The World and Everything in It: April 3, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. My name is Diane Ippolito and I live in beautiful central Pennsylvania with my husband Steve and our therapy dog Hope. I serve as the state coordinator for Moms in Prayer International, an organization that impacts children and schools worldwide for Christ by gathering mothers to pray. I use what I learn in the World and Everything In It to inform my prayers. I hope you enjoy today’s program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! 

The Navajo Nation battles for water rights to the Colorado River.

SHAY DVORETZKY: Both parties understood that in promising the Navajos their land, the United States was also promising them the water it needed to sustain life in the arid southwest.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Money Beat: more listener questions, economist David Bahnsen will be along for our regular visit.

Plus the World History Book. Today a notable speech from 70 years ago.

DWIGHT EISENHOWER: This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

RICHARD: It’s Monday, April 3rd. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time now for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump » Former President Donald Trump is expected to be arraigned in Manhattan tomorrow.

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina says the sooner, the better.

JOE TACOPINA: We’re ready for this fight, and I look forward to moving this thing along as quickly as possible to exonerate him.

The Secret Service will follow Trump as his fingerprints and mugshot are taken. He is not expected to be handcuffed.

Trump plans to return to Florida after the arraignment and will deliver remarks tomorrow night from his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy reacted on Sunday:

BILL CASSIDY: No one should be above the law, but no one should be a target of the law. As Bill Barr has said, this is less about the crime and more about the target.

Trump insists he committed no crime. The indictment is believed to stem from payments he allegedly made to silence reports about extramarital affairs.

Asa Hutchinson running for president » Meantime, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is calling on Trump to drop out of the race, just as Hutchinson jumps in.

He told ABC’s This Week, the Trump’s indictment creates—in his words—“too much of a sideshow and distraction,” and that he intends to provide voters with another Trump alternative.

ASA HUTCHINSON: I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America and not simply appeal to our worst instincts.

Hutchinson recently completed two terms as governor.

He joins a Republican field that also includes former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

 Tornadoes/weather » Deadly tornadoes tore through the United States over the weekend,  killing at least 32 people from the South to the Northeast.

An EF-3 tornado ripped apart portions of Little Rock.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin:

TIM GRIFFIN: Any loss of life is horrible. But we’re fortunate that it was not many, many, many more, because there are indeed complete neighborhoods devastated.

At least 5 people were killed in Arkansas.

Meantime, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has declared a state of emergency in his state… where severe weather has killed at least 5 people.

J.B. PRITZKER - This will facilitate the delivery of resources to these communities, those who have been affected. I've also spoken with the federal FEMA Director and the Secretary of Homeland Security in Washington in pursuit of additional federal resources.

Tornadoes were suspected or confirmed in at least 11 states.

Six killed in shelling in Ukraine / new US aid announced for Ukraine » In Ukraine, at least six people are dead in the eastern Donetsk region, after more Russian shelling on Sunday.

MAN: [Speaking Ukrainian]

One resident describing the damage to his home, said a nearby blast shattered his windows and blew doors off their hinges.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: [Speaking Ukrainian]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced the attacks, saying the dead were civilians.

Meanwhile U.S. officials are expected to announce a new aid package to Ukraine this week with $2.6 billion dollars worth of weapons to include radar systems, anti-tank rockets, and fuel trucks.

Blinken calls on Russia to release detained Americans » U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is calling on Russia to release two detained Americans immediately. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: In a rare phone call Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Blinken demanded the release of former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Whelan is currently serving a 16-year sentence for espionage.

Russian authorities arrested Gershkovich last week, saying he was caught spying on one of the country’s military facilities. The U.S. says the accusations against both Americans are baseless.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Border detention » Law enforcement officers in Texas found dozens of illegal immigrants packed inside a Penske moving truck near the Mexican border over the weekend.

Department of Public Safety officers safely removed 58 migrants from the truck during a traffic stop. All were from Mexico and Central America.The driver now faces federal human smuggling charges.

Meantime, in Eagle Pass, Texas, one resident says she sees people crossing the border near her house daily.

MAN: There’s some people coming for the benefit of the good, but then there’s some that come for the bad. And it’s just—those moments of walking out of your home, do you feel safe or not?

