In his authoritative history of the conservative intellectual movement in the United States, George Nash identified three main schools of post-World War II conservative thought: market-based economics, social traditions and values, and anti-communism.
Nash traced the beginnings of the anti-communist school to the writings of Eugene Lyons, author of The Red Decade (1941), but even more influential than Lyons was James Burnham, the former Trotskyite who joined the anti-communist cause in the 1940s and the conservative movement in the 1950s. The distinctiveness of Burnham’s anti-communism was its grounding in geopolitics. Sixty-seven years ago, Burnham brought geopolitics to the conservative movement.
Burnham broke with his former liberal anti-communist colleagues in the early 1950s over the issue of congressional investigations into communist subversion of the U.S. government that liberals grouped under the general heading of “McCarthyism.” In 1954, Burnham wrote about the nature and extent of communist infiltration of our government that McCarthy and others exposed in "The Web of Subversion" (1954). But Burnham first brought geopolitics into the fledgling conservative movement when he agreed to become a senior editor of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s new magazine National Review. And it was in one of Burnham’s first columns for NR in the Nov. 26, 1955 issue, that he added geopolitics to the conservative lexicon.
Geopolitics and Mackinder
The immediate subject of Burnham’s column was the growing crisis in the Middle East along the Egypt-Israeli border, but Burnham used the crisis to introduce NR’s readers to the geopolitical ideas of the great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder. Mackinder’s most profound geopolitical works spanned the time period between 1904-43, and analyzed the global struggles for power between land powers based in Eurasia and insular sea powers, such as his native Great Britain and the United States. Burnham had been influenced by Mackinder and other geopolitical thinkers since the early 1940s when he wrote "The Managerial Revolution." In January 1945, he wrote an essay for Partisan Review entitled “Lenin’s Heir,” in which he wrote that Stalin was approaching the postwar world on the basis of Mackinder’s “heartland” theory which held that effective political control of the Eurasian-African landmass (which he called the “World-Island”) could result in a global empire.
After the war (during which Burnham worked for the Office of Strategic Services), he wrote a Cold War trilogy and his assessment of the U.S.-Soviet contest was informed by Mackinder’s geopolitical concepts. Burnham’s intellectual debt to Mackinder has been noted by Nash, Daniel Kelly, Samuel Francis, John Patrick Diggins, and others.
In his Nov. 26, 1955 column, Burnham insisted that the Egypt-Israeli border dispute must be viewed “in the perspective of world geography.” The Middle East, he wrote, is the “Land Bridge between Eurasia and Africa.” He borrowed Mackinder’s terms to describe Eurasia-Africa: “the Great Continent,” “the World Island.” Great Britain, he explained, “stood guard at the bridge” from its posts in Suez and Palestine. He noted that medieval writers often depicted Jerusalem as “the center, the navel, of the world.”
Burnham quoted Mackinder (from Democratic Ideals and Reality): “If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the southern Heartlands [i.e., from central Eurasia to Central Africa], is central in the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages.”
Contemplating a Soviet-dominated Middle East
The Middle East, in other words, was strategically important, and not just because of oil but also because of geography and global geopolitics. Burnham worried that Soviet infiltration of the Arab League and its support for Arab nationalist movements, combined with Britain’s receding empire, meant that the Land-Bridge was open. “[T]he guards,” he wrote, “have left their posts.” What, therefore, would be the consequences of a Soviet-dominated Middle East? Again, he quoted (and updated) Mackinder: “‘What if the Great Continent,’ Mackinder asked 36 years ago, ‘the whole World Island or a large part of it, were at some future time to become a single and united base of sea power [let us translate to ‘air power’]? Would not the other insular bases be outbuilt as regards [planes] and outmanned as regards [airmen]? Their [squadrons] would no doubt fight with all the heroism begotten of their histories, but the end would be fated.’”
For the next 23 years (Burnham ceased to write for NR in 1978 after suffering from a stroke), Burnham frequently used Mackinder’s geopolitical ideas in his bi-weekly columns for NR. Brian Crozier, who succeeded Burnham at NR, remarked that Burnham wrote “the best column on international affairs in contemporary English journalism.” Those columns, wrote George Nash, “supplied the conservative intellectual movement with the theoretical formulation for victory in the cold war.” As Robert Merry has noted, Burnham’s columns influenced many young conservatives who helped Ronald Reagan formulate and implement policies that led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
The citation to the Medal of Freedom awarded to Burnham by President Reagan in 1983 reads in part: “Freedom, reason and decency have had few greater champions in this century than James Burnham.”