On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton?
Chris Preble makes the case for military restraint as a de-escalation strategy in the middle east
In his State of the Union address in February, President Trump sounded like a non-interventionist when he said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” Since then, he has begun to draw down America’s military presence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Due to the growing unpopularity of drawn-out wars in the Middle East, and Trump’s focus on reelection in 2020, he probably does not want to start another endless war with Iran. However, much of his rhetoric has been hawkish — perhaps influenced by his national security advisor, arch-hawk neocon John Bolton.
The latest news is that he is growing disenchanted with Bolton, who helped design the Iraq War and has even called for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.
It was reported that Trump teased Bolton last year — shortly after his appointment — asking, “You’re not going to bring me into a war, are you?” But we can detect a seriousness beneath Trump’s remarks, signaling an insecurity about his ability to resist outside pressures to exercise America’s immense military might.
Bolton is Trump’s fourth national security advisor, and some worry that his reluctance to fire yet another cabinet member could lead him into the same kind of trap that led George W. Bush into Iraq in 2003. Sketchy intelligence, an idle standing army, and a convenient enemy in an oil-rich region… this story sounds familiar.
The difference this time around is that the public adamantly does not want war. As Cato’s Trevor Thrall documented back in 2016, a growing number of Americans — and especially young people — are part of a “restraining constituency” that does not want the U.S. to serve as the world’s policeman.
The tensions between the U.S. and Iran have a complex history, but the latest escalation stems from intelligence linking the Iranian regime to an attack earlier this month on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s tough talk has included calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group,” to which they responded in kind by labelling our own military in the Middle East as terrorists as well.
It’s easy to imagine this tit-for-tat spiraling out of control, unless calmer minds in the military and cabinet can influence the President to step back from the brink. Many retired admirals, generals, ambassadors, and senior government executives comprising the American College of National Security Leaders have attempted to do just that — writing an open letter to the President warning against escalation in the Persian Gulf.
As George Washington noted over two hundred years ago, the protected geography of the U.S. ought to insulate us from foreign intervention. He thought we should go to war only when absolutely necessary for national defense, and even then, engage only in short, strategic actions.
So why have we so found ourselves in so many endless wars?
Chris Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and is now vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He recently released a video that explains the incentives behind America’s infamous military industrial complex — the hybrid beast of a bloated weapons industry and military establishment that perpetuates itself at the expense of the taxpayer and global peace.
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Chris’s new book Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy shows how the emergence of this complex cuts against the non-interventionist intentions of the Founders, and why the United States gains strength from the limits on war-making imposed by the Constitution.
Let’s hope that Trump will make good on his promise in the State of the Union. It’s a modest expectation when compared to George Washington’s skepticism of standing armies altogether.
Chris joined me to explain everything you need to know about 21st century foreign policy, but were too afraid to ask. Don’t miss it.
Transcript: War & Peace with Chris Edwards
Revisiting American Founding Principles
Bob Zadek: I’ll introduce today’s show with a hypothetical. Imagine you were the editor of a well-known nonfiction book and your publisher assigned you the following task: they give you the title of a book and the publisher says to you, “Find the perfect author for this book and get it done.” The title is Peace, War and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy. If that editor knows what he or she is doing, that editor would pick this morning’s guest as the perfect author for such a book.
With that introduction, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Christopher Preble. Chris is the Vice President for Defense and foreign policy studies at Cato. He is a published author and has published several books including The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe. Also, John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap, also A Dangerous World: Threat Perception and National Security. Chris was also a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and served aboard the USS Ticonderoga. He holds a Ph.d in History from Temple and writes at War on the Rocks, which is a platform that deals with the analysis, commentary, and debate on foreign policy. Chris is the perfect author for the perfect book, at a perfect time in our history.
Welcome to the show.
Chris Preble: Thank you, Bob. You’re too kind. I really appreciate you having me on the show.
Bob Zadek: So thanks so much for writing the book.Chris, your book is a history of American foreign policy that focuses on the instrument of war. It traces war from the founding through the day you put your computer down, having finished the book. You go on to discuss what
Americans all carry with us, in our DNA — this American view of how an individual’s life should be organized insofar as its relationship to war is concerned. What country did the founders give us insofar as an instrument of war is concerned? And also, what is the relationship between war, which is a tool, and foreign policy, which is the principle by which wars are carried out?