Also over the weekend, DPS also found 36 migrants hiding in a cave in Culberson County, Texas.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Whether the federal government is doing enough to protect the water rights of Native Americans.

Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday, April 3rd. So glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Just one opinion handed down by the US Supreme Court last week. I say “just” because the court’s heard 49 arguments so far this term, with only nine decisions having been handed down. Which is a much-slower pace compared to the recent past.

So it means we’ll have a slew of opinions soon.

EICHER: Okay, well, let’s talk about that one opinion we do have in Wilkins v United States. It’s a 6-3 victory for two landowners in Montana who sued the federal government.

They’d lived in peace for years under an easement owned by the government. That allowed loggers and ranchers to cross over their property to access a nearby forest.

But when the U.S. Forest Service opened the road up to the public, well, along with it came traffic, noise, and crime.

REICHARD: No more peace and quiet. So the landowners sued the government under the appropriately named Quiet Title Act.

The government argued they were too late to sue, per language in the law giving only twelve years to file suit. That time had already come and gone.

In this comment last fall during oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts gave a clue as to the outcome:

JUSTICE ROBERTS: The people across the street are on clear notice that they’ve really got to spell it out if they want one of these time limits to be jurisdictional.

EICHER: The street he’s talking about is First Street Northeast, the street that separates the Supreme Court building from the Capitol building. So he’s putting his neighbor Congress on notice.

And as for time limits, he’s talking about two of them: one that’s “jurisdictional,” which you cannot waive, and one that’s a “claim processing rule” that you can.

Congress didn’t say which, so the default position says this is the kind of time limitation that can be waived.

The landowners may now proceed with their lawsuit, despite having filed after the twelve-year limit.

REICHARD: Now for our single oral argument of the day: two disputes consolidated into one with the caption Arizona v Navajo Nation.

On one side, the federally recognized Indian Tribe, the Nav60ajo.

On the other side, the US Department of the Interior, along with several states: Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.

At one level, this is a dispute over water. As in, how to allocate the water in the Colorado River basin among competing groups.

On behalf of the Navajo Nation, attorney Shay Dvoretzky reviewed some history:

SHAY DVORETZKY: The Senate ratified two treaties with the Navajo Nation. In the 1868 treaty, the United States promised the Navajos a permanent homeland. Both parties understood that in promising the Navajos their land, the United States was also promising them the water it needed to sustain life in the arid southwest. Those treaties are specific sources of law that give the Nation rights to water and impose duties on the government to secure that water. But, for years, the United States has failed to fulfill that promise.

EICHER: Dvoretzky went on to say that the Navajo reservation is about the size of the state of West Virginia, with a population of 170-thousand, and the average person uses just seven gallons of water a day. The national average is 80-100 gallons.

DVORETZKY: The United States agrees that, on paper, the Nation has treaty rights to the water its people need. We're here because the United States says it doesn't have to do anything to secure the water it promised, even though the United States also says it speaks for the Navajos as trustee of the Nation's water rights.

And even though the main stem of the Colorado River isn’t mentioned in the treaties, the tribe argues the federal government is still obligated to protect its water rights from that source.

But the federal government says it has protected the Navajo water rights by way of tributaries of the Colorado River. Lawyer Frederick Liu:

FREDERICK LIU: When a reservation is established, that reservation isn't just the land. It's also a right to the timber on the land, a right to the minerals below the surface, and, under Winters, a right to water for the reservation. Each of those rights is a stick in the bundle that makes up the reservation, and when the Navajo Reservation was originally established and later expanded, the Navajo Nation got all of those sticks, and it still possesses them today. There's no dispute about that.

REICHARD: But there is a dispute about what the United States owes the Navajo Nation. Attorney Liu goes on:

LIU: The dispute here is about something different, whether the United States owes the Navajo Nation a judicially enforceable affirmative duty to assess the tribe's water needs, develop a plan to meet them, and then carry out that plan by building water supply infrastructure on the reservation. The answer to that question is no.

Because, he argued, managing Navajo water rights is very different from unmanaged rights to the water itself. Responsibility for infrastructure and so forth isn’t specified in any agreements.

And that’s the legal question: Does the United States have a duty to assess the Navajo’s water needs and then create a plan to meet them?

