James Burnham<\/a> in \u201cThe Struggle for the World,\u201d published in 1947.\u00a0 Burnham was a former Marxist and Trotskyite who eventually abandoned Marxism, and became one of the leading conservative intellectuals of his day.\u00a0 His thought made a deep impression on, among others, George Orwell.\u00a0 For example, he had suggested the possibility of a world dominated by three massive totalitarian states, constantly at war with each other, in an earlier book, \u201cThe Managerial Revolution,\u201d published in 1941.\u00a0 These became Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia in Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984.\u201d\u00a0 The notions of \u201cdoublethink\u201d, the totalitarian use of terms such as \u201cjustice\u201d and \u201cpeace\u201d in a sense opposite to their traditional meanings, and the rewriting of history every few years \u201cso that history itself will always be a confirmation of the immediate line of the party,\u201d familiar to readers of \u201c1984,\u201d were also recurrent themes in \u201cThe Struggle for the World.\u201d<\/p>\nBurnham, born in 1905, had come of age during the stunning period of wars, revolutions, and the birth of the first totalitarian states that began and ended with the world wars of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 He assumed that events of such global impact would continue at the same pace, only this time in a world with nuclear weapons.\u00a0 \u00a0As a former Marxist, he knew that the Communists, at least, were deliberately engaged in a \u201cstruggle for the world,\u201d and was dismayed that U.S. politicians at the time were so slow to realize the nature of the struggle.\u00a0 He also correctly predicted that, unless they were stopped, the Communists would develop nuclear weapons in their Soviet base \u201cin a few years.\u201d\u00a0 This, he warned, could not be allowed to happen because it would inevitably and quickly lead to a full scale nuclear exchange.\u00a0 His reasoning was as follows:<\/p>\nLet us assume that more than one (two is enough for the assumption) power possesses, and is producing, atomic weapons.\u00a0 Each will be improving the efficiency and destructive potential of the weapons as it goes along.\u00a0 Now let us try to reason as the leaders of these powers would be compelled to reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Each leader of Power A could not but think as follows:\u00a0 Power B has at its disposal instruments which could, in the shortest time, destroy us.\u00a0 He has possibly made, or is about to make, new discoveries which will threaten even more complete and rapid destruction.\u00a0 At the moment, perhaps, he shows no open disposition to use these instruments.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I cannot possibly rely on his continued political benevolence – above all since he knows that I also have at my disposal instruments that can destroy him.\u00a0 Some hothead – or some wise statesman – of his may even now be giving the order to push the necessary buttons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even if there were no atomic weapons, many of the leaders would undoubtedly be reasoning today along these lines.\u00a0 Atomic weapons are, after all, not responsible for warfare, not even for the Third World War, which has begun.\u00a0 The fact that the political and social causes of a war are abundantly present stares at us from every edition of every newspaper.\u00a0 The existence of atomic weapons merely raises the stakes immeasurably higher, and demands a quicker decision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But to assume, as do some foolish commentators, that fear of retaliation will be the best deterrent to an atomic war is to deny the lessons of the entire history of war and of society.\u00a0 Fear, as Ferrero so eloquently shows, is what provokes the exercise of force.\u00a0 Most modern wars have been, in the minds of every belligerent, preventive:\u00a0 an effort to stamp out the fear of what the other side might be about to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The existence of two or more centers of control of atomic weapons would be equal to a grenade with the pin already pulled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
According to Burnham, the resulting nuclear war or wars would lead to the collapse of Western Civilization.\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n
If, however, we are not yet ready to accept passively the final collapse of Western Civilization, we may state the following as a necessary first condition of any workable solution of the problem of atomic weapons: there must be an absolute monopoly of the production, possession and use of all atomic weapons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One wonders what direction world history might have taken had someone like Burnham been President in 1950 instead of Truman.\u00a0 He would have almost certainly adopted MacArthur’s plan to drop numerous atomic bombs on China and North Korea.\u00a0 We were lucky.\u00a0 In the end, Truman’s homespun common sense prevailed over Burnham’s flamboyant intellect, and the nuclear genie remained in the bottle.<\/p>\n
However, in 1947 the U.S. still had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and, for the reasons cited above, Burnham insisted we must keep it.\u00a0 He suggested that this might best be done by establishing an effectual world government, but dismissed the possibility as impractical.\u00a0 The only workable alternative to a Communist conquest of the world or full scale nuclear war\u00a0and the end of Western Civilization\u00a0was U.S. hegemony.\u00a0 In Burnham\u2019s words,<\/p>\n
