"KEEP THE FREE WORLD BIG"

A crucial point in the current debate about Asia is what to do about reluctant allies--give in to them, try to win them over, or if need be, go it alone. Last week, in a commencement speech at Georgetown University, Ambassador Warren Austin, U.S. Representative to the U.N., and a Republican, made the case for allies. Excerpts:

SOME say our strategic frontier lies along an island chain, or on a river's bank. I say our strategic frontier lies where aggression threatens liberty.

We have not the capability of imposing a pax Americana upon the world. More important, we have not the desire. Our motive is neither to impose our will upon the world, nor to turn our backs upon it and retreat to our own frontiers. Either course would be folly. Either course would strip us of friends and allies at the moment in American history when, more than any other, we need friends and allies. Our aim is to keep the free world big. There are practical and hardheaded reasons for this. Nearly twice as many people inhabit non-Soviet Europe as inhabit the United States; and they can produce nearly as much steel a year as we can. Quite aside from any considerations of the human spirit, these are adequate reasons for us to hold to our aim of strengthening the free world and keeping it big.

We deliberately chose the United Nations way. By another act of choice, we could choose to go it alone. But we'd better count the cost, and choose with our eyes open, not in a blindness of irritation because not every country in the free world always agrees with every one of our policies. Countries do differ, as men and women sometimes do. Differences do not mean divorce, when the great ends of policy are still held in common.

We are now in the pioneer days of collective security. In Korea, we are testing a theory: that aggression by a great power can be met locally without expanding into general war. This theory is fundamental to the United Nations. It grew out of the experience of the 1930s, which seemed to teach men that they had better use the courage to fight local wars so that they would not have to fight world wars. We cannot, of course, control the acts of aggressors. Let us make sure that history keeps the blame on them for acts which would turn a limited war into a general war.

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