The World Around Us

DR. PHIMISTER: Re-appointment of His Excellency, Livingston T. Merchant, one of the top Career Diplomats in the Department of State, as United States Ambassador to Canada, underscores the importance of AmericanCanadian relations to President Kennedy's administration.

President Kennedy announced one year ago that Ambassador Merchant, who had served as Ambassador to Canada from 1956 to 1958, was his choice for the Ottawa post. Before returning to Canada as Ambassador, he served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the third highest post in the State Department. He is one of the few men in the U.S. Foreign Service who holds the rank of Career Ambassador.

Our guest speaker today is a Princeton Graduate and an Investment Counsellor who was called into Government service the day Pearl Harbour was attacked. Since then he has taken part in many of the great policy discussions of the Cold War. To list the conferences at which he has represented his country, and to enumerate the responsible roles he has filled in his country's service, would take more time than is at our disposal today. A newspaper man has described our guest as "a blunt, likeable, efficient man who sometimes seems to be criticizing Canada and the U.S. with equal vigour."

During his first term here, Mr. Merchant travelled 80,000 miles by air, foot, rail and auto, to meet Canadians in all walks of life and, it is reported, he is planning to travel again as he used to do.

I am told that Ambassador Merchant has a deep conviction that U.S. relations with Canada are more important than U.S. relations with any other country. This is something with which Canadians are likely to agree. Canadians and Americans, living side by side together on the North American continent, share many of the same ideals and look upon many of the problems of the world through the same eyes. Hence it is appropriate that His Excellency has chosen to speak to us today on the subject, "The World Around Us." Gentlemen, His Excellency, Livingston T. Merchant.

MR. MERCHANT: I chose my title for today-"The World Around Us"-because it seems to me that occasionally it is not only useful but necessary to stand back and take a look at what is happening around us. This is true of nations and governments as well as individuals. It is natural that everyone is preoccupied most of the time with his own personal or, in the case of a government, its own domestic affairs. The children would not get off to school and dinners would not be cooked and the wheels of business and finance would not turn nor, in fact, would governments operate at all if unremitting attention were not paid to the complex, absorbing responsibilities of earning a living, raising a family, running a city, a province or a country.

We all know form reading the daily papers, from TV and the radio that there is an even more complex and certainly more dangerous outer world which affects our future and, indeed, can radically alter our daily occupation. Everyone who has stepped on a jet aircraft knows that the world around us has been sensationally compressed in terms of ratio of time to distance. When a wall goes up in Berlin or a Dag Hammarskjold dies in the heart of the Congo, or the Communist guerrillas step up the weight of their attacks in free Viet-Nam, or Castro builds Cuba into an armed Communist-controlled camp, results and consequences flow which can affect us all.

It is perhaps harder for North Americans than for Europeans, or even Asians for that matter, fully to appreciate the significance of the changes which have occurred in the lifetime of those in this room. Two broad oceans gave both Canadians and the people of the United States, for long decades, a sense of fundamental security and detachment from a world which from time to time seemed dangerously disordered. I think Canada's close ties with Britain-the bonds of Empire and then the Commonwealth-and Canada's participation from the very outset in two World Wars probably gave to you in this country an earlier and better perspective and less of an inclination to build a foreign policy on isolation. We in my country, however, have come a long way in the last twenty years as we learned in Donne's words that "No man is an island, entire of itself." And then, to underline the interdependence of all men, the poet goes on to say: ". . . therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

We accept interdependence today. We accept it not in substitution for independence but in the knowledge that only by an acknowledgment of interdependence can any country, which desires to remain free, insure, in fact, its own independence. I am certainly safe in saying that changes in the world around us have been great and have in turn enforced changes not only in our attitudes and outlook but in our national policies. Nevertheless, the rate of change in science, in war-making potential, in economic relationships and institutions, in the number of new nations, in the break-up of great empires and the rise of new ones-less benevolent than the old empires, if I may permit myself an understatement-compel us, as I said a moment ago, to step back and look at the world environment in which we live if we, as individuals and countries, are to understand the dangers and the opportunities that lie ahead.

