Peace Through Strength? War Is Our Gospel

Summary

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History As It Happens

Episode: Peace Through Strength? War Is Our Gospel

Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)
Date: March 20, 2026

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Overview

This episode delves into the history, evolution, and consequences of the phrase "Peace Through Strength"—a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. Host Martin Di Caro and guest historian Brandon Buck explore how this slogan, often associated with conservative and Republican administrations, has functioned as a rhetorical tool shaping policy, public opinion, and even America's self-identity. The conversation further investigates the antiwar traditions on the American right, debates over interventionism, and the persistent legacy of "endless war" in the post-1945 era, including contemporary relevance under the Trump administration and current military actions in Iran.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins and Evolution of "Peace Through Strength"

• Initial Usage & Political Adoption (18:06–19:44)
  • While Truman and Eisenhower referenced the phrase, it firmly entered the conservative lexicon with Gerald Ford and was cemented by Ronald Reagan.
  • The slogan has functioned as a device for GOP presidents to appear restrained while upholding the liberal internationalist order.
  • Quote [02:24, Brandon Buck]:
    "Peace through strength is a slogan that conservative presidents use almost always from the GOP in the wake of liberal overstretch in foreign affairs. And then they use it as a way to feign restraint while in fact conserving all the core assumptions of liberal internationalism."
• Meaning for the Public (25:57–26:32)
  • Public support for "peace through strength" is high unless it entails direct or costly war, e.g., Korea.
  • Quote [26:01, Brandon Buck]:
    "Voters really believed in the peace through strength thing, so long as it didn't come at any actual cost."
• Malleability & Political Function (04:24, 25:26–25:52)
  • The phrase's vagueness allows it to justify various policies, from deterrence to intervention, and shift blame between parties.

2. Historical Context: From Early Cold War to Current Day

• The Liberal Internationalist Worldview (19:58–21:50)
  • A consensus emerged post-WWII that U.S. power underwrites global order—a notion justified with both realist and idealist rhetoric.
• The Conservative Turn & Revisionism (27:59–31:17)
  • Even arch-conservatives like Goldwater accepted many trappings of the postwar liberal order, albeit directing it towards unilateral American leadership.
  • Debates about NATO, intervention, and American military posture reflect this tension.
  • Retconning Truman as "conservative" due to his anti-communism, despite the diverse views within the GOP at the time.
• 1990s and Post-Cold War (31:17–34:02)
  • After the Cold War, "peace through strength" was used to criticize humanitarian interventions and nation-building by Democrats.
  • Conservatives focused on re-tooling the military for great power competition, especially with China, rather than global police interventions.

3. The Antiwar Conservative Tradition

• Roots and Evolution (37:09–41:52)
  • Tracing back to Lodge's opposition to the League of Nations, conservatives historically favored non-intervention and opposed entangling alliances to preserve American freedom of action.
  • The line between progressive and conservative antiwar stances blurred before WWII, with labor unions and even the American Legion initially skeptical of intervention.
• Transformation with the New Deal and WWII
  • Political realignments during FDR's time caused many previous anti-intervention constituencies to shift, leaving antiwar sentiment as primarily a conservative, Midwestern phenomenon.

4. Debates Around WWII, NATO, and "Lessons"

• Revisionist Arguments (49:38–53:54)
  • Some on the right argue U.S. entry into WWI (or WWII) created more problems than it solved—a view with roots in non-interventionist, even civic nationalist, American tradition.
  • Host and guest discuss the limits of historical hindsight and the dangers of triumphalist interpretations of WWII.
  • On NATO, Buck takes a Taftian skeptical view, suggesting that permanent U.S. garrisons in Europe were likely a long-term mistake.

5. The Presidency, Iran, and the Ease of War

• Imperial Presidency & Recent Conflicts (55:45–58:16)
  • Presidential unilateralism in starting wars has increased, with both Obama and Trump relying on airpower and minimal boots on the ground for regime change—especially in places like Libya, Syria, and now Iran.
  • Quote [56:19, Brandon Buck]:
    "The imperial presidency is just so hard to deconstruct because for one, I don't know if it's just partisan brain rot, but it's like everyone's fine with their president launching a war without Congress."
  • Skepticism that "limited" uses of force will achieve maximalist goals.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The Rhetorical "Bait and Switch"
  [03:37, Martin Di Caro recapping Buck and Elkins]:

  "It has, however, consistently served as a rhetorical bait and switch, entrenching the very liberal world order that conservative hawks claim to oppose."