Chris Preble: I think the writings of the Founders and their views informed our foreign policy for at least the first hundred years of our history, if not longer. They saw the ideal U.S. foreign policy as one in which Americans were allowed and encouraged to interact with others around the world as much as possible through trade, but they saw occasions for actually resorting to war to be quite rare. In particular, they put the war powers in the hands of the Congress, not the executive, because they believed correctly that if these decisions were closer to the people, war would be less likely to occur.
They also critically limited the President’s power through maintaining a small Navy and really no permanent army. If you needed a military to go to war, you needed to raise the army to go to war. That placed an additional restriction on how often the United States could go to war.
So for the first hundred years or so of our history, the United States fought relatively few wars. The wars that were fought were fought within the interior against the Native American peoples, and a few wars against Mexico, for example. Those were declared by Congress. They raised the necessary forces, they accomplished their objectives, and then the forces were stood down.That was the pattern. That was the way the Founders intended it. I think that by and large that had served the country well because it allowed the United States to grow physically. Equally important was that we restricted the power of the state, which allowed people to grow and prosper as individuals with minimal restrictions from an intrusive state.
Isolationism: A Pejorative and Misleading Term?
Bob Zadek: The accusation by the war-hawks against those of us who are against military force, is that we are isolationists. Putting that aside whether or not isolationism is good or bad, isolation is generally looked upon negatively. However, you have explained in your introduction that by no means did the Founders, nor should the country today, ever act or behave as isolationists. It is not a question of not interacting with the world. It’s a question of the form of those interactions.
Help us to understand this unpleasant use of isolationism as a rebuttal to those who do not want to go to war.
Chris Preble: I think that the use of the term isolationism is quite deliberate. It is intended as a pejorative. It was first deployed against critics of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, but it became in vogue in the period after World War II, where the attitude of many Americans to avoid involvement in the war was cast as isolationism, and anyone who was a critic of warfare was an isolationist.
I think that’s fundamentally wrong. One of the other critical features of the 1930s was a restriction on foreign trade and severe restrictions on immigration, for example, that tried to create a much more isolated America than what we have today. It is also particularly shortsighted to say that the only way that the United States, or the best way for the United States to interact with the rest of the world is by force.
If we believe that these ideas at the foundation of America are in the DNA, then we shouldn’t have to impose them by force. They should be embraced by most people voluntarily, and they have been.
So, I think that when we privilege the military instrument over the other instruments of American power, we ironically undermine America’s influence. Therefore, that creates more isolationism. There’s been much more resistance to American ideas and including ideas of liberty and liberalism as we define it. There’s been much more resistance to that over the last 20 years, precisely because I think many people around the world believe that the United States is doing these things with the barrel of a gun. Not surprisingly that generates a lot of resistance.
Bob Zadek: The Founders believed that we should set an example of a Republican Democracy of personal freedom, free trade, etc. We should encourage that form of behavior worldwide, but not at the point of a gun. Instead we should do so by example. Remind our listeners how, given that as a country we seek to export the values that we cherish, there is more than one way to export them.
The bad way is to say “Darn it, you are going to be democratic whether you like it or not. We are sending in the troops to make sure that you are democratic.”
Instead we can set an example that shows others what the benefits are. Help us understand how we could promote freedom and free trade by example as opposed to by force.
Chris Preble: When the United States created a Constitutional government where the people were the power and the government served the interest of the people, that was a fairly new concept. I think that you see a number of countries over the ensuing 150 years or so wanting to emulate the United States. Why? Because the United States during that period of relatively limited government and relative human freedom grew very prosperously and powerfully. We demonstrated by our example that it was successful. It actually delivered benefits to a greater number of people.
People wanted to come to the United States, and if they didn’t come to the United States as immigrants they wanted to create similar governments in their places. So, I think if you look at the influence of American political ideas around the world, it definitely impacted the growth and spread of liberal democracy and republicanism and things like that. Representative government that has certain delegated powers
The other factor which we talked about was trade. Eventually the United States became an advocate of freer trade. We were not in the early days, but we became one more towards the beginning of the 20th century. We saw the benefits of trade both in being able to enhance human prosperity, but also as an instrument of peace, because people who are trading with one another build up trust, which reduces the likelihood of conflict, because people are less likely to fight when they are buying and selling things from each other as opposed to taking them from one another by force.
