The 70th anniversary of National Review is a good time to reflect on the conservative magazine’s most important and influential writer—at least during the Cold War years. By 1955, when he became a founding editor of National Review, James Burnham had been writing about international affairs for twenty years—first as a Marxist in The New International, Symposium, The New Militant, New Masses, Socialist Appeal,and other left-wing outlets from 1933-1940; then in Partisan Review, the influential liberal journal, after his break with Marxism from 1940-1951; and later in The Freeman and the American Mercury in the early 1950s. Burnham was William F. Buckley Jr.’s most important recruit to his fledgling journal of opinion because he brought to the conservative movement an unmatched geopolitical realism that included what George Nash described as a strategy for winning the Cold War.
In the 1930s, Burnham corresponded with Leon Trotsky, reviewed Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution favorably in Symposium, and became Trotsky’s principal spokesman in the United States. In the mid-1930s, Burnham foresaw the approaching Second World War and predicted it would be “far greater and more deadly than the last.” It would be a total war, he wrote, because “directly or indirectly, everyone is part of the war machine.” Civilians as well as soldiers would be targets in the coming war, he explained, because the resources of entire nations would be devoted to war.
Burnham recognized that the League of Nations would not keep the peace. In 1936, he wrote that the early skirmishes of the Second World War had already begun, citing Japan’s moves against China, Italy’s attack on Ethiopia, and Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s participation in the Spanish Civil War. He predicted that the United States would enter the war in its later stages, and thereafter would make a bid for “world hegemony.” Burnham wrote that, for Franklin Roosevelt, war was “the solution for the economic crisis.”
Burnham’s writing in the 1930s combined realism with Marxist dialectics. When he broke with Marxism in 1940, Burnham kept his foreign policy realism. During the war, he wrote two books exhibiting that realism: The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). The outcome of the war, Burnham predicted, would result in a clash of global superstates based in key geographical regions. Global politics, like all politics, was fundamentally a struggle for power. High-sounding principles and abstract ideas were nothing more than tools used by political leaders to achieve, maintain, and expand their power.
During the latter stages of the war, Burnham joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where in the spring of 1944 he wrote a paper that envisioned the coming struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Burnham had by that time read the geopolitical works of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. In a January 1945 article in Partisan Review titled “Lenin’s Heir,” Burnham, borrowing from Mackinder, described the then-emerging Cold War as a struggle between the Heartland power of Soviet Russia versus the maritime power of the United States.
After the war, Burnham wrote a Cold War trilogy: The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, and Containment or Liberation?. He was also a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency. The Struggle for the World appeared during the same month President Harry Truman announced the Truman Doctrine. The Coming Defeat of Communism was the inspiration for NSC-68, the classified document that guided American national security policy throughout much of the Cold War. Containment or Liberation? criticized the passive policy of containment and urged U.S. leaders to pursue an offensive policy of Liberation vis-à-vis the Soviet empire. Burnham would go on to write three more books: The Web of Subversion (1954), which detailed communist infiltration of our government; Congress and the American Tradition (1958), a brilliant analysis of our country’s founding principles and institutions, and their evolution into the late 1950s; and Suicide of the West (1964), a devastating critique of modern liberalism (which he called “the ideology of Western suicide”).
Burnham’s regular column in National Review was titled “The Third World War” (later changed to “The Protracted Conflict”), which he later described as a running commentary on the events and personalities of the Cold War. (Many of Burnham’s columns between 1955 and 1967 were collected in a book titled The War We Are In.). In these columns, Burnham exhibited the same geopolitical realism that characterized his previous writings. In one of his earliest columns in November 1955, Burnham expressly invoked Mackinder’s concepts in describing the Cold War as a geopolitical contest for control of the Eurasian continent. He subsequently wrote incisively about the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis of 1956, and later noted the geopolitical implications of Sputnik. He wrote about the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of Khrushchev, the Vietnam War, arms control, the Sino-Soviet split, détente, the opening to China, the wars and crises in the Middle East, the Panama Canal, and Soviet adventurism in the Third World. In each column, Burnham demonstrated what Samuel Francis called his respect for “power and history.” Burnham wrote his last column for National Review in 1978, after which he was sidelined by a stroke.
In 1983, President Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Burnham died four years later, so he did not live to see our victory in the Cold War that was achieved in part by Reagan’s offensive geopolitical strategy that built-up America’s strengths and exploited Soviet vulnerabilities, just as Burnham had recommended in his Cold War trilogy and in numerous columns in National Review. James Burnham’s geopolitical realism helped bring down the Soviet empire.
