assumptions that guide United States' thinking about international affairs. It is our fundamental belief that in our age we must seek to construct a world of co-operative communities. These communities need not be of one mould; there is no single prescription for them. Some may reflect similarities in development and in ways of life; some may be regionalothers may cut across regional boundaries. But the basic point is that today the profoundest problems we face are too great for the nation-state, the traditional unit of international affairs, to handle. This does not mean that the nation-state has outlived its usefulness or that we seek to create a world of supranational political cartels. The nation-state will, for a very long time, remain the primary focus of civic loyalty, the basic source of historical and cultural diversity, and the prime force for mobilizing the individual's commitment. Unlike the past, however, today the world needs more than the nation-state to organize global peace, to promote global welfare, to diffuse globally the fruits of science and technology. All of these things can be done more effectively and more rationally if nation-states co-operate with one another in the setting of larger communitiesof

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