Military Ease and a New Meaning to “Defense”: Two Reasons for Increasing Involvement in War
Bob Zadek: To supplement what you just said, it is a truism that people are less likely to kill their customers or their suppliers than they are otherwise. If you are trading with somebody, your self-interest is not furthered by bumping off those people who are buying your product. Your book is magnificent in its analysis and discussion of war. We start with a country founded on the principle of do not harm others except in self-defense. Defense was important. We evolved into a country that is permanently at war. The leaders of our country have found war to be politically useful. We’ll get into that in a second.
Help us understand how we evolved from a country that was genetically opposed to war to one that is permanently at war more than any other country on the planet. What accounts for this bizarre evolution?
Chris Preble: First of all, it is relatively easy for the United States of America to wage war because we have a large military and it is deployed in many places around the world. It is staffed by professionals whose job it is to wage war or to deter war. That was not always the case. I pointed out that in the past when the United States wanted to wage war it had to raise a military in order to do it. But because the President now has that military at his disposal, it effectively flips the premise and says that the President uses the military and then dares Congress to cut off the funds for that military, which almost never happens. So first of all, it is easy. It is relatively easy for us to wage war in a way that it is not for most other countries.
Secondly, we redefined what was required to keep our country defended. After World War II, we created the National Security Act of 1947. Among other things, it created the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and things like that. Critically, it redefined the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Prior to that, there was a Department of War and a Department of Navy. We defined “defense” after World War Two as not primarily defending the United States and the approaches to the United States at sea, but to defending an idea that had to be defended forwardly, mostly in Europe and Asia. That is why U.S. Forces remained in Europe and Asia or were sent to Europe and Asia during the Cold War. The argument was that in order for the United States to be secure, the military had to be deployed abroad.
One other quick point on how easy it was to go to war. The Constitution makes it hard to do things. That was another one of the insights of the Founders. You would need a large public groundswell to make major changes in public policy. You need all the branches to align. Those occasions are quite rare. Of course, we have seen the sort of paralysis that afflicts our government in most domestic policy matters. War, by contrast, is the easiest of all things the President can do. I think it’s the combination of this new idea about what is required to keep us safe — one that I think can and should be challenged — but also just the mechanics of it that make it so easy. I think that we don’t have a debate about foreign policy and especially about the use of force, precisely for the reason that most people think it is not worth debating. It seems obvious and easy.
Congressional Declarations of War: A Rarely Used Constitutional Safeguard
Bob Zadek: Explicit in what you said is that Congress was given the weighty responsibility that only they could declare war. What has happened in our country is that those who are elected to Congress are focused primarily and perhaps not surprisingly on the preservation of what turns out to be a pretty gosh darn good job. They’d like to keep it, all things being equal. And the best way to keep your job, if you’re an elected official, is not doing anything that is going to cause you to get yelled at. So Congress, in order to preserve their wonderful job — free parking at national airports, Reagan airport and the like, the best thing to do is to take all the hard decisions and push them out to other branches of the government, the executive, and the judiciary.
Therefore, Congress can pass lofty, broad bills that preserve peace, while leaving the details to others, so that way the judicial and executive branches get all the heat and they can keep their jobs. All of the wars we have been in have never been specifically declared by Congress. They are all illegal wars or not wars. Korea was a police action. There was never a declaration of war.
Help us understand how many wars we were in but which were never declared. In a manner of speaking, all of the wars we were in were just plain unconstitutional.
Chris Preble: World War II was the last time you had a formal declaration where Congress actually authorized and declared war. You had several occasions since then such as the gulf war in 1991 where there was Congressional authorization to use military force, there was congressional authorization to use military force after 9/11, and there was another one leading into the Iraq war. So, there are occasions when Congress actually does vote, but they are rare, and even those authorizations, which are constructed not as declarations of war, is a sign of Congress’s willingness to give up its authority to the executive. They say, “If you Mr. President, decide that it is in the United States interest to go to war, then this authorization gives you that blank check.”
They are notoriously open-ended. The authorization still exists. There are people who will be deploying to Afghanistan this year who were not born at the time of the passage of the 2001 AUMF. You have people fighting under the 2002 AUMF on pretenses that are completely phony to the war in Iraq. So, Congress has really given up this power and has done it in a fairly cynical and self-interested way.
