The Secretary of State, in his September 4th statement, referred to these Geneva negotiations.  Two days later, Mr. Chou En-lai, the Premier of the People’s Republic of China, proposed that these talks should be resumed “in the interests of peace.”  This was followed up on September 8th by Mr. Mao Tse-tung, the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.  We promptly welcomed this prospect and instructed our Ambassador at Warsaw to be ready immediately to resume these talks.  We expect that the talks will begin upon the return to Warsaw of the Chinese Communist Ambassador, who has been in Peiping.

Perhaps our suggestion may be bearing fruit.  We devoutly hope so.

Naturally, the United States will adhere to the position it first took in 1955, that we will not in these talks be a party to any arrangements which would prejudice rights of our ally, the Republic of China.

We know by hard experiences that the Chinese Communist leaders are indeed militant and aggressive.  But we cannot believe that they would now persist in a course of military aggression which would threaten world peace, with all that would be involved.  We believe that diplomacy can and should find a way out.  There are measures that can be taken to assure that these offshore islands will not be a thorn in the side of peace.  We believe that arrangements are urgently required to stop gunfire and to pave the way to a peaceful solution.

If the bilateral talks between Ambassadors do not fully succeed, there is still the hope that the United Nations could exert a peaceful influence on the situation.

In 1955 the hostilities of the Chinese Communists in the Formosa area were brought before the United Nations Security Council.  But the Chinese Communists rejected its jurisdiction.  They said that they were entitled to Formosa and the offshore islands and that, if they used armed force to get them, that was purely a “civil war” and that the United Nations had no right to concern itself.

They claimed also that the attack by the Communist north Koreans on south Korea was “civil war,” and that the United Nations and the United States were “aggressors” because they helped south Korea.  They said the same about their attack on Viet-Nam.

I feel sure that these pretexts will never deceive or control world opinion.  The fact is that Communist Chinese hostilities in the Formosa Straits area do endanger world peace.  I do not believe that any rulers, however aggressive they may be, will flout efforts to find a peaceful and honorable solution, whether it be by direct negotiations or through the United Nations.

My friends, we are confronted with a serious situation.  But it is typical of the security problems of the world today.  Powerful and aggressive forces are constantly probing, now here, now there, to see whether the free world is weakening.  In the face of this there are no easy choices available.  It is misleading for anyone to imply that there are.