James Burnham: Reagan's Geopolitical Genius
Afraid for the future of the West in the face of the Soviet threat, this former Trotskyite shaped Ronald Reagan's tough approach.
IN 1983, Ronald Reagan awarded James Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award. Reagan declared, “As a scholar, writer, historian and philosopher, James Burnham has profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world. . . . Freedom, reason and decency have had few greater champions in this century.” With his characteristic smile and tilt of the head, Reagan added, “And I owe him a personal debt, because throughout the years traveling the mash-potato circuit I have quoted you widely.” The award’s recipient, then seventy-seven, was surely flattered. He was in declining health—his eyesight deteriorating, his short-term memory devastated by a stroke. His professional standing, too, was a far cry from the days when he had stirred up intellectual debate with books that assaulted conventional thinking.
It was fitting that Reagan and Burnham should come together to celebrate their mutual fight against global Communism. If the Gipper—who gets credit from many historians and commentators for being, as the Economist put it in a 2004 cover headline, “The Man Who Beat Communism”—was key to winning the Cold War, then Burnham laid the intellectual blueprint for him. He was the father of the Reagan Doctrine. Like Whittaker Chambers, who had made a searing break with Communism, Burnham was, as Reagan put it upon his death in 1987, “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century: the journey away from totalitarian statism and toward the uplifting doctrines of freedom.” Nor was Reagan alone in his view. “More than any other single person,” writes historian George H. Nash, “Burnham supplied the conservative intellectual movement with the theoretical formulation for victory in the Cold War.”
Still, the Cold War ended nearly a quarter century ago. Even granting Burnham’s pivotal role in the ideological battles surrounding that long struggle, it seems fair to wonder: What lessons, if any, can we derive from Burnham’s global outlook for the present? There is an understandable but misguided tendency among many intellectuals and policy makers these days to apply Cold War impulses and strategies to post–Cold War realities. Burnham was a fierce Cold War hawk on the intellectual scene, as was Reagan on the political scene, and thus many assume that their hawkish instincts would carry over into the subsequent struggles against Islamic fundamentalism or upstart regional powers. Indeed, Burnham biographer Daniel Kelly and conservative commentator Richard Brookhiser have suggested that Burnham was “the first neoconservative.”
Others, though, have suggested that Burnham was a quintessential foreign-policy realist, who stripped away wispy thoughts about human fulfillment and punctured myths fashioned by elites to justify their societal dominance—a realist rooted in an unadorned understanding of human nature and man’s irrepressible quest for power. But this interpretation also runs into difficulty, as Burnham’s Cold War prescriptions often differed from those of the era’s realists—including Hans J. Morgenthau and Walter Lippmann, among academics and journalists; and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, among foreign-policy practitioners.
Perhaps it is best to try to understand Burnham as he understood himself. For his oeuvre reveals some intriguing contradictions that may help to elucidate contemporary foreign-policy disputes. Indeed, he personified the post–Cold War foreign-policy debate in his earlier writings about global power and America’s position in the world. The Burnham record cannot be fully understood, however, without exploring his remarkable odyssey from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan—or, in his case, from Trotskyism to Reaganism.
BORN ON November 22, 1905, in Chicago, Burnham was the son of a wealthy railroad executive. He studied at Princeton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received advanced degrees in English literature and medieval philosophy. Then he joined the philosophy department at New York University’s Washington Square College, where for the next thirty-two years he taught aesthetics, ethics and comparative literature. Soon—agitated by the ravages of the Great Depression, the apparent looming collapse of capitalism and the intriguing rise of Communism—he plunged into the turbulent world of left-wing radicalism.
He adopted the anti-Stalinist Bolshevik Leon Trotsky as his ideological lodestar. He joined various Trotsky-leaning organizations, coedited a Trotskyist theoretical journal called the New International, corresponded widely with the great man himself, and became embroiled in the intrigues and maneuverings of the Left. A gifted writer, Burnham emerged in New York literary circles as a thinker of rare dimension, depth and shrewdness.
Burnham was anything but the typical scruffy Trotskyist. Dedicated to the cause by day, the elegantly attired Burnham retreated to his Greenwich Village apartment by night and played bourgeois host at black-tie dinners where the guests seldom included his ideological brethren. Irving Howe considered him “haughty in manner and speech, . . . logical, gifted, terribly dry.” Others viewed him more as standoffish, perhaps a bit shy. But he was not easily ignored. James T. Farrell, who saw him as “prissy and ministerial,” used Burnham as the prototype for a character in his novel Sam Holman.