Let’s provide a little background so you can see why this is such a big deal: The Colorado River is nearly 1,500 miles long and the water in it is allocated to seven states. Millions of people depend upon it. Making matters worse, a decades-long drought reduced the river’s water by 20 percent.

EICHER: Competing needs, competing interests, and scarce resources.

So in one way, this is about water.

But in another way, it’s about what the tribe’s brief says in its opening sentence: “How did we get here, in this country, in the 21st century? Broken promises.”

Litigation over the Colorado River has been going on for years. Treaties, compacts, court opinions, you name it. Lawyers and justices referred to all of them during oral argument.

Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out treaty language that promised the Navajo a permanent homeland. He addressed Liu for the government on that point: 

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is it possible to have a permanent home, farm, and raise animals without water?

LIU: No.

GORSUCH: And could the United States dam the Little Colorado right above the reservation and prevent water from flowing into the reservation?

LIU: It could do that as a matter of fact.

GORSUCH: Well, as a matter of fact --

LIU: Right. Not legally.

GORSUCH: -- but, as a matter of law, could it do that?

LIU: No.

GORSUCH: Okay. So, clearly, there is a duty to provide some water to this tribe under the treaty, right?

LIU: No.

GORSUCH: Well, hold on. What am I missing? We just agreed you can't dam the Little Colorado because that would breach the treaty.

LIU: Right.

GORSUCH: That's water, right?

LIU: Correct.

GORSUCH: So there's some obligation with respect to water in this treaty.

REICHARD: Liu hedged, and Justice Gorsuch pressed on, not with the tribe’s breach of trust claim, but with another type of claim:

GORSUCH: If you'd just answer my question. Could I bring a good breach-of-contract claim for someone who promised me a permanent home, the right to conduct agriculture and raise animals if it turns out it's the Sahara Desert?

LIU: I don't think you would be able to bring a breach-of-contract claim.

GORSUCH: Really?

LIU: I -- I think -- I --

GORSUCH: You don't think that's a breach of good faith and fair dealing?

EICHER: Liu had quite a rough ride. Listen to Justice Sonia Sotomayor state the Navajo perspective:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: They agreed to sit to a land that would permit them to return to agriculture, and the bargain they got in return was we, the United States, took away all of your other lands, we gave you this piece of land here, survive, even if it turns into a desert condition, where you admit significant water needs on the reservation, but the tribe can’t do anything about it.

REICHARD: Well, Liu said the tribe signed treaties saying it would handle its own affairs. So it’s not for the federal government to figure out Navajo water access and infrastructure

Justice Samuel Alito asked Liu for the federal government about the practical effects if the tribe should win here.

LIU: Well, there are 500 or so tribal reservations. The government has entered into about 30 or so water agreements since the late 1970s. There's ongoing litigation in, in courts across the country. I think this would impose on the United States a sort of amorphous duty to take a -- take another look at all those issues.

REICHARD: Justice Alito probed as to the situation on the ground when the 1868 Treaty was signed:

JUSTICE ALITO: In -- in 1868, was the reservation adjacent to the Colorado River?

LIU: It was not. The 1868 reservation straddled the New Mexico-Arizona border, which is hundreds of miles away from the Lower Colorado River mainstream.

ALITO: So, if we are looking at the expectations of the treaty parties, do we look at what their expectations would have been in 1868 or at the time of the expansion of the reservation subsequently?

LIU: We look to the 1868 time frame, and in that time frame, what they were thinking about was the land set aside for the original reservation, not the land that's at issue today.

Therefore, Liu argued, there’s no going forward with the tribe’s breach of trust claim here, because the 1868 treaty said nothing about what the tribe is asking for now.

The tribe’s lawyer faced hard questions, too. Listen to this exchange with Chief Justice Roberts and lawyer Dvoretzky:

JUSTICE ROBERTS: The treaty specifically mentions a variety of things that would be necessary for agriculture, you know, the 15,000 sheep, however many cattle, the seeds. Why wasn't the water mentioned, as -- your argument now is it's necessarily implicit, but the other things were spelled out. Wouldn't you have spelled out the water at the time?

