For That or Nothing

Shudders will go up a lot of spines because of James Burnham's new book (The Struggle for the World--John Day; $3) published just five days after President Truman's historic message to Congress (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Burnham's purpose is neither to create nor allay shudders, but to stiffen the national spine.

His argument has been made before, sometimes with more tact, sometimes with more violence--never with such a compelling combination of chilling logic and prophetic fire. Everybody will want to disbelieve it. "Fascist warmongering" will "be among the gentler terms applied to it. Only one defense of Burnham's book can be made: it is--appallingly--true.

The Prospect. The Struggle for the World can be summarized in a series of questions & answers:

Q. Is it really One World?

A. "From the time of Lenin . . . every Communist has been drilled to believe that in the world there are only two divisions of mankind: the Communists, and all the rest. . . . When the Communist sings 'The international Party shall be the human race' he means what he says and he expresses his view of the process by which alone he thinks that ultimate difference [between peoples] can be overcome."

Q. Can it become One World?

A. "The transcendent power concentrated in atomic weapons makes politically possible . . . the domination of the world by a single sufficiently large state, provided that state holds the monopoly of atomic weapons. The threat of mutual destruction by atomic weapons of all the states that might possess them, assuming that there are more than one, makes certain that each such state will strive to acquire the monopoly. But a monopoly of atomic weapons can be secured only by gaming world domination."

Q. Is there no substitute, through U.N. or otherwise, for this "power politics?"

A. " 'Power politics' is the only kind of politics there is. ... When someone condemns 'power politics' it is a sign either that he doesn't know what politics is about, or that he is objecting to someone else's power politics while simultaneously camouflaging his own."

Q. If there must be domination of the world by one state, which might that be?

A. "The present candidates for World Empire are only two: the Soviet Union and the U.S."

Q. What can the U.S. do to prevent Communist world domination?

A. Defensively, block the two main Communist aims, which at present are "consolidation of effective domination of Eurasia, and the infiltration and weakening of all countries which cannot be brought under Communist control." Offensively, the U.S. can help friendly, non-Communist nations by "loans, relief, mutually profitable trading agreements, machines, floods of wanted consumers' goods, easy financial terms. . . . They could all be made to repeat the lesson that it is a materially pleasant and profitable thing to be associated with the United States. . . . Concessions alone would not, however, be enough. . . . The realization that it is good to be a friend of the United States must be inseparably tied to the further realization that it is fearful to be its enemy."

Q. Will the U.S., in fact, adopt such a strong, clear policy of world leadership?

A. "The evidence suggests that the U.S. in world affairs will have a policy of vacillation . . . perhaps the worst of all policies . . . because one action in one direction merely cancels another in another direction."

The Last, Long Chance. If a policy of vacillation is followed, Burnham believes that the Communists will be able to pick their own time for war between Russia and the U.S., and that Russia would win such a war even though the U.S. had superiority in atomic weapons. In the absence of a strong U.S. political policy to win world leadership, even a preventive war now by the U.S. against Russia would not end the threat of Communist world domination. But--just possibly--the U.S. might achieve a political policy strong enough to break the Communist drive, and thus avoid a Russian-U.S. war.

Some of Burnham's specific suggestions for carrying out a positive policy are much weaker than his over-all analysis. He, like Secretary of Labor Schwellenbach (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), proposes the suppression of the Communist Party, without explaining how that could be done effectively.

As the author of The Managerial Revolution, Burnham believes that free enterprise economics is done for. The present book gives free enterprise no role in the U.S. foreign policy; apparently, the economic rivalry with Russia is to be a competition in collectivism.

Burnham, however, is quite willing to leave to others the task of finding just how and where to apply the general policy of building what he calls the "democratic world order."

Burnham's conclusion (and much of the rest of his book) draws heavily on Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History (TIME, March 17). Gloomily he holds out a great, Toynbeean hope:

"History offers each of its great challenges only once. After only one failure, or one refusal, the offer is withdrawn. Babylon, Athens, Thebes, Alexandria, Madrid, Vienna sink back, and do not rise again. ... It may be that the darkness of great tragedy will bring to a quick end the short, bright history of the United States --for there is enough truth in the dream of the New World to make the action tragic. The United States is called before the rehearsals are completed. Its strength and promise have not been matured by the wisdom of time and suffering. And the summons is for nothing less than the leadership of the world, for that or nothing. If it is reasonable to expect failure, that is only a measure of how great the triumph could be."

Harry Truman--or any American--looks small against that measure. The American people look bigger than Burnham thinks they do.

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