With the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, however, Burnham did a somersault. He repudiated Trotsky’s preposterous admonition that good socialists owed fealty to the Soviet system even in the face of comrade Stalin’s deviations from the true doctrine. Now he concluded the problem wasn’t Stalin but Communism itself. He broke with Trotsky, who promptly labeled him an “educated witch-doctor” and a “strutting petty-bourgeois pedant.” Burnham evinced no agony over this rupture. His commitment was “rational and pragmatic, not spiritual,” he explained. “God had not failed, so far as I was concerned. I had been mistaken, and when I came to realize the extent of my mistakes, it was time to say good-bye.”
Besides, he was developing a new theory of the ideological clash enveloping the industrial world, which he pulled together in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. It sold more than one hundred thousand hardcover copies in the United States and Britain during World War II, and far more in paperback. Postwar sales surged further when the book was translated into fourteen languages. The New York Times devoted three days of reviews and analyses to the book. Time displayed Burnham’s photo with a review that called the volume “the most sensational book of political theory since The Revolution of Nihilism.” Peter Drucker, reviewing it for the Saturday Review of Literature, labeled it “one of the best recent books on political and social trends.”
It argued that the great clash of the era was not between capitalism and socialism, but rather between capitalism and an emerging centralized society dominated by a new managerial class—business executives, technicians, soldiers, government bureaucrats and various kinds of experts in various kinds of organizations. This new class would assault the old structures of entrepreneurial capitalism, institute central planning and undercut any true democracy by superimposing themselves upon society as a kind of managerial oligarchy. Governmental intrusion and control would increase, though certain democratic norms would be preserved to provide legitimacy. The managerial era would engender superstates that would compete for global primacy. The outlines of this new epoch could be seen in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and, in less developed form, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The book had its critics, most notably George Orwell, whose penetrating analysis suggested how Burnham had gone astray. And some developments predicted by Burnham proved spectacularly wrong—for example, that Germany would win the war (this was before U.S. entry); that Germany and Japan would remain powerful states in their respective spheres; that Germany would not attack the USSR before a British defeat; and that the Soviets would be conquered. But Orwell pronounced the fundamental thesis “difficult to resist” and indeed incorporated it into his famous novel 1984. In retrospect, it is clear that Burnham had identified a fundamental shift in power interrelationships in the industrial world. Indeed, the most consequential fault line in American politics since the New Deal has been between the rising managerial class and those resisting its seemingly inexorable ascendancy.
Next came Burnham’s 1943 volume The Machiavellians, a kind of realist manifesto designed to help readers get past the myths of political discourse (or, as Burnham called them, ideologies) and get to the essence of political contention, which is always about power and its distribution. In projecting his thesis, he explored the thinking of four neo-Machiavellians—Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. He made five important points.
First, the concept of representative government is essentially a fiction because of what Michels called the “iron law of oligarchy”—elites always emerge and zealously protect their power, while the masses ultimately depend psychologically upon autocratic leadership. Second, the myths or ideologies of any polity, while often nonrational in origin and substance, are crucial in maintaining societal cohesion and stability (along with the standing of elites), and so it is frivolous to attack them on the basis of verifiable facts or logic. Third, all healthy elites must maintain a kind of slow circulation, admitting new members and expelling obsolete elements, and they must maintain an equilibrium between lions (leaders who are traditionalist in outlook and willing to impose force) and foxes (the innovative ones who live by their wits, employing fraud, deceit and shrewdness). Without this flexibility and balance, an elite will atrophy and ultimately lose power. Fourth, human nature is fixed and flawed, and so government policies dedicated to the ethical fulfillment of man in society, as opposed to the protection of liberty, will fail. Fifth, societal stability and liberty require a balance of competing powers to check leadership abuses; as Burnham put it, “Only power restrains power.” This leads to Burnham’s faith in what Mosca called “juridical defense”—essentially, the equilibrium that ensues when competing influences and forces in society, both governmental and nongovernmental, are allowed to counteract each other.