• On Reagan's Dovish Streak
  [25:26, Brandon Buck]:

  "Especially in his second term, he wanted to wind down the Cold War. He had a far more dovish streak in him than a lot of his modern supposed inheritors like to recall."

• Ordinary Americans’ Reluctance for War
  [46:34, Brandon Buck]:

  "A lot of people were just—the reason why they didn't want America to go to war was pretty simple. They didn't want their children to die."

• On Lessons from WWII
  [54:02, Brandon Buck]:

  "What are the lessons that we learned from it? ... The lessons to learn from it is that of tragedy, that war is terrible, it should not be taken lightly."

• Contemporary Application
  [56:52, Martin Di Caro]:

  "It's just become way, way too easy to start a war for an American president and then put on the drapery: We're doing this to liberate the Iranian people. We can't break that pattern."

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |:----------:|-----------------------------------------------------| | 01:19–01:53| Historical context for "peace through strength" | | 02:24 | Buck outlines the meaning/function of the slogan | | 10:42–14:43| Buck’s personal military evolution (Afghanistan) | | 18:06–19:44| Origins and adoption of the slogan | | 25:26–26:32| How Reagan used and redefined the slogan | | 27:39–28:39| Bipartisan adoption and mythmaking | | 31:17–34:02| The 1990s and the post-Cold War world | | 37:09–41:52| Conservative antiwar tradition | | 49:38–53:54| Revisionism and arguments about WWII, NATO, etc. | | 55:45–58:16| The imperial presidency and current actions in Iran |

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Flow and Tone

The episode weaves together historical analysis, personal experience, and sharp critique in a manner that is both accessible and deeply knowledgeable. Both host and guest share moments of personal reckoning (e.g., Di Caro’s admission of shifting views on Iraq, Buck’s evolving doubts during Afghanistan), lending authenticity and gravity to the discussion. The tone is reflective, critical, and occasionally wry—eschewing simplistic assessments in favor of wrestling with complexity and irony.

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Conclusion

"Peace Through Strength" has mutated over decades from a deterrence-based principle to a blanket justification for intervention—a balm for public opinion, a stick against political opponents, and a crucial symbol of the American postwar order. Yet as the conversation underscores, its malleability comes at the cost of clarity and genuine debate about U.S. interests, methods, and the human costs of war.

To learn more, read Brandon Buck’s essay “When Peace Through Strength Means War is Peace” (link in show notes).

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Transcript

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[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

History as it happens March 20, 2026 Peace through Strength War is our gospel,

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

that only the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace. We can remain first in peace only if we are never in defense.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Jerry Ford)]

For 30 years since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to preserve peace through strength. It is steadiness and the vision of men like Dwight Eisenhower that we have to thank for policies that made America strong and credible.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end and

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. Peace through Strength More than a slogan, not quite an ideology synonymous with US foreign policy since 1945 and now a recipe for endless, wasteful wars. Where does it come from and how did it come to mean peace is war? Anti war conservatives in the age of Trump are raising this question as a man who promised peace can't stop bombing other countries. That's next as we report. History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Peace through strength is a slogan that conservative presidents use almost always from the GOP in the wake of liberal overstretch and foreign affairs. And then they use it as a way to feign restraint while in fact conserving all the core assumptions of liberal internationalism.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

In 1952, in the middle of the Korean War, during a very chilly period in the Cold War that included a hot war, a Pennsylvania newspaper polled its readers and found a large majority was in favor of peace through strength rather than fighting a war to defeat the Soviet Union. But what did peace through strength mean? Not dependent on who was in charge at the time, it was Harry Truman. The following year, Dwight Eisenhower. Now, that same poll found that support for peace through strength plummeted when it meant fighting small wars such as Korea, which was only a small war if you weren't involved in the enormous troop deployments and violence.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

