of American power.
Nothing however has shown more clearly than
the latest crisis in the Middle East that such talk can be
misleading. It is the United States which has once again taken
on the leadership of the Western response and we are once again
all
in debt to American courage and American strength for the
firmness of that response. It is however true that while the United States has continued to grow in wealth and power, we in
Europe and you in Japan have also both recovered from the
devastation of war. It would be quite wrong for us to leave the
United States to shoulder the whole burden of defending our
collective interests. That is why British aircraft and ships
have joined the Americans in the Middle East and why Japan has
contributed
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That is also why there
is need for better mechanisms of
consultation involving the United States, Europe and Japan. We
in Britain have been making efforts to build such concertation
into something regular and effective.
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The second general point is that our success has been based on
allowing tbs people to choose, both in politics and in economics.
It is the ability of people to choose their government freely in
the political sphere and to choose freely what to buy in the
economic sphere which has given our societies their dynamism.
That has at last been recognised among the communist countries
of Europe and to some extent in other regions of the world. It
is now essential for us to encourage these moves. The European
Community, as the world's largest trading bloc and as a group
of countries committed to democracy, has a special responsibility
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