The Protracted Conflict

Since NR’s founding my periodic comments have appeared under the logo, “The Third World War.” The change I now make relates to medium, not message. I’m afraid the old label had become a barrier, not a gate.

By choosing “The Third World War” as the name for a column of comment on current international (and internationally related) affairs, I sought to suggest to the reader two facts—or what, at any rate, I believe to be facts. First, the United States is engaged in a global struggle, with decisive victory or even more decisive defeat at stake. Second, this struggle, not some possible conflict that might start at some moment of the future, is our century’s World War III. In my book, The Struggle for the World, published in 1947, I dated this struggle as having begun in the spring of 1944: that is, at the moment when the leaders of the Communist enterprise, seeing that the defeat of the Nazis was assured, altered their strategy to maximum exploitation of the victory at the expense of their temporary partners. The turn was conspicuously marked by the Communist-led revolt in the Greek navy at Alexandria, Tito’s shift from anti-Nazi to almost entirely anti-Mikhailovitch operations, the public thrust given the Free Germany committees and the swing of the Communists’ China policy to a hard anti-Chiang line.

JB

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James Burnham

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Since NR’s founding my periodic comments have appeared under the logo, “The Third World War.” The change I now make relates to medium, not message. I’m afraid the old label had become a barrier, not a gate.

By choosing “The Third World War” as the name for a column of comment on current international (and internationally related) affairs, I sought to suggest to the reader two facts—or what, at any rate, I believe to be facts. First, the United States is engaged in a global struggle, with decisive victory or even more decisive defeat at stake. Second, this struggle, not some possible conflict that might start at some moment of the future, is our century’s World War III. In my book, The Struggle for the World, published in 1947, I dated this struggle as having begun in the spring of 1944: that is, at the moment when the leaders of the Communist enterprise, seeing that the defeat of the Nazis was assured, altered their strategy to maximum exploitation of the victory at the expense of their temporary partners. The turn was conspicuously marked by the Communist-led revolt in the Greek navy at Alexandria, Tito’s shift from anti-Nazi to almost entirely anti-Mikhailovitch operations, the public thrust given the Free Germany committees and the swing of the Communists’ China policy to a hard anti-Chiang line.