Count for a moment some of the things that have happened in the past five years. It was in 1957 that the Soviets launched into orbit the first Sputnik. Today there are 36 man-made, instrument-laden capsules circling the earth, 33 of them launched by the United States. They are marvels of miniaturization of scientific instruments, most of which were not even dreamed of twenty years ago and all of them so progressively developed as to bear no genuine resemblance to prototypes of even five years ago. Men have already been placed in orbit and safely returned to the earth. The exploration of outer space by men in fligth is just around the corner.

These scientific achievements have already demonstrated an important peaceful utility in such fields as communications, meteorology and navigational aids. They have also provided ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads capable of being placed with great accuracy on targets thousands of miles distant from the launch pad, or, in the case of the Polaris submarine-incidentally, a product of almost fantastic imagination combined with scientific, engineering and organization effort-ballistic missiles can be launched from the depths of the sea. In medicine, giant forward strides have been equally impresive. In our countries, polio has been virtually eliminated by Salk, as tuberculosis and diphtheria in our own lifetime have been similarly removed from the list of the great killers.

There is a new industrial revolution underway with the development of automation and electronic computers. Just as a hundred years or so ago the first industrial revolution substituted steam and then electricity for the power of men's and animal's backs and legs, so today in an acceleration of that revolution, banks of machines and pieces of automatic machinery under electronic control are substituting in part for the human brain. It is literally true that man has in sight the conquest of the problem of scarcity in the production not merely of necessities but of luxuries as well.

Agriculture is the beneficiary of a comparable revolutionary process. In my country we are all familiar with the figures showing that 140 years ago one farmer fed himself and three others, whereas today one farmer feeds himself and 25 others. In the last ten years the productivity per farmer in the United States has doubled. Incidentally, a farmer in the Soviet Union today produces enough food for himself and five others. One wonders whether it is a source of satisfaction to Soviet leaders that Communist efficiency has permitted the Soviet farmer of 1960 finally to reach and even slightly exceed the standard we set in about 1820.

Communications in all forms have similarly been affected by the scientific revolution. Today we take TV for granted as thirty years ago we were just beginning to take radio for granted. We hurtle cargo and human beings on scheduled flights around the world at sonic speeds. Last summer I took a jet from Dorval Airport at Montreal and stepped off the plane in Orly Field at Paris less than six hours later. Last fall, I climbed on a Comet jet at Karachi which had originated its flight at Sydney and we arrived in London fifteen hours later, ten minutes behind schedule, to the intense chagrin of the aircraft commander and his crew.

Man is bringing his burgeoning scientific knowledge to almost any field one can name. The Arctic regions are being opened up. Canada's experience and study in these climates is adding notably to the store of man's knowledge and to the future utilization of spaces on this earth which since the beginning of time have been considered uninhabitable and economically unexploitable. Antarcticathe last unexplored, uninhabited continent on this planet -is being studied, criss-crossed by aircraft and teams of scientists under the impulse of the international effort launched several years ago for the International Geophysical Year.

The pressures that come from the expanding frontiers of man's scientific knowledge are clear enough. And I suppose this is not surprising when one realizes that 90% of all the trained scientists which the entire world has produced since Aristotle are today alive and in their creative prime, working in laboratories such as Newton never dreamed of, and with funds, counting governmental subsidies and industrial budgets, running into billions of dollars a year. These pressures, man-made, are encountering a resistant front, also man-made. That resistant front is man's institutions, social, educational, economic and political.

The Community of Six in Europe and the pull it exerts on Britain to join is, it seems to me, a reflection of an adjustment in man-made institutions to man-made changes. Another great political institution, the United Nations, reflects the strains and pressures of rapid change in its environment. Change is exerting its influence on traditional procedures and precedents by the multiplication of nation states. Five years ago there were seventy members of the United Nations. Today there are 104. Despite frustrations and disappointments that it will bring us from time to time, we must never cease our efforts to increase its effectiveness as an instrument for peace.