United nations forces drive ahead toward the

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

Manchurian border and the power dams of

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

northern Korea, which the Communists have been fighting desperately to defend as UN troops

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

capture town after town, the fleeing red.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

So I can't take credit for finding this pole that belongs to Brandon Buck and Beckett Elkins, writing for the American Conservative. Their article carries the headline When Peace Through Strength Means War Is Peace. They chart the origins of the phrase and how, as they put it, it's been used to advocate for seemingly every foreign policy position from containment to rollback, prosecuting wars and pursuing diplomacy despite its malleability. It has, however, consistently served as a rhetorical bait and switch, entrenching the very liberal world order that conservative hawks claim to oppose. And I will share a link to their article in the show notes to this episode. Now, if you grew up during the 1980s as I did, you might picture Ronald Reagan when hearing those words.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Jerry Ford)]

There is an alternative path for America which offers a more realistic hope for peace, one which takes us on the course of restoring that vital margin of safety. For 30 years, since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to preserve peace through strength. It is steadiness and the vision of men like Dwight Eisenhower that we have to thank for policies that made America strong and credible. The last Republican defense budget proposed by President Jerry Ford would have maintained the margin. But the Carter administration came to power on a promise of slashing America's defenses. It has made good on that promise.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

That was during a campaign speech in 1980, also cited in the aforementioned article in a sharply partisan tone. In Reagan's view, Carter was a weakling who hobbled the military when the US really needed to engage in an enormous military buildup to deter the Soviets, to convince them peace was now the only sane alternative. The truth is, Carter had already started increasing defense spending 16 years earlier. Barry Goldwater, the arch conservative ripped into Democrats for not understanding how to deal with global communism to during his 1964 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention,

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

it is further the cause of Republicanism to restore a clear understanding of the tyranny of man over man in the world at large. It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony if we just don't rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression. And this is Hogwarts.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

And as Buck and Elkins point out, Gerald Ford embraced the slogan in his 1977 State of the Union address. Not even two years after the fall of Saigon, Ford warned the country that paring back military spending was the wrong lesson to learn from the Vietnam nightmare.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

The Vietnam War both materially and psychologically affected our overall defense posture. The dangerous anti military sentiment discouraged defense spending and unfairly disparaged the men and women who serve in our armed forces.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

So do you sense a pattern here? Donald Trump has repeatedly chided his predecessors for weakening the US Military until he arrived to save it. And now he is using this sprawling military empire to coerce or bomb countries into submission or occasionally kidnap their leaders. Indeed, peace is war for anti war conservatives like Brandon Buck. The anti war tradition on the American right has a lot to teach us how to break this pattern of forever war. Brandon Buck is a Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is a historian of domestic opposition to US foreign policy in the 20th century, post war conservatism and the national security state. He is also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Tired of interruptions? Want to go straight to the Conversation Tap? Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, enjoy early access and all of our bonus content or go to history as it happens.com do you love sexy chic fashion?

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[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

That's innerbalance.com Brandon Buck of the Cato Institute. Welcome.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

So tell us a little bit about yourself. Before you became a historian, you were a soldier.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, but in between my time in the military and in graduate school, I worked in the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Formally trained as an imagery analyst, but I spent most of my time, six years, doing counterterrorism stuff in Afghanistan. In that capacity I deployed as a civilian three times to Afghanistan supporting special operations forces. Prior to that I got my undergraduate degree and then right out of high school I joined the army. I was in basic training on 911 and then I reenlisted into the National Guard and I deployed to Afghanistan from 04 to 05. Was in the infantry. It was a 11 Bravo, so a little bit of a twists and turns to my career, but I've always been in the national security space in one way or the other, so.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