Two other quick points. First of all, Madison, famously one of the principal authors of the Constitution, called the War Powers Clause the most important in the entire document. He understood how important it was. For people who comment on Congress’s willingness to give up its power over war and say it is important for the President to have that ability, I wonder how people would respond if Congress routinely gave up other powers that are explicitly delegated to it in the Constitution.
For example, if the congress just said, “We are not really sure whether or not raising taxes is such a good idea, but we will let the President decide and he can take the heat if taxes go up.” Or take the origination of spending bills, which is also vested in the powers of Congress in the Constitution. If they decided, “Well, in fact, the President’s budget submission isn’t just a suggestion, it is actually the law of the land so we’ll just treat it as such.”
If Congress routinely relinquished the powers granted to it by the Constitution, I think most people would feel that they were not doing their jobs and that it was literally a dereliction of duty. Yet somehow when they choose to avoid weighing in on matters of war and peace, the public sentiment is a sort of a shrug of the shoulders. I think we really need to turn the tables on this whole process and say it is politically damaging for a member of Congress to not weigh in on matters of war and peace, because it is truly one of the most important decisions that he or she can make as an elected official.
Bob Zadek: As an aside, Congress has delegated huge swaths of legislative authority through the administrative state. That is for another show. Help us understand how once we are in a war, the target of the war easily slips from a foreign threat to a domestic threat.
This is the issue of preemption versus preventative wars. That is, wars in anticipation of a threat.
This involves the word “defense.” As a practicing lawyer, I teach those who work with me that “words matter.” The word “defense” has become so polluted and captured that it has lost its dictionary meaning. It has been used now as to defend foreign policy initiatives that have nothing to do with defense at all.
The War Goes from Foreign to Domestic: A Dangerous Transition
Chris Preble: When we redefined or renamed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, we implied that in order for the United States to defend itself we would actually have to be fighting more wars and be present in lots of places around the world, and we have been since the end of World War II. Again, that is very different from the way we had practiced it for most of our history. We see it play out in that the United States is engaged in a number of wars around the world. We have troops on the ground and a number of places fighting, and then we’ll have places where we don’t actually have troops on the ground and we are conducting more from the air. To most objective observers, that would look like an offense, and in some cases, even aggression, which is not defensive at all.
We draw a distinction between actions taken to protect one’s life and liberty, from those taken to deny others life and liberty. I think there’s basic critical concept of the nonaggression principle which libertarians understand very well. Having said that, there are occasions for the use of force. I’m not a pacifist. I think that we can look at certain instances in American history where the use of force was appropriate. It was truly for those rare cases where for our own security it was necessary to take preemptive action, that is that there was evidence of an imminent attack danger to the United States. Preemption in that sense is a legitimate form of self defense.
Prevention is much more like aggression. Prevention is spying across the room or across the world some future danger and saying rather than risk that future danger actually materializing we are going to take them out ahead of time. To most independent observers that would just look like aggression. I think it’s important for us to differentiate between defensive measures that are designed to protect us from harm and those that are actually much more aggressive in nature and therefore likely to stimulate resistance to the United States or resistance to our actions around the world and undermine our ability to be a model of liberty, which is what we talked about at the start of the show.
Bob Zadek: You were on Free Thoughts, a podcast sponsored by Libertarianism.org and Cato, and you mentioned, our initial foray into Afghanistan as an example of justifiable use of military force. I was thinking about that and in my mind it was kind of on the border. I wasn’t as all in as you seemed to be on Afghanistan. What is there about Afghanistan that made the use of military force appropriate under the principle of defense?
Chris Preble: It connects entirely to al Qaeda and to the events of 9/11. Al Qaeda demonstrated that it was a concrete threat to the United States. The war had effectively started against al Qaeda in 1998 after the bombings in Africa, in Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. Those attacks were when the United States started to take the threat from al-Qaeda seriously and to actually consider a military operation against it in the places where it was operating after 9/11. Afghanistan was where the base camps were.
I think that usaully the use of force is not particularly effective against terrorist organizations because the hard part of war against a terrorist is finding them. Killing them once you know where they are is fairly easy.