What I have already said and what I have implied constitute the challenge and the opportunity for all of us. This challenge and opportunity is equally matched by danger. We must understand this danger if we are to deal with it succesfully and realize the vista which science has opened up. In a world at peace, with sensibly accepted procedures for achieving political changes by peaceful measures, with a rule of law which recognizes the rights and dignity of individual men everywhere, with men's institutions accommodated to the twentieth century and looking toward the twenty-first, and with hard work and self-discipline, the world literally has it in its power to banish poverty and disease and to create societies in which the creative genius. of man can find its full scope.

What prevents this dream becoming an immediate reality, a reality toward which all peoples and all governments on the earth can work co-operatively to create? The answer lies in the present policies of the Sino-Soviet bloc of two great powers and eleven satellites. The contribution which China has made over the centuries to the world's culture and Russia's great achievements in science and technology demonstrate what the genius of those two peoples could contribute to a world-wide effort to fashion the sort of world I have sketched. Tragically, under their present doctrine and leaders, they are quite outspokenly and frankly more interested in dominating the world, even at the risk of destroying it.

Mr. Khrushchev said not long ago, "We will bury you." It would be a deadly mistake not to believe that to be his intention. Mr. Robert Lovett, a great public servant in my country, who held high office under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, said not many months ago: "If the public statement 'We will bury you' does not carry the message to us, then words have lost their meaning. Attempts to explain this blunt warning of intention by calling it jovial or by saying it does not mean a military funeral, but just a little economic one, is a form of jocularity too close to the jugular to lighten my heart."

Mr. Khrushchev expressed this thought earthily. It caught the headlines and then was forgotten by most. This thought, however, has been insistently and elaborately and repeatedly expounded publicly. Mr. Khrushchev discussed lengthily the question of war in his report of January 6, 1961, on the Moscow Conference of World Communist Leaders. He spoke of the need of preventing large-scale or all-out war and also local wars. But what he says about "national liberation wars" is enlightening. Mr. Khrushchev cites Viet-Nam, Algeria and Cuba as examples of "national liberation wars," but he does not mention Hungary. He has this to say:

What is the attitude of the Marxists toward such uprisings? A most positive one. These uprisings must not be identified with wars among states, with local wars, since in these uprisings the people are fighting for implementation of their right for self-determination, for independent social and national development. These are uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against the colonizers. The Communists fully support such just wars, and march in the front rank with the peoples waging liberation struggles.

For those who have taken comfort from Communist propaganda calling for "peaceful coexistence," we should examine carefully what this term means to the leadership of the Soviet Union. Again I quote Mr. Khrushchev from his same definitive speech:

The policy of peaceful coexistence promotes the growth of the forces of progress, of the forces fighting for socialism; in the capitalist countries it facilitates the work of the Communist parties and the other progressive organizations of the working class, makes it easier for the peoples to combat the aggressive war blocs and foreign military bases, and contributes to the success of the national-liberation movement.

The policy of peaceful coexistence is, then, as far as its social content is concerned, a form of intense economic and ideological struggle between the proletariat and the aggressive forces of imperialism m the world arena.

I am sure each of you knows that the Communists use upside down language. For example, in the quotation of Mr. Khrushchev which I have just read, when he says "socialism" he means "Communism."

"Capitalist countries" include Norway and Sweden, for example, since the term is all-inclusive for non-Communist countries, however remote their systems are to "capitalism" in the Marxian sense; "progressive organizations of the working class" mean Communist-controlled labor unions; "aggressive war blocs" means NATO; and "foreign military bases" mean NATO bases for our collective defense in NATO countries.

