Eighty years ago, James Burnham was putting the finishing touches on the first book of his Cold War trilogy, The Struggle for the World, which was published in 1947. Burnham later revealed that the first part of that book was based on a paper he wrote in the Spring of 1944 for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The first sentence of The Struggle for the World set the overall tone of the book: “The Third World War began in April 1944.” Burnham’s key insight in that book was that the geopolitical/ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that historians have labeled the Cold War began before the Second World War ended. Ostensible “allies” in the war against the Axis powers were in fact, according to Burnham, enemies in a new struggle for global power.
The Franklin Roosevelt administration, infested with communists and fellow travelers, did not share Burnham’s insight. While Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White and others within the administration were aiding and abetting their Soviet masters, President Roosevelt was naively engaged in what Robert Nisbet called the “failed courtship” of Josef Stalin. Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets continued even as the war was winding down and evidence of Soviet treachery accumulated. The Roosevelt administration envisioned the Soviet Union as one of the world’s four policemen that would maintain world peace. In other words, Roosevelt wanted to welcome the Soviet Union into the postwar world order, not realizing that Stalin wanted to reshape that world order in Moscow’s favor. Burnham had no such illusions about Stalin’s goals, and he set forth in The Struggle for the World the geopolitical and ideological aspects of the emerging Cold War.
Today, the United States is engaged in another “struggle for the world,” this time with Communist China. The parallels with the old struggle for the world that Burnham described are striking. Just as in the early 1940s when the United States and the Soviet Union joined together to fight a common enemy, Nazi Germany, in the early 1970s the United States and China joined together against their common enemy, the Soviet Union. And just as in the 1940s when, as Burnham noted, the Soviet Union initiated a new global struggle with the United States known to history as the Cold War as World War II was nearing its end, so too in the late-1980s-early 1990s, China began its geopolitical and military ascension to eventually challenge U.S. global preeminence as the Cold War was nearing its end. Like the previous struggle for the world, today’s rivalry has both geopolitical and ideological components.
Burnham would likely have called today’s struggle for the world the “Fourth World War.” While it is hard to say precisely when this new struggle for the world began, a good reference point is the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June 1989. At that time, the Soviet Union was crumbling; the Berlin Wall would fall five months later. China’s Communist Party leaders were determined that there would be no “Chinese Gorbachev.” The crackdown in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China signaled that there would be no political liberalization to accompany the economic liberalization that had begun in China. Or perhaps, it is better to date the beginnings of the Sino-U.S. struggle for the world in 1995-1996, when China launched six ballistic missiles near Taiwan, staged naval exercises, including amphibious landing practice, in the South China Sea, and increased belligerent rhetoric toward the U.S. and Taiwan, causing the United States to send two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region.
For China, annexing Taiwan is part of the unfinished business of the October 1949 revolution and seizure of power that followed the Chinese civil war. It would also serve to break through the island chain barriers in the western Pacific and enable the creation of China’s version of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—let’s call it the Greater Indo-Pacific Co-Prosperity Sphere. Current Chinese President Xi Jinping has put a different spin on it—he calls it the Belt and Road Initiative, and it extends across the globe.
Another similarity between the two global conflicts is America’s initial attempts to welcome its rivals into the “liberal world order.” As previously mentioned, Franklin Roosevelt and, initially, Harry Truman thought that Stalin’s Soviet Union could be a partner in maintaining global peace. As Roosevelt’s most trusted aide Harry Hopkins once explained, “In our hearts we really believed a new day had dawned. . . The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far-sighted and neither the President nor any one of us had the slightest doubt that we could live with them and get on peaceably with them far into the future.” FDR once remarked about Stalin: “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”
U.S. presidents from George H. W. Bush through Barack Obama pursued to varying degrees “constructive engagement” with China, welcoming China into the “liberal world order,” helping to facilitate China’s economic rise under the naïve belief that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had abandoned communism and embraced a form of “state capitalism.” As in the earlier struggle for the world with the Soviet Union, American businessmen have exhibited in their dealings with China what James Burnham characterized as a “suicidal mania.” That “embrace” of China, as Bradley Thayer and James Fanell have noted, was a “strategic failure” reminiscent of FDR’s “failed courtship” of Stalin.
That embrace stopped with the presidencies of Donald Trump. In the first Trump administration, as Josh Rogin detailed in Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century, U.S. policy shifted from focusing on small, peripheral conflicts to great power competition, as explained in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, largely the work of then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Elbridge Colby and in policy shifts that emphasized the Indo-Pacific as the center of gravity in world politics. In Trump’s second presidency, he has appointed a high-level team of “China hawks,” which includes Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, and Colby—now in the role of Under Secretary of War for Policy. The goal is not to go to war against China, but to deter China from attacking Taiwan and maintain aa stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region and globally.
Back to Burnham. In The Struggle for the World, he had some things to say about the earlier struggle that are relevant to today’s conflict. “[E]very communist.” Burnham explained, has been drilled to believe that in the world there are only two divisions of mankind: the communists, and all the rest.” The object of all communist parties, Burnham continued, is “the possession of all power,” and to that end communists “aim to destroy all rival, independent foci of power.” All communists, including the CCP, believe in the inevitable triumph of communism. The challenge of communism cannot be wished away, nor are there permanent solutions to the struggle for power, Burnham wrote. “Power politics” is the only kind of politics in international relations. To preserve peace and a stable balance of power, he explained, the United States “must be willing to fight whenever [its] major interests . . . are seriously threatened.”
Burnham understood that a successful foreign policy had to be supported by adequate military power. “Policy unsupported by power is empty,” he wrote, “but power divorced from correct policy is sterile.” Burnham knew his Mackinder, Spykman and Mahan—geopolitics was central to his global analyses. He also, however, knew his Lenin and Mao—ideology could not be ignored because it defined the nature of the enemy. These things are as true today as they were in 1946-47. The United States won the first struggle for the world against the Soviet Union because most presidents during the Cold War paid attention to geopolitics and the nature of our enemy—none more so than Ronald Reagan (a great admirer of James Burnham) who peacefully ended the Cold War. If we are going to prevail in this second struggle for the world without suffering through kinetic warfare, American leaders would do well to familiarize themselves with Burnham’s writings and Reagan’s statesmanship.
Francis P. Sempa writes on geopolitics.