So you were in basic training when Al Qaeda hit the Twin Towers in the Pentagon. Did that change you?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, yeah, I'd say so. I went into military service. I was very much a liberal hawk, internationalist type and so I was already kind of prepped for that. So once, once the war started, I, I was revved up. I wanted to go. I volunteered to go to Iraq. Didn't get the call. When my original contract was up. Back in those days you could enlist in the army for two years, which is what I did in. In 01 I reenlisted in in the National Guard intentionally kind of hoping that I would get a call. And I did reclassed from the cavalry into the infantry. And so I was, yeah, I was fired up to go. Got there and then quickly started to get doubts. I was going to ask about this whole project.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Yeah, it initially changed you, but then it changed you again, right?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

What was the moment for you or maybe the process that made you sour on the whole endeavor?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

It's tough to say because I went over there in 2004 and 2005 and there wasn't much of a war going on at the time. We did lose a couple guys in my battalion, Sergeants Cherry and Beasley. Nevertheless, it was kind of a low key deployment. Things were getting bad in 2005 when we left. Thankfully I didn't see much action. And so I'd kind of put the war in the back of my mind going through my undergraduate. But then the war started to ramp up, you may recall, from that 2005 through 2009 window. And so I kind of got my second wind, as it were, and I kind of wanted back in the game. So that's part of the reason why I took a job in the intelligence community.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

OH five is when the Taliban that window there before Obama.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, that summer of OH five, that's when they searched back in. So I graduated from college in 2009 and then I got a job in the intelligence community and I sort of worked my way into the counterterrorism field and then from there I volunteered to go back in part because I had soured on things, but I kind of wasn't yet towards. Sure.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

You still thought maybe it could be salvaged.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

That's right, yeah. And I was very much a Obama guy, kind of an Obama national security guy who never believed in Iraq but thought Afghanistan was a righteous cause. So I got there. I remember the incident that got me on that downward slide and there was this little town called Janda in Ghazni. And when I had first experienced that town, it was in 2004, in which there wasn't much of a war going on. And so whenever we would do our patrols and our operations and stuff, we would stop in to this police station that was just off of the ring road, the main highway in Afghanistan. And it was fairly safe. We could walk, you know, the quarter of a mile from that police station down the street and go basically shopping and go get. Go get cigarettes and. And snacks and sodas and stuff with basically nothing more than, like, a handgun. And then many years later, when I was doing my intelligence work, I was trying to help find some local Taliban commander in a little town called Janda. I hadn't heard that name in many years. And it comes. It turned out that that sleepy little town that we used to stop in for cigarettes and soda had turned into a hotbed of the insurgency. So much so that the army had actually put a large fort operating base just on the opposite side on the north side of the highway, where we used to walk up, buy our cigarettes and soda. So seeing that juxtaposition of, like, a war, like, lost, made me think, I don't think there's any way out of this, especially once you started to go through intelligence reports of John and Jane Q. Public in Afghanistan, asking them about their thoughts on the war, they would always say the same thing is that we need law and order here in this rural hamlet, wherever that might be. I have a problem with my neighbor. I got some disputes. We have highwaymen that are coming through and, like, robbing us. We need someone to make this stop. And they didn't trust the government in Kabul because they thought it was a construct of the west, and they weren't wrong. Who do they turn to? They turn to the Taliban. That juxtaposition and those kind of atmospherics made me realize there's just no way that we can remake this place.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

The Taliban are Afghans. They're Pashtuns, right? You know, I'm not proud to say that I initially supported the invasion of Iraq. And that changed me when I realized that not only had my government misled us and made a disastrous failure, only failure could have come from such an endeavor. And then the revelations of torture and everything else that the Bush administration was up to, it changed me permanently. I'll just pass along another anecdote, too. Last year, my mentor and friend who taught me history at ithaca College, Paul McBride, he passed away. He was 85 years old. He had been in Vietnam, and he had come from a very conservative Catholic upbringing in Youngstown, Ohio. He joined the ROTC. He was sent to Vietnam in the mid-1960s. He didn't question the idea that the United States should be in Vietnam. As you said, once he started talking to people in the country, he realized that the United States had no idea what was doing there, and he quickly soured on the war. Also, he received a presentation from a decorated military figure from mid 20th century America, General Walt. And Paul never wanted to cast aspersions upon him, but Paul said that he gave the officers the most ignorant presentation you can imagine about what's happening in Vietnam. And Paul said to himself, you know, if the commander of I Corps doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, what are we doing here?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Compounding on all that were the interventions in Libya and later Syria, as I remember rather vividly sitting in a tactical operations center in FOB Salerno in eastern Afghanistan and cracking open the Stars and Stripes and realizing that we were now at war with Libya. Like, wait a minute, we haven't won this one. The one, the one I'm sitting in right now.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, remember, Obama said it won't be