It is not our individual minds or desires, but the condition of world society, that today poses for the Soviet Union, as representative of communism, and for the United States, as representative of Western Civilization, the issue of world leadership. No wish or thought of ours can charm this issue away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This issue will be decided, and in our day. In the course off the decision, both of the present antagonists may, it is true, be destroyed. But one of them must be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Whatever the words, it is well also to know the reality. The reality is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control. Nothing less than this can be the positive, or offensive, phase of a rational United States policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As a first step to empire, Burnham proposed the union of Great Britain and the United States, to be followed, not by outright conquest, but by firm assertion of U.S. predominance and leadership in the non-Communist world. \u00a0\u00a0Beyond that, the Communist threat must finally be recognized for what it was, and a firm, anti-Communist policy substituted for what was seen as a lack of any coherent policy at all.\u00a0 Vacillation must end.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, when it came to the nuclear standoff, Burnham was wrong, and the \u201cfoolish commentators\u201d who invoked the fear of retaliation were right.\u00a0 Perhaps, having only seen the effects of dropping two low yield bombs, he could not yet imagine the effect of thousands of bombs orders of magnitude more powerful, or conceive of such a thing as mutually assured destruction.\u00a0 Perhaps it was only dumb luck, but the world did not stumble into a nuclear World War III as it had into the conventional world wars of the 20th<\/sup> century, and the decisive events in the struggle did not follow each other nearly as quickly as Burnham imagined they would.<\/p>\nBurnham also failed to foresee the implications of the gradual alteration in the nature of the Communist threat.\u00a0 At the time he wrote, it was everything he claimed it to be, a messianic secular religion at the height of its power and appeal.\u00a0 He assumed that it would retain that power and appeal until the battle was decided, one way or the other.\u00a0 Even though he was aware that the masses living under Communism, other than a dwindling number of incorrigible idealists, were already disillusioned by \u201cthe God that failed,\u201d he didn\u2019t foresee what a decisive weakness that would eventually become.\u00a0 \u00a0In the end, time was on our side.\u00a0 The Communists, and not we, as Lenin had predicted, finally dropped onto the garbage heap of history \u201clike a ripe plum.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Burnham wasn\u2019t wrong about everything.\u00a0 To win the struggle, it was necessary for us to finally recognize the threat.\u00a0 Whatever doubt remained on that score, at least as far as most of our political leaders were concerned, was dissipated by the North Korean invasion of the south.\u00a0 Our policy of vacillation didn\u2019t exactly end, but was occasionally relieved by periods of firmness.\u00a0 In the end, in spite of a media dominated through most of the struggle by Lenin\u2019s \u201cuseful idiots\u201d and the resultant cluelessness of most Americans about what we were even trying to do on the front lines of the \u201cclash between the cultures\u201d in places like Vietnam, we prevailed.<\/p>\n
It was a near thing.\u00a0 Burnham feared that, even after losing the opening battles of the next war to a United States with a monopoly of nuclear weapons, the Communists might regroup, abandon their vulnerable cities, and transform the struggle into a \u201cpeople\u2019s war.\u201d\u00a0 His description of what would follow was eerily similar to what actually did happen, but in a much smaller arena than the whole world:<\/p>\n
They would transform the struggle into a political war, a \u201cpeople\u2019s war,\u201d fought in every district of the world by irregulars, partisans, guerillas, Fifth Columns, spies, stool pigeons, assassins, fought by sabotage and strikes and lies and terror and diversion and panic and revolt. They would play on every fear and prejudice of the United States population, every feeling of guilt or nobility; they would exploit every racial and social division; they would widen every antagonism between tentative allies; and they would tirelessly wear down the United States will to endure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Though the result would be not quite so certain, perhaps, as if the communists also had atomic weapons, they would in the end, I think, succeed. Because of the lack of a positive United States policy, because it would not have presented to the world even the possibility of a political solution, its dreadful material strength would appear to the peoples as the unrelieved brutality of a murderer. Its failure to distinguish between the communist regime and that regime\u2019s subject-victims would weld together the victims and their rulers. Americans themselves would be sickened and conscience-ridden by what would seem to them a senseless slaughter, never-ending, leading nowhere. The military leadership would be disoriented by the inability of their plans based on technical superiority to effect a decision. The failure to conceive the struggle politically would have given the communists the choice of weapons. From the standpoint of the United States, the entire world would have been turned into an ambush and a desert. In the long night, nerves would finally crack, and sentries would fire their last shots wildly into the darkness, and it would all be over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Change \u201cthe world\u201d to Vietnam and it reads like a history instead of a premonition.\u00a0 Tomorrow is another day, and I doubt that any of us will prove better at predicting what the future will bring than Burnham.\u00a0 We have lived through an era much different, more peaceful, and more sedate in the pace of events than the one he experienced between 1914 and 1945.\u00a0 We should beware of assuming, as he did, that the future will bear any resemblance to the immediate past.\u00a0 The world is still full of nuclear weapons, some of them already in the hands of, or soon to be in the hands of, dictators of suspect rationality.\u00a0 Some of our intellectuals soothe our fears with stories about the \u201cvanishing of violence,\u201d but as Omar Khayyam put it in the \u201cRubaiyat,\u201d they could soon be \u201ccast as foolish prophets forth, their mouths stopped with dust,\u201d through some miscalculation or deliberate act of malice.\u00a0 As the Boy Scouts say, \u201cbe prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n