DVORETZKY: Well, the other things were spelled out with -- with numbers. They could be very specifically enumerated in that way. Water was something that was simply inherent in the permanent homeland and -- and making it suitable both as a permanent homeland and for the very purpose of agriculture.

Finally, this exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who mentioned a familiar thread in oral arguments of late:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: It's not clear you can ever get what you really want out of the court system, as we've danced around today, we should leave it to Congress. So that’s I think their theory and I just want to get your response to that?

DVORETZKY:  As a practical matter, the government says leave it to Congress, leave it to the political branches. We've been waiting half a century for the political branches to solve this problem for the Nation. It hasn't happened.

REICHARD: I won’t predict any outcome here. The justices seem divided, and not neatly ideologically. Not to mention this area of the law is a big mess. Allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses is at the root of economics, and the court probably isn’t the best place to resolve this.

But it will, at least on some narrow basis, by the end of June—even if it means dropping it on the front steps of the neighbor across the street.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen.

He’s head of the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group and he’s here now.

David, good morning!

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Okay, David, I’d like to start with a story you called my attention to last week: It has to do with the issue of political de-banking, a bank’s practice of denying payments or canceling accounts for religious or ideological reasons. And it has specifically to do with JPMorgan Chase. You, David, proposed a resolution to the board of Chase asking for an evaluation and report on the trend of what you called “politicized debanking.” Chase tried to exclude even consideration of your resolution,  and the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled against Chase and said it had to consider your resolution.

Could you talk about what led to the need for this resolution in your view and what you expect to happen next?

BAHNSEN: Well, absolutely, what caused me to bring this was this podcast, it was brought up on this very conversation, that there was some question as to what JP was doing. I've been personally a shareholder in JP Morgan, but particularly, we have a significantly large position with clients and the money that we manage at my firm. And it was certainly news to me. And there was some ambiguity about it. JP Morgan certainly doesn't admit that they do this. And so there were some stories that were a little more clean than others. But in the course of researching what exactly was going on and wanting to push back, it became clear to me that there were some areas that required explanation. And I decided that it was best to go forward, putting it on a shareholder ballot, which is something I just want to continue to emphasize, for Christians who believe the right thing to do when they get upset at a company doing something or potentially doing something that they don't like, they can always just sell or boycott or walk away. Or they can decide to actually engage the fight, and you have rights as a shareholder. So I look at saying, I don't want to own a company, because they're doing things that bother me, as akin to surrender. If one is bothered by it, I have every right as a shareholder to express that. And I don't know that I'll get what I want out of it. But all we've asked for is, as a shareholder, and I brought this proposal forward. On behalf of myself and my own interest. I'm not representing all of the many, many clients that we have, this wasn't done. From the vantage point of being an investment advisor, it was done as a shareholder. And initially, JP Morgan, it's important to note they denied my request to put it on as a resolution. But they did so not on the basis of they thought it was okay what they're doing, but denying that they were doing it, saying we don't need to put this forward because this isn't happening. We, then with legal counsel, thought back went straight to the SEC and the SEC ruled, quite surprisingly, I think to JP Morgan, that they do have to now have this on the upcoming shareholder meeting ballot. And so it is a resolution to essentially ensure equal treatment for the bank's customers that they cannot discriminate based on religious or political beliefs and and we'll see where it goes.

EICHER: Well, on that note, let’s jump to listener questions. And I wonder if you haven’t opened up a whole new vein of listener questions with your responsiveness, David.

BAHNSEN: Well, I'll get in front of that. I'll get in front of that, Nick by saying I assure you we have plenty of things in the works with other companies in my portfolio.

EICHER: Excellent, well, as I say, on to listener questions: I received an email from Victor Chen in Southern California who says he “studied finance in college” so “he’s interested in financial issues.” He writes: 

“I enjoy listening to your segment in the WORLD podcast during the week. After listening to the podcast this morning, I had two questions to ask concerning bank failures.

1. When a bank’s CEO has to publicly state that the bank is solvent, is that a clear indication that the bank is facing financial difficulties?

2. You mentioned that the acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS made the bank too big to fail. Is this term a myth? If I remember, this term was coined during the 2008 bank failure.”