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Barack Obama)]

regime change, but broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

mistake at first until it turned into regime change.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Barack Obama)]

Today we can definitively say that the Gaddafi regime has come to an end.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah. So I think my disillusionment mirrored a lot of, like, conservative and libertarian stories of disillusionment, where, you know, you had the neoconservative presidency, you get Iraq and then you get the guy who's supposed to be the reformer and President Obama, and then you get more or less more of the same. Right? Yes. He didn't send in a quarter of a million troops in Libya, but nevertheless, air power and special forces stuff affected a regime change that led to a state collapse of all kinds of negative consequences. Our assumptions about American power in the world are just deeply flawed. The domestic politics is ineffectual for a number of reasons, and that there are just deep systemic things that need to be changed here if we're going to have any kind of standard foreign policy.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

You know, while following you and some others on Twitter, I've been reminded of the traditional of anti war sentiment, anti war attitudes in the United States. On the right, you know, there's a leftist or a liberal anti war tradition, but there's also one on the right. The reason I wanted to have you on was to discuss, among other things, your essay in the American Conservative about the slogan peace through strength, which is very much a Trump administration slogan. Now, I was Actually, just at the White House website looking at one of their embarrassing news releases, and it mentions peace through strength. That's what we're doing in Iran today. When was the first time it was used by a US Politician, or when did it first surface? What were the origins of this, and what did it mean at that time?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Truman had used it in passing, and then it was used by some folks in the orbit of Eisenhower. But it really comes up first with Ford. It kind of enters the conservative lexicon, and then it's Ronald Reagan who makes it a slogan that is identified with his presidency. Goldwater had also used it off and on as well.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, we'll pick away at each of these layers as we go along here.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

The thesis of the piece that I wrote for the American Conservative is that co wrote is that peace through strength is a slogan that conservative presidents use, almost always from the GOP in the wake of liberal overstretch and foreign affairs. And then they use it as a way to feign restraint while in fact, conserving all the core assumptions of liberal internationalism. Ronald Reagan, former Democrat, very much had a orthodox liberal view of America's role in the world coming out of his experience in World War II. He doesn't want to get involved too much because of the experience in Vietnam, but nevertheless still sees the United States as a force for good in the world. And I think in some ways, you're seeing the same thing with President Trump, although even in a more unilateral flavor coming out of the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the failures of nation building. Nevertheless, he still sees the United States as the arbiter of world peace. Even though sometimes he. He tries to eschew that mantle, he nevertheless puts it back on his shoulders. And so there's a way to say that we can do power in the world smartly. You don't get bogged down, but nevertheless, you have to reserve martial strength and then use it at certain times in order to maintain kind of a peace between states.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, Donald Trump's not a liberal internationalist. He wrote in the piece. Peace through strength during the Truman and Eisenhower years was also frequently employed in ways that echoed the rhetoric of liberal internationalism. As you said, define liberal internationalism.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

It is a set of assumptions about America's role in the world that comes out of the Second World War with a preface in World War I.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Jerry Ford)]

For 30 years since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to preserve peace through strength. It is steadiness and the vision of men like Dwight Eisenhower that We have to thank for policies that made America

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

strong and credible, and that is that the United States is the rightful arbiter of global security. But for the United States maintaining some element of martial power, economic integration and engagement diplomatically, the world will fall into chaos as it did in World War II. I think it's predicated upon an assumption that America's so called isolationism after World War I was ultimately responsible for the Second World War.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

So there's realism in there. If the US withdraws, it makes the world less stable. But there's also an idealistic strain in there as well. Right. As far as what's motivating it. High ideals.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