As the intellectual historian John P. Diggins pointed out, Burnham’s conclusions, though stark in their realism and disdain for utopian notions, were “far from pessimistic. If democracy, conceived in Lincolnesque terms as popular sovereignty and government by the people, was theoretically impossible, liberty and freedom, as expressed in and through organized opposition, could still prevail.” This became the bedrock of Burnham’s philosophy, and, decades later, he told an interviewer that he had not changed his “general point of view” in any fundamental way since The Machiavellians was published.
INDEED, THIS view undergirded his thinking as he turned his attention to the topic that would obsess him for the rest of his life—the threat to Western civilization from expanding Soviet totalitarianism. By this time it was clear that Germany and Japan would go down in defeat, that the British Empire would dissolve, that the Soviets would gobble up Eastern Europe and pose a mortal challenge to Western Europe, and that the fate of the West rested with America. Burnham foresaw that events unleashed by World War II were positioning Stalin to dominate what the celebrated British geopolitical analyst Halford Mackinder considered the most crucial swath of territory upon the globe: the Eurasian Heartland, impervious to sea power and from which the surrounding Coastland (Western Europe, China and India) would be vulnerable in the modern era of mechanized transportation. The key to global dominance was Eastern Europe, argued Mackinder, explaining, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island” of both Heartland and Coastland. “Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
And now the Soviets had positioned themselves to grab Eastern Europe. Burnham, a student of Mackinder, anticipated a looming postwar crisis when he was asked by the wartime U.S. Office of Strategic Services to produce an analysis of the Soviet Union’s strategic ambitions. His study became a substantial part of his next book, The Struggle for the World (1947). “The Third World War,” it declared, “began in April, 1944.” This referred to a Soviet-inspired revolt of Greek soldiers and sailors against their British commanders in Alexandria. As Daniel Kelly explains, “Correctly understood, the mutiny amounted to a preliminary skirmish between communism and the West . . . in a new world war that was beginning before the old one had ended.”
Burnham feared that the West, lacking the necessary will in such a protracted crisis, would lock itself into a defensive posture that would prolong the struggle and preclude any eventual victory. That became his recurrent theme, interjected into his writings for the next thirty years, including in two books that, along with The Struggle for the World, constituted a kind of Cold War trilogy—The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) and Containment or Liberation? (1953).
The Struggle for the World received from historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. a review that crystallized the new terms of responsible Cold War debate. Schlesinger, an anti-Communist liberal, pronounced the book “an able presentation of an allowable viewpoint” and added that it surpassed in logic “the confused and messy arguments of the appeasers.” But he thought Burnham focused too much on “the maximum Communist position” and slighted prospects for the emergence of “a minimum position” that might be fostered through deft American policies.
Instead, Schlesinger promoted the containment doctrine formulated by George F. Kennan. Burnham emerged as this doctrine’s leading critic. His alternative concept of “liberation” focused on political warfare, or “polwar”—propaganda efforts, support for local anti-Communist insurgencies, and covert operations aimed at undermining and perhaps overthrowing various Communist regimes. In Containment or Liberation?, he likened containment to a boxer’s strategy of merely parrying his opponent’s blows without delivering punches of his own. Returning to Mackinder, he argued that so long as the Soviets held Eastern Europe—enabling them to strengthen their hold on the Eurasian Heartland—they posed a mortal threat to the West and the rest of the world. What was needed, therefore, was a strategy aimed at dislodging their grip on this key European enclave.
SO ZEALOUS was Burnham in his anti-Communism that in 1949 he moved to Washington to work as an undercover consultant for the Office of Policy Coordination, a federal covert-action arm later incorporated into the CIA. He served there for four years, mostly in government-sponsored propaganda efforts. Then, in 1955, he began a twenty-three-year stint as senior editor and foreign-affairs columnist for William F. Buckley Jr.’s new magazine, National Review. Ultimately he became Buckley’s right-hand man, as well as acknowledged father figure, but to outsiders he was known largely for the stark realism and intellectual forcefulness of his column, entitled “The Third World War” (later “The Protracted Conflict”), which regularly highlighted what he considered the essential peril of the West in the face of global Communism and the inadequacy of Western resolve.
