The Third World War

For long-term strategy, individual defeats are seldom catastrophic. Both sides in all great wars always suffer defeats. Defeats are the indispensable classrooms, laboratories and training grounds of victory, if we respond to them creatively, as challenge rather than disaster.

In the past month we have suffered a series of defeats, in South Korea, Turkey and Japan—the last an unmixed defeat of large and enlarging proportions. Severe as our losses have been, they are not one-tenth as grave as the failure of our leaders to make any sort of creative or even reasonably serious response. We ordinary citizens wait for so much as a single voice to give a sober assessment of the past, a fresh guide toward the future, or merely some expression to heightened feeling—of anger at the infamy of the enemy, contempt for the fools, cowards and traitors in our ranks, patriotic fervor for our beleagured country.

JB

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James Burnham

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For long-term strategy, individual defeats are seldom catastrophic. Both sides in all great wars always suffer defeats. Defeats are the indispensable classrooms, laboratories and training grounds of victory, if we respond to them creatively, as challenge rather than disaster.

In the past month we have suffered a series of defeats, in South Korea, Turkey and Japan—the last an unmixed defeat of large and enlarging proportions. Severe as our losses have been, they are not one-tenth as grave as the failure of our leaders to make any sort of creative or even reasonably serious response. We ordinary citizens wait for so much as a single voice to give a sober assessment of the past, a fresh guide toward the future, or merely some expression to heightened feeling—of anger at the infamy of the enemy, contempt for the fools, cowards and traitors in our ranks, patriotic fervor for our beleagured country.