BAHNSEN: Well, first of all, when the CEOs bank has to publicly state that the bank is solvent, it's not a clear indication that they're facing financial difficulties necessarily, it's certainly an indication that the bank may create financial difficulties. In other words, the whole nature of fractional reserve banking is confidence. And so if there is a competence problem that is requiring a CEO to say something like that, that vicious cycle may already be in the works. And the CEO of the bank having to say it very likely makes that confidence problem worse. And so there becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, which makes banking PR by definition very difficult. Now, as we've seen that there was not a slew of bank failures in the last three weeks after the two that went down, and the FDIC announcing depositor protection for those two, which was largely taken to mean that they weren't going to let others go down either. There were a lot of deposits withdrawn from other banks, but it seems to have calmed the waters. And fundamentally, it is true, that things that some of these banks can be okay not insolvent, until the point at which people start believing something's wrong, and then it creates the insolvency because the funding mechanism for most banks is itself the depositor capital. So it's the sort of circular nature of banking that can be very concerning.

The second question about ‘too big to fail,’ it's really important people understand what the expression means there is no question in the world UBS is too big to fail now, and that Credit Suisse was too big to fail three weeks ago, but too big to fail doesn't mean that they're so big they can't fail. It means they're so big that the regulators won't let them fail. That's all ‘too big to fail’ ever meant. And we already know this is true, we don't have to speculate they UBS was bailed out and given a lifeline by the Swiss National Bank at the financial crisis. UBS was the largest banking institution in the world, and it was dead and gone, it was insolvent as a result of the hole in its balance sheet from the bad mortgage investments of 2008. And the Swiss National Bank, the equivalent of the Fed and Switzerland kept them alive, because the downward spiral effect would have been so brutal to Switzerland, they wouldn't let it happen.

Now, with Credit Suisse circling the drain, 15 years later, they orchestrated the UBS purchase, so as to avoid letting a $530 billion bank like Credit Suisse go down the drain, providing $100 billion loan guarantee, and bypassing a shareholder vote and other things that were impediments and enabling UBS to take over Credit Suisse. Now, UBS was already a trillion dollar asset bank, They've now taken on Credit Suisse, which is 500. Both of those banks individually have already been deemed too big to fail. And I can assure you, both of them now put together as one will never be allowed to go down. But that doesn't mean that the stockholders can't be wiped out or the bondholders can't face trouble. It simply means that as an ongoing, transactional institution, regardless of the value of the equity, that collateral damage to Bank of that size, failing is too substantial. There's more I can say about what this means to US banks, but I'll leave it there.

EICHER: Our next question comes from the mission field.

MICHAEL WALTERS: Hi Nick and David. My name is Michael Walters, currently serving as a missionary in Nairobi, Kenya. My question is what happens to the U.S. debt held by China if a conflict with China were to occur? What leverage does each country have over the other, and how might that play out? Thank you.

BAHNSEN: Well, there's an old expression, the air for you owe a bank a million dollars and you can't pay it back, you're in trouble. And if you owe a bank a billion dollars, and you can't pay it back the banks in trouble. And the reality on this with China has always been so comically misunderstood by people who have thought Well, boy, China sure has a lot of leverage on us because they Oh, they hold a fair amount of our debt. It's less than 10% of the total outstanding debt but it's it was a bit Big chunk has gone down by a couple 100 billion dollars. But the US in my opinion would not default on its debt to China and contractually cannot if they were to default to China, it would be a default to other parties as well. And the damage to us would be much worse. But if there is any leverage, I think the person who owes the money has the leverage, not the person who is owed the money. And so I think the US would have the upper hand there now the argument is, yeah, but what if the US were dependent upon China to keep buying the debt, and China were to weaponize their lack of buying our debt going forward? We already have seen with Japan over the years where people used to make that argument about Japan that i don't i China is not a big enough marginal purchaser of our debt that we are dependent on them. And so the reality is that I don't think China has a significant amount of leverage than the other argument to get in front of it that some people could make as well. What if China went to the world to dump US debt? And it could cause a downward price of it? Well, I think that would be outstanding if they did that. Because if all of a sudden get the trades $1 par value $1 we're trading at 90 cents on the dollar. I would love for the US to buy back its own data at 90 cents on the dollar and save 10% So there's there's not a lot that the person owed the money can do here it's just a fact. And because they're the ones holding it to try to take the value of the debt would hurt their value in foreign exchange reserves. So I simply don't believe that China has leveraged their.Well, there's an old expression, the air for you owe a bank a million dollars and you can't pay it back, you're in trouble. And if you owe a bank a billion dollars, and you can't pay it back the banks in trouble. And the reality on this with China has always been so comically misunderstood by people who have thought Well, boy, China sure has a lot of leverage on us because they Oh, they hold a fair amount of our debt. It's less than 10% of the total outstanding debt but it's it was a bit Big chunk has gone down by a couple 100 billion dollars. But the US in my opinion would not default on its debt to China and contractually cannot if they were to default to China, it would be a default to other parties as well. And the damage to us would be much worse. But if there is any leverage, I think the person who owes the money has the leverage, not the person who is owed the money. And so I think the US would have the upper hand there.