After the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Suez crisis, Burnham posited his “two zone” theory of the Cold War—the zone of peace and the zone of war. The zone of peace was the acreage already under Communist rule and thus “off limits to disturbers.” Soviet officials displayed an iron-fisted resolve to crush any effort to roll back these Communist gains. The zone of war was the acreage still free from Communist rule, always subject to Communist expansion. He added that, although the containment principle called for resistance to any attempted extension of the zone of peace, it never seemed to prevent slow, inexorable encroachment. Thus, when Communist dominance was extended to Cuba in 1959, America’s response was the half-hearted 1961 Bay of Pigs episode, which turned out to be a catastrophe. Even with the more favorable 1962 Cuban missile crisis outcome, President John F. Kennedy contented himself with getting rid of the missiles while accepting this provocative Communist regime inside the strategic threshold of the United States.
This, wrote Burnham, was “the essence of ‘the policy of peaceful coexistence,’” a product of containment, which served to remove serious diplomatic pressure from the Soviet regime. This state of play was brazenly codified in 1968 by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev when he declared that Communist party monopolies on power in all Communist states were inviolable and that all socialist countries must protect such monopolies wherever they were threatened. This attitude, quickly labeled the Brezhnev Doctrine, later was described by George Shultz as “What’s theirs is theirs; what’s ours is up for grabs.” The West’s willingness to play by these rules rankled Burnham.
It also rankled Ronald Reagan, and herein we see the significance of Burnham’s thinking in reversing America’s Cold War policy and contributing to the Soviet demise. The conventional wisdom today is that the Cold War was won largely through America’s long, patient application of Kennan’s containment policy. There is some truth in this. But the man who contributed most to that victory, and who read Burnham regularly in National Review, rejected many elements of containment that had become hallmarks of U.S. policy. Reagan was not a “realist” as that term has been applied to such figures as Kennan and Kissinger. He was, rather, a Burnhamite.
This comes into focus with a review of Burnham’s perspective on Cold War events as they unfolded over the decades. As early as the Berlin airlift, he lamented the West’s defensive posture at such flashpoint locations. He called the airlift “a decision not to decide”—leaving a festering sore in East-West relations unhealed—and felt vindicated thirteen years later when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev resolved the ongoing crisis in the Soviets’ favor by erecting the Berlin Wall. Burnham anticipated what would ensue in discussions to defuse the situation: “We grant them half or two-thirds or nine-tenths of what they have asked, and we ‘win’ one-tenth. Until the next round.”
Similarly, he opposed Kennedy’s Limited Test Ban Treaty, fearing it would let the Soviets off the hook from having to engage in a financially debilitating arms race. He foresaw the possibility of a sophisticated missile-defense system, and endorsed it for the same reason—as a means of draining Soviet resources as the USSR scrambled to keep up with the more technologically advanced West. He vehemently opposed the Nixon administration’s détente policies aimed at fostering a more friendly footing for U.S.-Soviet relations. He took particular aim at the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which granted the Soviet Union’s long-standing desire for legal recognition of its 1945 borders and expanded Soviet access to Western goods and technology. While Westerners tended to see détente as the “diplomatic equivalent of a business deal,” he wrote, the Soviets used it as “a cover for their fundamental strategy of aggression.”
Burnham also attacked the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which he argued would favor the Soviets. He vehemently opposed Nixon’s agreement to limit missile-defense systems, given that the United States could make serious technological progress in this realm and thus leave the Soviets gasping economically to catch up. “In any historical sequence,” he wrote, “it is the direction of change that counts. In this matter of strategic strength there can be no mistaking the direction: [U.S.] monopoly—superiority—parity—sufficiency—inferiority.” Such inferiority, he added, breeds “caution, yielding, unsureness on the one hand, and sometimes a desperate recklessness on the other.”
Burnham articulated an insight that later became a foundation stone of Reagan’s Cold War strategy. “We overstress the USSR’s strength,” he declared, “and understress its menace.” This seeming paradox reflected both the Soviet Union’s position of strength in the Eurasian Heartland and its intrinsic vulnerabilities. Far more than the United States, which dominated the globe economically, the Soviet Union operated on the margin—beset by economic stagnation, a discontented populace, declining birthrates, and the high cost of its dual aim of maintaining its empire and undermining Western strategic positions around the world. America’s soft policies, argued Burnham, enabled the Soviets to bolster their fundamental strengths and surmount their inherent weaknesses.