Most of the effective work that is done to reduce the danger of terrorism is by law enforcement and some intelligence, and via cooperation with other law enforcement agencies around the world. That is where most of the successes have occurred. I understand it is a debatable proposition. I know there are some people that don’t think that was a justified use of force. But, I think that in the case of Afghanistan in September and October of 2001, the presence of al Qaeda camps and personnel in a physical location that was targetable by military force, was an appropriate use of force. I also think, while we’re at it, that it was appropriate to explicitly punish the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda, which they did, in order to send a message to other countries that might have been tempted to do the same thing.
I do think that there is some deterrent effect that it carries with it when you take action against terrorist organizations in foreign countries. That does not mean that it’s an easy call. It does not mean there are no risks. I think the risks we have seen in Afghanistan is that the mission has evolved considerably since we went in. What we’ve been trying to accomplish in Afghanistan for the most part since November or December of 2001 is not easily defended on counter terrorism or national security grounds.
Bob Zadek: Is there an easy standard citizens of our country can look at to decide whether our leaders are acting in our best interests? Can you give any guidance at all as to how we can make a judgment whether the use of force in a foreign country is justified under the narrow definition of defense or whether it is too expansive? Or is it just a judgment call? You know it when you see it.
Chris Preble: I think that first of all, it requires a certain degree of skepticism on the part of all Americans, but especially our elected officials that is members of Congress, who we elect to help communicate our preferences. They should be skeptical of claims by the President or his advisors of a national security threat. They are empowered. Some of them have access to information that would allow them to assess the nature of the threat. I think they should have a very skeptical view of those things. I think journalists need to be much more critical and skeptical of the information presented to them, precisely because of what we now know. I document this in some detail in the book. We now know how the major media handles information about the supposed threats from Iraq leading up to that war.
Frankly, many of those news organizations did not do their job effectively and did not scrutinize those claims. I think that that is a critical point. The other thing is that precisely because it is so easy for us to wage war, we should be extraordinarily careful in doing so. It is easy for us to wage war, but that doesn’t mean that other countries around the world are just going to roll over and take it. That’s the part that I think we forget. I think that it starts with a certain amount of skepticism and a certain amount of empowerment on the part of individuals to be willing to question the claims that they are presented with and to seek out other sources of information that might suggest that the danger is not as great as we are told it is by the mainstream media.
Wars on Ideas: An Excuse for Permanent Governmental Expansion?
Bob Zadek: Once we are on a war footing, which we have been on certainly since 9/11, the focus and mission of the military starts to get blurred. It goes from being focused on foreign threats from foreign powers, to being focused inwardly, the so called “war on terror,” so that the domestic civil rights and freedoms become threatened. Madison knew that would happen. Madison observed that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Madison and others knew that war was the way that government accumulated power against its people. Help us understand how the distinction between foreign and domestic targets gets blurred.
Chris Preble: When the United States or any country is engaged in foreign conflict, there is a tendency for individuals to mute their criticism and to self censor, to avoid criticizing their country’s conduct. They do not want to seem disloyal at a time of war. I also talk about it in the context of the growth of the state in general. The measures that the country has to employ to mobilize a military power and to maintain it in foreign countries would not be tolerated in peacetime. And yet when we’re in a position of war or in a state of war, people grow quiescent. They allow certain things to happen and they do not criticize it.
During World War II, for example, it would have seemed particularly petty to complain about a rationing or gas stamps, or things like that, when your neighbor’s son has been killed in combat.
So the people censor themselves. On top of that, you have a government that is routinely engaging in legal action against critics of war. This happened infamously during World War 1 where Eugene Debs spent a good part of the war from a jail cell and ran for president against Woodrow Wilson from a jail cell. You had the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which is one of the more notorious cases in World War II. And then you just have a general tone of the stifling of dissent, sometimes actively, by arresting and prosecuting people for behavior that in any other context would be normal.
The kinds of rights and liberties we expect in a free society. Being in a state of permanent war steadily erodes human liberty in ways that are not always perceptible while they are going on, but, but afterwards, if actually stop to ponder it, we can see how much we have given up in terms of our ability to criticize our government and raise questions about new governmental powers.
Bob Zadek: Think back about how many times in recent memory our government has taken actions that compromise our individual freedoms in the name of National Security. I’m not trying to single out Trump, but it is just in recent memory. He is our president. Trump has used national security as a basis to impose tariffs on Mexico, so we cannot import Toyotas from Mexico. It is in the name of national security. What goes on at the border is “national security.” The word has become cheapened or the words so that it has no more meaning. The word “defense” has become cheapened so it has no more meaning. It becomes political cover for the government to always temporarily compromise and take away our personal freedoms in the name of national security.
