The thing is the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements — all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.
…there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence — 1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous. (He included 450,000,000 Chinese in this number.)
It was the vision of a world in which Britain’s and France’s struggle to recover their empires would be a bigger problem for U.S. foreign policy than Stalin’s Soviet Union.