That was the situation through Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when the Soviet Union, emboldened by the fruits of détente and what appeared to be halting presidential leadership, embarked on an adventuresome strategy. It beefed up its efforts to obtain strategic advantage in key Third World locations, heightened its support for the Castro regime in Cuba, funneled substantial resources to Communist movements in Central America and sent into Afghanistan a 150,000-troop occupation force that threatened to alter the balance of power in the region.
THEN, WITH Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory, in part a harvest from Carter’s weakness, American foreign policy quickly moved away from the tattered détente outlook and edged toward Burnham’s hard-line philosophy. “So far,” declared Reagan at a 1981 news conference, “détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims. . . . Their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state.” It was pure Burnham. In a 1982 speech before the British House of Commons, Reagan replaced “peaceful coexistence” with a “rollback” metaphor by predicting the Soviet empire would end up in the “ash heap of history.” The foreign-policy establishment was aghast, but a year later, in describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” he rejected the “realist” notion that the Cold War was, at base, a traditional clash of nation-states with inherent and predictable geopolitical interests. It was, rather, an epic ideological clash fraught with ethical and moral ramifications and necessitating a global response.
Accompanying this was the powerful Reagan Doctrine, a direct challenge to the Brezhnev Doctrine. As Reagan put it in 1985, “We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. . . . Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.” The ensuing policy initiatives placed a further financial crimp on the Soviet economy. Soon Kremlin leaders were spending nearly $30 billion per year defending their gains in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and other locations under pressure from U.S.-backed “freedom fighters.”
The strategy worked. As military analyst Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, put it, “The Soviet system was dysfunctional; its empire was collapsing; the cupboard was bare. And Reagan’s surging military budgets, without question, brought this internal crisis to a head.” Soon Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that his country must pursue serious disarmament agreements. Otherwise, he told his Politburo colleagues in October 1986, “We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities.”
Almost alone among serious U.S. politicians, Reagan believed it was actually possible to defeat Soviet Communism. It was a conviction supported by James Burnham throughout three decades of Cold War commentary. In 1960, he wrote that, while the USSR had a global goal and the will to pursue it, it did not yet possess the power to win the long struggle. The West, he added, had the power but lacked the goal and the will. “Which side will be the first to complete its triad?” he asked.
Reagan, supplying the goal and the will, completed the triad. By then, Burnham’s deteriorating health had removed him from the scene, and he died in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down and four years before the final collapse of his old Soviet nemesis. But his outlook helped guide events under the man who had quoted him copiously during those mash-potato dinners.
Does this define Burnham as a neoconservative? After all, his anti-Soviet stance was not far different from that of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the neocon group that sought to nudge Carter toward a more confrontational Cold War stance and then ended up supporting Reagan in 1980. This group was made up of people such as Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Ben Wattenberg, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams. Some of these figures, along with subsequent allies such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, became ardent promoters of American bellicosity in the post–Cold War era, pushing for strong U.S. actions against Islamic fundamentalists, Arab despots, post-Soviet Russia, a resurgent China and various nettlesome dictators around the world.
In several respects, it seems clear that Burnham would not have embraced much of the neocon outlook that has emerged over the past two decades. Post–Cold War neoconservative thought has shunned the kind of power-conscious realism of Burnham and his Machiavellians and embraced a Wilsonian ideal of transforming non-Western societies by injecting into them what neoconservative writer Max Boot has called “the powerful antibody known as democracy.” William Kristol’s stalwart Weekly Standard consistently has extolled “morality in foreign policy” and cheered when President George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address, identified his country’s ultimate goal as “ending tyranny in our world” by supporting “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”
Burnham consistently rejected such thinking. His concern was U.S. and Western survival, not the well-being of the world and certainly not the export of Western values. He harbored little confidence that Third World peoples could easily reach serious levels of civilization. Indeed, he jeered at Third World leaders whose dictatorial abuses mocked their “Wilsonian” jargon, such as “the cant about ‘freedom,’ ‘anti-colonialism,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘self-determination.’” Further, he didn’t see any particular reason why these non-Western peoples would want to embrace cultural values imported from America, which he viewed as a “gawky adolescent” of a country, a European offshoot with little serious cultural sensibility of its own. “Who,” he asked, “listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a shudder if he thought the price of survival would be the Americanization of the world?”