We should not forget that by Mr. Khrushchev's definition everyone in this room is a member of "the aggressive forces of imperialism." The fact that we have not the slightest aggressive intent, that we are quite obviously banded together in NATO for purely defensive purposes, that neither Canada nor the United States has any colony or any territorial ambition, does not affect in the slightest our being placed by the Communists, for reasons of doctrine, in the category of "the aggressive forces of imperialism." Lest anyone say Mr. Khrushchev is given to overstatement or that Mr. Khrushchev is an impetuous character who gets carried away when speaking to an enthusiastic audience, or that the doctrine he enunciates is something new or temporary, designed for tactical purposes to put us in a properly compliant mood to accept his terms for a treaty on the suspension of nuclear tests, for example, let me go back 40 years to the early days of the Soviet Union when Lenin was its leader and spokesman. It is important to remember that from the day in 1917 that the Bolsheviks seized effective power in Russia, later signing the Treaty of Brest Litovsk with Germany, and taking Russia out of the war, the hostility of the Soviet regime toward the governments of the West has been unremitting. As Mr. George F. Kennan, one of the great living authorities on Russia, has pointed out in his book Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, the foreign relations of Moscow with the governments of the free world have made a mockery of the entire western theory of international relationships. Such relationships among the nations of Western Europe and this hemisphere recognize sovereign equality and the principle of live and let live. Mr. Kennan points out that this did not

eliminate wars and struggle over limited objectives; but it did mean as a general rule, that once another state had been recognized as a sovereign entity, one did not attempt to extinguish it entirely, or to deny it the basic right to order its own internal affairs in accordance with its own traditions and ideas. It was this theory that the Bolsheviks challenged on their assumption of power in Russia. They challenged it by the universality of their own ideological pretensions -by the claim, that is-to an unlimited universal validity of their own ideas as to how society ought to be socially and politically organized. They challenged it by their insistence that the laws governing the operation of human society demanded the violent overthrow everywhere of governments which did not accept the ideological tenets of Russian Communism, and the replacement of these governments by ones that did. The Soviet leaders, let us remember, professed it their duty and that of all right-minded followers to exert themselves to the utmost to bring about these political changes.

This attitude and this concept of the relation of the Soviet Union to all non-Communist states flows ineluctably from the policies laid down by Lenin who remains the authority on Communism unchallenged by any living Soviet leader. In 1917 Lenin said, There is one and only one kind of internationalism in deed, working wholeheartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy and material aid) such and only such a struggle and such a line in every country without exception.

In 1920 he spoke frankly of the general form of government under which both Canada and the United States live. His words are:

Communism rejects parliamentarianism as the form of the future society; it rejects it as a form of the class dictatorship of the proletariat; it rejects the possibility of the protracted process of winning over parliaments; it pursues the aim of destroying them.

This fundamental hostility quite naturally enabled L. B. Kamenev to say in March, 1921, the day before the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed, "We are convinced ... that the foreign capitalists, who will be obliged to work on the terms we offer them, will dig their own grave. . . ."

The consistency of this basic and implacable attitude on the part of the U.S.S.R. toward free governments of free nations follows consistently in all relations through the Twenties, the Thirties, with something of a truce during World War II, but even more nakedly in the postwar period, down to the present day.

You Canadians will particularly recall the revelations of the Royal Commission in the Gouzenko case in 1947. We have seen similar evidence of the activities of Communist agents in my country, in Britain and in others of our NATO allies. Mr. Khrushchev was laconic, but beyond question honest of intention, when he said "We will bury you." This is the reality. We can only at our deadly peril pretend that it does not exist or that if we ignore it it will go away. It is useful to recall that in the mid-Thirties most of us failed to believe Hitler when he discussed with great frankness and in full detail in Mein Kampf the blueprint for his conquests. This then is the danger which matches the glorious possibilities of the future, unless we are prepared by inadvertence or by conscious choice to take our chances on participating in that future under the Kremlin's domination.

I am quite sure that this will not be Canada's choice, as I know that it will never be the choice of my own country. The greatest risk, it seems to me, is that of slipping toward surrender by inadvertence; of saying, for example, "Is it worthwhile being atomized for West Berlin and a little later for West Germany and then for all of Western Europe?" Or, "Let others carry the burden of our collective defense." Or, "Let someone else provide aid to fragile, expectant, new governments in less developed areas." Or indulging in the luxury of internecine quarrels. Or in falling into the fallacy of believing that the road to peace is to offer more concessions every time the Soviets reject an honest offer and stand rigidly on their original demands.

