Bill Clinton: “Mr. Secretary General, leaders of NATO, other distinguished foreign guests, my fellow Americans. It is a profound honor…”

“Mr. Secretary General, leaders of NATO, other distinguished foreign guests, my fellow Americans. It is a profound honor for the United States to welcome NATO back to Washington for its 50th anniversary, an occasion to honor NATO's past, to reaffirm its present mission in Kosovo, to envision its future. In 1949, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, the American novelist William Faulkner acknowledged the fear of nuclear holocaust that then gripped the world. But he declared firmly that humanity will not merely endure, it will prevail. In that same year, 12 nations came here to pledge to vindicate that faith. They were North Americans and Europeans determined to build a new Europe on the ruins of the old through a mutual commitment to each other's security and freedom. In this auditorium, the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, said that NATO's fundamental aim was not to win a war that would, after all, leave Europe ravaged but to avoid such a war, and I quote, ``by becoming, together, strong enough to safeguard the peace.'' He was right. No member of NATO has ever been called upon to fire a shot in anger to defend an ally from attack. The American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, said that NATO would ``free the minds of men in many nations from a haunting sense of insecurity and enable them to work and plan with confidence in the future.'' And he was right. NATO bought time for the Marshall plan.…”