During the first half of the 20^th century, the Jesuit priest Father Edmund Walsh was one of America’s most influential foreign policy theorists. He combined a fierce and knowledgeable anticommunism with a keen grasp of global geopolitical realities. Fr. Walsh was an adviser to American presidents, a consultant to Chief Counsel Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials, and the founder of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He was one of the country’s great Christian realists during the early years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and today’s foreign policy practitioners would benefit immensely from Fr. Walsh’s thinking as they navigate the ship of state through a second Cold War against another communist adversary—China. 

There was a time when the American Roman Catholic church was a great adversary of communism, Fr. Walsh being perhaps the most prominent example. In the early 1920s, Fr. Walsh headed the church’s humanitarian efforts to deal with famine in Soviet Russia, a tragedy the great historian of Russia Richard Pipes called “the greatest human disaster in European history, other than those caused by war, since the Black Death of the fourteenth century.” By the end of 1922, five million Russians were dead of starvation. An equal or greater number died from the fighting in Russia’s civil war. And then there was the Bolshevik “Red Terror” inspired by Lenin to root out any opposition to Bolshevik rule—including opposition by churches in Russia. Fr. Walsh arrived in Moscow in March 1922, just as the Bolsheviks ramped-up their campaign against priests and churches in Russia. Church properties were confiscated. Many priests and bishops were murdered, while others were found guilty in sham “clergy trials” and ended up on the Solovetsky Islands in a monastery that the Bolsheviks converted into a prison—the beginnings of the infamous Gulag Archipelago.  

Fr. Walsh’s experience of early Bolshevik rule in Russia shaped his fervent anticommunism for the next four decades. In his diary, Walsh called Soviet communism “the most reactionary and savage school of thought known to history,” and compared Soviet terror policies to those of the French Revolution. Communism, he wrote, was “bent upon the destruction of spiritual ideals.” In one letter, Walsh declared that “the avowed purpose of the [Communist] Government is to destroy every religion.”  

Biographer Patrick McNamara noted that during the 1920s, Fr. Walsh “was on a crusade to spread the gospel of anticommunism.” At Georgetown University where he served as regent of its foreign service school, Walsh established and taught courses on communist theory and practice. He became a recognized expert on Soviet affairs. Richard Gid Powers in his excellent history of American anticommunism, described Fr. Walsh as “the most influential Catholic anticommunist in the country.”  

Fr. Walsh lectured at U.S. war colleges, where officers in the audience included then-Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later “vividly recalled Walsh’s presentation” of the Soviet threat to the free world. In 1928, Fr. Walsh authored a book titled The Fall of the Russian Empire, which covered the period from the end of the Romanov dynasty to early Bolshevik rule. He predicted in the book that “no lasting peace is possible in Europe or Asia until the breach between Russia and the West is securely bridged.” Like George Kennan years later, Fr. Walsh discerned the sources of Soviet conduct in both Russian history and communist ideology. And he foreshadowed his later appreciation of geopolitics by noting the geographic basis of Soviet power. 

Long before Karl Marx, Russia had been an expansionist power for centuries. The adoption of Communist ideology by the Russian state, which preached world revolution, served to further justify Russian plans for global hegemony. Patrick McNamara noted that throughout the 1930s, Fr. Walsh “attempted to persuade the American public and American policymakers that Soviet Russia was and continued to be ideologically driven, its goal being world domination.”  In speeches and writings, he vigorously and publicly opposed U.S. recognition of the new Soviet regime. Historian Richard Gid Powers notes that Walsh ridiculed naïve Soviet apologists like Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw, who after a brief tour of the Soviet Union in 1931 expressed unbounded enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment. Fr. Walsh was highly critical of President Franklin Roosevelt when FDR formally extended diplomatic recognition to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1933.  

Biographer Patrick McNamara wrote that through the 1920s and 1930s, Fr. Walsh “was an idealist who sought to promote the moral element in international affairs.” But beginning in the 1940s with the world at war and continuing into the early years of the Cold War, Fr. Walsh emerged as a geopolitical realist—an intellectual disciple of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Halford Mackinder, and an admirer, though with qualification, of the German geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer, whose ideas influenced Adolf Hitler’s quest for world domination. At the height of the Cold War, Fr. Walsh even advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.   

If Edmund Walsh the anticommunist was an idealist, Edmund Walsh the geopolitician was a realist. In 1944, he penned an essay that began with an appreciation of the three great geopolitical works of Mackinder—his 1904 address “The Geographical Pivot of History,” his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality, and his 1943 Foreign Affairs article “The Round world and the Winning of the Peace.” He characterized these works as “Mackinder’s masterful analysis of power politics,” and noted Haushofer’s admiration of Mackinder. Haushofer believed that the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 provided Germany with sufficient “living space” and made the Nazi-Soviet alliance the world’s preeminent global power. Hitler, however, had other ideas which he had spelled out in Mein Kampf.  When Germany invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941, Haushofer knew Germany was doomed.  

Fr. Walsh worried about Soviet power expanding into Eastern and Central Europe. He predicted that Stalin would “incorporate” into the Soviet empire the lands his armies occupied. He was critical of FDR’s appeasement of the Soviets, who, he wrote, were establishing a sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe with the goal of dominating all of Europe and Asia. Stalin, he wrote, will expand communism in a way “hostile to Christianity and Democracy.” 

In a lecture at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in August 1952, Fr. Walsh explained the Soviet geopolitical threat to the West. Since 1945, he wrote, the Soviet Union has established a “new Communist Empire, the largest in recorded history.” Communist domination of the Heartland and its Asian and part of its European rimland meant that the Soviets and their allies were geographically positioned to make a bid for world empire. The Soviets, he explained, sought to unite Eurasia’s inner “Heartland” with its outer, coastal “Rimlands,” thus presenting the Atlantic world with a fait accompli.  

In November 1952, Fr. Walsh suffered a stroke which effectively ended his public career. He died four years later. His legacy of Christian realism lives on and is sorely needed in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls Cold War II—our current geopolitical competition with Communist China. China, like the Soviet Union in Cold War I, is shaped by its history and communist ideology. China’s leader Xi Jinping is a committed communist of the Maoist sect. Today’s challenge is greater than that posed by the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1989. What the United States needs to effectively meet China’s challenge is the anticommunist geopolitical realism of Fr. Edmund Walsh.