From his earliest Marxist days, Burnham disdained sentimentalists—dreamy reformers, liberals, progressives, abstractionist optimists—who couldn’t accept the fundamental reality of man’s tragic nature and thus retreated to consoling myths about the human experience. No doubt he would dismiss the neoconservatives’ democratization project as being based on such consoling myths. If their aim is American global dominance, he might have mused, they should formulate a philosophy of action based on the dynamics of pure power, not some wispy thoughts about turning Third World societies into modern, Western-style democracies.
YET BURNHAM did indeed see the Cold War as a “struggle for the world”—meaning the victor would gain a significant degree of global hegemony. Early in the Cold War he welcomed the idea of America liberating Eastern Europe, constructing an alliance with Great Britain, fostering the political unification of Western Europe, destroying the Soviet empire, and then seeking hegemony over undeveloped parts of Asia, Africa and South America. The result would be what he called a “democratic world order,” a term he employed for fear that readers would recoil at the word “empire.” But empire was what he had in mind.
Here’s where Burnham’s thinking gets intertwined with the neoconservative outlook, which also manifests hegemonic impulses. In Burnham’s case, his views on the subject reflect a nineteenth-century attitude about the superiority of Western culture and the need for the West to protect itself from hostile global forces by dominating the societies from which they could emerge. He was an old-fashioned imperialist who lamented that the West had been “drugged” by the “myth” that it was
always just . . . for Indonesians to throw out the Dutch, Indians the British, Indochinese the French, dark men the white men, no matter for what purpose, nor by whom led, no matter the state of development, nor the consequences to the local people and economy, nor the effect on world strategic relations.
Burnham, in contrast, was concerned primarily with “the right of Western civilization to survive.”
This was not a particularly provocative viewpoint in, say, 1900, but it has been overtaken by events since the end of World War II and particularly since the close of the Cold War. Will-to-power imperialism has little resonance in our time and no prospect for success. Burnham was out of date, stuck in a bygone era that he couldn’t quite relinquish. This was a lapse that undermined the rigor of his realism. But for neoconservatives the hegemonic impulse is quite different, based on a desire to bring U.S. imperialism forward into a new era of global democratic bloom. Such Wilsonian notions lack any shred of realism at all.
Burnham’s view of American hegemony can be seen as the product of an intellectual tendency that George Orwell attacked scathingly in his essay on The Managerial Revolution—namely, to predict a continuation of the thing that is happening. “Now the tendency to do this,” wrote Orwell, “is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”
Applying this critique to Burnham’s imperial flirtation, we can say that the anti-Communist intellectual saw the Cold War as an epic global struggle between Western civilization and the artificial ideology of Russian Bolshevism. And, since it was a global struggle, the winner would inherit the globe. This tendency to see the conflict in such stark, linear terms—extending current struggles out into the future without regard to possible intervening forces—overwhelmed Burnham’s commitment to realism. Thus, he didn’t give sufficient weight to the elements normally explored by foreign-policy realists—for example, the importance of spheres of influence, balance-of-power considerations, the intrinsic difficulty and cost of expansive conquest (leaving aside global conquest), and the relentless force of religious, cultural and ethnic impulses that rise up in response to threatening hegemonic missions. Such matters rarely came under Burnham’s scrutiny during his long Cold War struggle on behalf of Western resolve.
But he didn’t abandon these considerations entirely and seemed more taken with them in the latter years of his Cold War commentary—as, for example, when he suggested that a post-Soviet Russia could legitimately lay claim to a dominating position vis-à-vis Ukraine, which had been part of the Russian sphere of influence for centuries. It caused a bit of a firestorm, but he never relinquished this position and thus gave a nod to the realist principles of spheres of influence and balance of power. This contradiction—spheres of influence versus hegemonic ambition—presaged the foreign-policy debate that ensued with the end of the Cold War.
But that contradiction does not lessen the significance of Burnham’s advocacy or the sagacity of his analysis during the dark and dangerous days of the Cold War. Nor does it detract from his achievement in producing a strategic vision that ultimately, as embraced by Reagan, became the foundation for victory. Still, the world has moved beyond the Cold War, as it has moved beyond Burnham and just about everyone else who played any historic or heroic role in that struggle. The biggest lesson of the Cold War victory is that it emerged from a strategy that was tailored specifically for that challenge. Subsequent challenges, including those faced by America today, require counterstrategies that are similarly enlightened.
Robert W. Merry is the political editor of The National Interest and an author of books on American history and foreign policy.