To Meet the Challenge

Abstract

WHEN WE FIRST MET in New York in the summer of 1972 to charter what has now become the Trilateral Commission, we were motivated by our common perception of the importance of expanding communication and consultation among the countries of Western Europe, North America, and Japan-countries that share many common values and commitments to freedom, democracy, and an open world economy. Although we did not intend that the Commission would be an actor in any ideological struggles with the Soviet Union or other communist countries, we nevertheless perceived that the values and common interests that brought us together were not shared by them. We sought to have an open forum for free discussion among private citizens in which we could air our differences with confidence that, in the final analysis, we sought the same basic goals. The distance between the Trilateral countries on the one hand and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other is not narrower now than it was in 1972. Although there have been times during the past decade when we thought we saw signs of improving relations, by the end of the decade it became apparent that the gap, if anything, had grown wider. While we should by no means abandon the effort to seek an improved dialogue across the gap, we feel today that the need is greater for us to close ranks in our endeavor to strengthen what I may call an of common values in order to defend freedom and democracy against the challenges arising out of the most recent world developments. I am using alliance not in a narrow military sense but in a much broader context to mean the network of cooperative relationships among the industrialized democracies for their threefold common objectives: