The Choking Point

“Berlin,” Khrushchev told us in that disconcertingly frank way he often has, “is a bone in our throat.” Mr. Kennedy could well echo that Cuba is a bone in ours.

Russia is a land power. Berlin can be thought of as an island in the middle of the great north European plain that stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals (or, looked at from the opposite perspective, from Russia into western Europe). The Berlin region—Prussia, that is—is the jump-off point for Western invasions of Russia, whether led by a Roman Varus, a French Napoleon, a Prussian Wilhelm, an Austrian Hitler or an American of a possible future. As Muscovy swelled from a provincial duchy to an empire, with her immense dynamism, restrained by the western glacis, bursting east and south, the enlarged geographic scale brought Berlin to, and finally within, her strategic threshold. As Moscow must see it, today’s West Berlin, with an anti-Communist civil government and an elite Anglo-French-American garrison, is an enemy outpost planted inside her own vestibule.

JB

About the Author

James Burnham

Featured Tags

“Berlin,” Khrushchev told us in that disconcertingly frank way he often has, “is a bone in our throat.” Mr. Kennedy could well echo that Cuba is a bone in ours.

Russia is a land power. Berlin can be thought of as an island in the middle of the great north European plain that stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals (or, looked at from the opposite perspective, from Russia into western Europe). The Berlin region—Prussia, that is—is the jump-off point for Western invasions of Russia, whether led by a Roman Varus, a French Napoleon, a Prussian Wilhelm, an Austrian Hitler or an American of a possible future. As Muscovy swelled from a provincial duchy to an empire, with her immense dynamism, restrained by the western glacis, bursting east and south, the enlarged geographic scale brought Berlin to, and finally within, her strategic threshold. As Moscow must see it, today’s West Berlin, with an anti-Communist civil government and an elite Anglo-French-American garrison, is an enemy outpost planted inside her own vestibule.