It was 80 years ago this month that James Burnham’s article titled “Lenin’s Heir” appeared in Partisan Review. It was the top article advertised on the magazine’s cover. It is, unfortunately, unknown to most Americans, but it was one of the earliest public warnings of the emerging Cold War, written when the Soviet Union was still our wartime “ally” against the Axis powers.
Burnham was then working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and would in a few years become a consultant to the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the spring of 1944, Burnham had written a secret assessment for the OSS that asserted that the Cold War (what Burnham called the “Third World War”) had already started while the Second World War was still being fought.
Burnham’s warning was a full year before George Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” and more than two years before Kennan wrote his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs that called for the containment of the Soviet Union. “Lenin’s Heir” deserves a place among the most important Cold War documents, and James Burnham should be recognized as perhaps the greatest prophet of the Cold War.
Burnham started writing for Partisan Review in the late 1930s, shortly before he broke with Marxism (the Trotskyite wing) and began his journey to conservatism. When he wrote “Lenin’s Heir,” Burnham could be classified as a liberal anti-communist (though Burnham later renounced all ideology).
Ten years later, he would join William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, where he wrote a regular column on the Cold War for the next 23 years. Brian Crozier accurately characterized Burnham’s National Review articles as the best column on international affairs written in the English language.
In “Lenin’s Heir,” Burnham began by noting Trotsky’s description of Stalin as a “mediocrity” who was “crude, ignorant, provincial, uncultured, empty of creative political ideas, without imagination.” Burnham concluded, however, that the war years and the years leading up to the war proved that Trotsky was wrong.
Instead, Stalin was in the tradition of the Tsars, Median and Persian Kings, and Mongol Khanates. He feasted in banquets while millions starved, and died at the front and in the ever-expanding Gulag. He consolidated political power and liquidated his real and perceived opponents. He purged and deported millions of his subjects, and starved Ukrainians even as he sold wheat abroad.
Stalin’s diplomacy, Burnham wrote, had been bold — first striking a deal with Hitler that expanded Soviet power, then posing as democracy’s ally when Hitler broke the pact, and all the while fueling communist parties in European and Asian countries (including China) and infiltrating spies and agents of influence in the United States. Even while reeling in the early years of the German onslaught, Stalin kept what Burnham called the “political initiative.”
Most important, according to Burnham, was Stalin’s “geopolitical vision,” which Burnham compared to the theories of Britain’s great geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder. Stalin’s immediate goal was to dominate the Eurasian landmass and then use it as a geopolitical base from which to establish global hegemony. In this respect, Stalin was the true heir of Lenin who sought to ignite a global communist revolution. “
There is nothing basic that Stalin has done,” Burnham wrote, “from the institution of terror as the primary foundation of the state to the assertion of a political monopoly, the seeds and shoots of which were not planted and flourishing under Lenin.” This truth, Burnham wrote, is “indispensable for an understanding of what is now happening in the world, and for the choice of a viable attitude toward what is happening.” Burnham’s public warning of Soviet global designs, therefore, preceded the more famous warnings of George Kennan.
Burnham’s “Lenin’s Heir” is not just of historical interest. China today poses an even greater threat to U.S. security than the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.
Today, there are Burnhams and Kennans who have tried to warn us that Chinese President Xi Jinping is Mao Zedong’s heir: Hannah Beech, Christopher Marquis, Elizabeth Economy, Stephen Mosher, Rush Doshi, Doug Bandow, Jamil Anderlini, Michael Schuman, among others.
Perhaps the best assessment of the Xi-Mao comparison and what it means for the United States and its allies is Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. It is a book that should be on the reading list of President Trump’s national security personnel. It is a warning worthy of Burnham and Kennan.
Xi today, like Stalin in 1945, has a “geopolitical vision” manifested in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive military build-up, and its pledge to erase what Mao called the “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers.
Xi is indeed Mao’s heir and Xi’s China has greater relative economic and military power vis-à-vis the United States than Mao ever had.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
Robert Kaplan’s Weimar Analogy Ignores Mackinder’s Final Word on Geopolitics