Now the argument is, yeah, but what if the US were dependent upon China to keep buying the debt, and China were to weaponize their lack of buying our debt going forward? We already have seen with Japan over the years where people used to make that argument about Japan. China is not a big enough marginal purchaser of our debt that we are dependent on them. And so the reality is that I don't think China has a significant amount of leverage. Then the other argument to get in front of it that some people could make as well. What if China went to the world to dump US debt? And it could cause a downward price of it? Well, I think that would be outstanding if they did that. Because if all of a sudden debt that trades at $1, par value $1, were trading at 90 cents on the dollar, I would love for the US to buy back its own data at 90 cents on the dollar and save 10% .So there's there's not a lot that the person owed the money can do here - it's just a fact. And because they're the ones holding it to try to tank the value of the debt would hurt their value in foreign exchange reserves. So I simply don't believe that China has leverage there.

EICHER: Alright, send your questions to us. If you can record your question in your voice on your phone’s voice memo app and attach the file, we'll, we’d be grateful for that. The email address is feedback-at-world-and-everything-dot-com.

Thanks this week to Victor Chen and Michael Walters  and, looked this up in the meantime,  Morgan Buchek of Fairview, Texas, for raising the issue of JPMorgan Chase back in November of last year. That prompted David to take action. We’ll be following to see how that all pans out.

David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group.

David, thanks for your work.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, April 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Today, we feature a notable speech from U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.

In the years that followed World War II, the Soviet Union had dramatically increased its military strength and influence. It had its own nuclear weapons. It controlled most of Eastern Europe by force and fear. And was engaged in a cold war with its former allies—as the Korean proxy war turned into a stalemate. Many feared another world war.

EICHER: Then, on March 5th, 1953, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died—leaving a power vacuum in the USSR. General Eisenhower had just been elected president in 1952 and saw a chance to pressure the Soviet Union to consider a different future. One of peace and not conflict.

REICHARD: Although a former military leader himself, Eisenhower speaks out against increased military spending—and invites the Soviet Union to join with Western nations to consider shifting from spending on armaments to spending on domestic needs. Not spending on guns, but spending on butter.

So here are a few highlights of President Eisenhower’s nationally broadcast speech: “The Chance for Peace” —delivered on April 16th, 1953. It’s been edited to fit the available time:

U.S. PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all people; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

Again we say: the United States is ready to assume its just part.

As progress in all these areas strengthens world trust, we could proceed concurrently with the next great work—the reduction of the burden of armaments now weighing upon the world.

The details of such disarmament programs are manifestly critical and complex.

The fruit of success in all these tasks would present the world with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.

The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are needs that challenge this world in arms.

There is, before all peoples, a precious chance to turn the black tide of events. If we failed to strive to seize this chance, the judgment of future ages would be harsh and just. If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate.

The purpose of the United States, in stating these proposals, is simple and clear.

They conform to our firm faith that God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil. They aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: What happens when well-intentioned housing policies for the homeless take town leaders by surprise.

And, West Coast lawmakers are passing legislation against an unusual form of discrimination. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible records a disciple named Tabitha who had died. Peter came to her….”and knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, “Tabitha, arise.” And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. And he gave her his hand and raised her up. Then, calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive. And it became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.” Acts chapter 9, verses 40 through 42.

Go now in grace and peace.

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