This is what has happened as a result of our being on a permanent war footing. We have been denied our liberties and the liberties never come back. As somebody with a military background, how will we know when the war on terror has been won?
Chris Preble: There is no way to know, because when you declare war on a tactic, which is what terrorism is, you can never be certain that someone is not thinking about planning to use violence against civilians for a political purpose, which is what terrorism is. The framing of the war on terrorism as a war against an idea and a tactic rather than against a group of individuals or a particular organization means that it is open ended by its very nature. This is why it is so critical for the authorization to use military force that was passed after 9/11 must be revisited. It must be repealed. If in the future a President believes that such an authorization is necessary to fight a particular organization or group of people, then he should have to come to Congress and make that case explicitly.
You fixed on the precise problem. If we were to declare a war against the use of submarines, for example, then does that mean that we are entitled to go to war with every single country that has a submarine in the harbor? The various techniques that individuals or groups or even countries employ are tactics and techniques. They are not an object of war in a traditional sense. I think we need to be very careful about allowing those terms to become the frame for conducting a war around the world.
Bob Zadek: The perfect way to become a dictator is to declare a war on a concept because there will never be peace. That means whatever powers you have accumulated in fighting a war on whatever, those powers will be with you for as long as you are in office. Nobody can ever take them away. Of course, nobody can ever prove that you have won the war. It is a permanent erosion of liberty. The War on Terror is nothing other than the latest example of using vacuous words to create an enlargement of government power at the expense of our citizens.
Concluding Thoughts: How to Be Influential Without War
Bob Zadek: Maybe the most important idea in your book is your emphasis on free trade and the interaction with other countries in the peaceable exchange of goods, services and humans, with open travel as a way to accomplish more effectively the same goals that we have achieved by waging adventuresome war. Chris, help us understand what our listeners would learn from your book on that topic.
Chris Preble: I think that if you look at trade both as an instrument to advance human prosperity and betterment, but also as an instrument of peace, the evidence is quite clear. As it was said, when goods cross borders, armies don’t. I think that if the United States were as committed to principles of free trade as we were in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when we tried to reduce levels of tariffs around the world and created rules governing the trade between nations, I think it would lead to a more peaceful world. I am troubled by the fact that some Americans seem perfectly okay with protectionism, i.e., just throwing up artificial barriers to protect domestic industries at the expense of American consumers.
The other factor is cultural exchange. The way you learn about other countries around the world is often by visiting them. We welcome tens of millions of foreign tourists into this country every year and Americans famously travel around the world. It is a way that we communicate our peaceful intentions. I think it is something that we should embrace. It is something that I take advantage of, and which I believe is as much an instrument of American power and influence as our military. This trade and cultural exchange is critical to our foreign policy.
Bob Zadek: That will leave America as what it should be, the shining city on the hill and an example to the world. Not an example of military power, but an example that peace and freedom actually work.
Links:
- Sign Up for the Cato Foreign Policy Newsletter
- Chris Preble’s author Page at War on the Rocks
- Blog Posts: Christopher A. Preble | Cato Institute
- Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy [Buy the book]
- VIDEO — Why America’s Wars Don’t End: The Military-Industrial Complex — YouTube
- VIDEO — “Great Nations do not fight endless wars. “— Trump SOTU
Related Shows:
- Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk with Jonathan Bydlak
- A. Trevor Thrall on Millennials’ Attitudes Towards Foreign Policy
- Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era with John Glaser
- Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser
- 16 Years Later — the Forever War Rages On with Lt. Col. Anthony Alfidi
- The Return of Big Spending Republicans? With Ivan Eland
Fun Facts, Foreign Policy edition:
- America’s 2020 military budget — $750 billion — is approximately the size of the entire economy of Switzerland, a country that incidentally has defended itself without a standing army.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the rise of a permanent armaments industry after WWII was changing the nature of the government through the rise of a #militaryindustrialcomplex.
- James Madison warned “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”
- Bin Laden’s terrorist strategy was astonishingly successful, but not in the way people think. He wish to “[bleed] America to the point of bankruptcy, ” and in his own words correctly predicted that “[all] we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.”
- Trump has called a 700+ billion military budget “Crazy!” yet he authorized more spending than the Pentagon asked for.