This trend of thought leads inevitably to the questioncan war be avoided? I am convinced it can. I equally believe, however, that we will have to keep on doing with more energy and the devotion of more resources the difficult, inconvenient and expensive things we are doing now. And this is really why at the outset I suggested that it is necessary from time to time to step back and take a detached look at the world around us.

I believe that, just as the winds of change are blowing in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia, and in Western Europe, there are at least symptomatic breezes behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains in the Sino-Soviet empire. Signs can be read, for example, that all is not perfect harmony in the relations between the Russians and the Chinese. The bonds of mutual interest, however, are strong between them, and it would be a great mistake to assume that those bonds are in process of rapid dissolution.

But if we keep on doing faithfully and well what I am about to suggest, then I believe that 10, 20 or 30 years form now there will come changes in the internal and external attitudes of the Russian, the Chinese, and the satellite leaders and in the attitudes of their peoples which will make peaceful coexistence a genuine condition and not the hoax or the fraud which it is intended to be today. What are these things that we must keep on doing? First, it seems to me, that to reduce the risk of war by miscalculation on the part of any potential aggressor, we must keep our collective defenses manned and modern. No doubt this will involve an increase in expenditures in order simultaneously to strengthen and modernize our conventional forces and to ensure that the deterrent, which is represented by our capability for nuclear retaliation, is properly protected against surprise attack. In the matter of defence, we should not overlook the fact that one of the key elements in any adversary's assessment of the effectivenes of our deterrent is the state of the resolution and will of the North Atlantic Alliance. A unit based on lip service to a common purpose is not enough. There must also be increasingly intimate and continuous consultation among all members of the Alliance in order to ensure that our assessments and policies are developed in common.

Secondly, we must pursue every reasonable opportunity for negotiation with the Soviets of the differences between us as we have been doing in Geneva on the Laotian question and as we may in the weeks ahead be doing on the Berlin question. The only important proviso is that such talks must be held in an atmosphere free from threat or duress. In particular we must continue to devote our energies and our patience to the effort to achieve safeguarded disarmament and the concurrent development of peacekeeping machinery. We must not permit ourselves to be discouaged by the long, frustrating and sad history of our efforts to negotiate a treaty for the suspension of nuclear tests.

Next, we must make sure that our social, our economic and our political institutions adapt themselves to the times of change in which we live and reflect the vitality and the aspirations of free people. If we are successful in this, we will attract to our example the undecided, convince the skeptics, and confound those who wish us and all our works ill. From enlightened self-interest, as well as the impulse of generosity, which is strong in both our peoples, we must expand economic aid and technical assistance to the less developed areas in the non-Communist world. Likewise we should move as rapidly as practicalities permit to the removal of trade barriers and the liberalization of commercial policy.

Finally, we should reflect with pride on what our two nations have achieved on this continent in the past 300 years. We are separate nations, each distinctive in its own way. We face today a common challenge and a common opportunity. From our past we can draw our courage for the present and the capacity to realize our opportunities for the future. It will take increased effort on the part of both of us.

President Kennedy recently said that all the elements in the foreign policy of the United States lead to a single goal--the goal of a peaceful world of free and independent states. I think Canadians likewise would agree that all the elements in Canadian foreign policy are similarly designed to lead to that same goal. The President went on to say,

This is our guide for the present and our vision for the future-a free community of nations, independent but interdependent, uniting North and South, East and West, in one great family of man, outgrowing and transcending the hates and fears that rend our age.

We will not reach that goal today, or tomorrow. We may not reach it in our own lifetime. But the quest is the greatest adventure of the century. We sometimes chafe at the burden of our obligations, the complexity of our decisions, the agony of our choices. But there is no comfort in evasion, no solution in abdication, no relief in irresponsibility.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. Douglas W. Best.