New Habits of Thought

President Eisenhower's NATO speech this week was drafted to offer a code within which NATO can live--and at the same time to present a challenge that NATO must meet if it hopes to live. Its gist:

We who inherit and share the humane and religious culture of Europe must examine our collective conscience to determine if we are doing our best to meet the grave threat to our free institutions. I believe that we must rid ourselves of certain false habits of thought of which we have all been more or less guilty.

Principal among current misconceptions: 1) the free economic system is inherently more productive in all fields than the despotic system; 2) time is always on the side of the West--irrespective of how the West wastes its time; 3) merely because of abstract virtue the triumph of freedom over totalitarianism is inevitable.

Not so--and far from so. From its inception, NATO has stood for peace, not in the sense of open war delayed by a standoff in the arms race, but in the sense of peace achieved through an expanding state of justice and understanding. In contrast, the Soviet system imposes upon the great mass of its workers a harsh, menacing discipline which drives blindly but inevitably toward concentration on new weapons, including missiles and atomic warheads. The Communists have also enlarged their industrial capacity and dared the West to a world economic contest.

Against that dare stands NATO, with its 15 nations and its 500 million people, whose per capita industrial productivity is about three times that of the Soviet Union. For NATO, with all its material and moral resources, to give way before a power long-sworn to world conquest would be unthinkable. Freedom has not failed NATO, and NATO, by striving and sacrifice, must not fail freedom.

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