High ideals. And then in later iterations, a belief that the internal natures of states can be changed. I think again, this is something that comes out of World War II. Like the only righteous way to win a war is through unconditional surrender and regime change and remaking states up. Obviously this is not something that the United States has employed everywhere that it exercises its power, but it is nevertheless one that constantly comes back up. And even, even with President Trump's rantings about unconditional surrender and making IR great again, obviously we'll see how that actually pans out.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

1945 was an anomaly, you know, exactly. Any wars and 12 massive wars, occupations that involve millions of soldiers on the allied side, go ahead.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

You know, and there is a conservative flavor of this. It is just one that is more unilateral than multilateral. You know, the UN can't do it. It's a feat. It's this construct. But American power acting individually in the world can do it as well.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, there's motivations and there's also aims. Aims change over time with the times. William Appleman Williams, in his seminal book the Tragedy of American Diplomacy, posited that it was a protection of markets. Right? Economic markets is the aim. Samantha Power, she would argue it's humanitarianism is the basis of intervention. I mean, that's kind of the drift of the 1990s after the Cold War, the Clinton administration, although it actually inherited the Somalia thing from George H.W.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

bush.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

But yeah, yeah, well then they didn't intervene in Rwanda. So you get wrapped on the knuckles for that. Why didn't you stop this horrible genocide? Then you wind up intervening in other places. In some ways you can't win. And then 911 happens and there's another aim and different motivations there. But you're saying that Cold War, Post Cold War, post 9 11, there was liberal internationalism underpinning interventionism?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

I think. So. If you look at the rationale of liberal interventionists before World War II, during World War II, during the Cold War, after the Cold War, it's kind of all the same story. There is this next great ism that has arrayed itself against the global hegemony of liberalism, and therefore it has to be fought. And one of the interesting things about the 90s is I cite some of these, some of these articles in my piece. Post Reagan conservatives looked at the right to protect liberalism of Clinton and scoffed at it, saying, this is not a job for Americans, our military. But nevertheless, they still maintain this belief in hegemony vis a vis states. Right? We still have to check China, we still have to maintain a force in Europe, and then, oh, maybe sometimes we'll have to intervene. So, like, they can never fully cut loose of those threads that tie them to the post war moment.

[M]

It's easy, for example, to say that we really have no interests and who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River? But the true measure of our interest lies not in how small or distant these places are or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread? We cannot, indeed, we should not do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Whether Republican or Democrat, the fundamentals aren't questioned. And it is. The US Is indispensable here.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right. And I'd say even in the Trump moment, too, because, you know, he's still a man of his generation. I think you can even see it in, like, the World War II nostalgia, like we just renamed the Department of Defense Department of War during the first Trump administration. They changed the uniforms back during, like, the World War II uniform. There's so much of this. Yes, they've soured on nation building. They haven't soured on regime change. They haven't soured on great power politics. It's just they're channeling them through a slightly narrower aperture, but only just, you

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

know, they're attempting to fight wars at minimal cost to the United States, or at least that's what it appears. I mean, the financial cost, economic costs are huge. Of course, maybe we'll return to Iran at the end here. Peace through strength. I mean, this didn't always mean all out step on the gas Interventionism. This was more about creating a deterrent rather than reacting to a new war after it's begun. This is the whole Munich shadow.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right? Yeah. And you could certainly make a case for Ronald Reagan having more of that take on that phrase. Yes, he armed the contras and all kinds of COVID shenanigans, but nevertheless, especially in his second term, he wanted to wind down the Cold War. He had a far more dovish streak in him than a lot of his modern supposed inheritors like to recall. He has a very wide umbrella. It can mean any number of things, which is why it's kind of so useless.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

1952 Pennsylvania Newspaper Poll that you dug up.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, right.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

What did Americans think peace through strength meant then?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Not that different than now. That's why I find that poll so fascinating. Voters really believed in the peace through strength thing, so long as it didn't come at any actual cost. Of course, I'm being a little bit unfair, but one of the sub questions is like, would you support a policy of peace through strength if it led to limited interventions like in Korea? And then the support for that just drop through the floor again. It's not like. It's not like today. Right. People will like the slogan, but if you tell them, okay, well, peace restraint means limited war, and all of a sudden people get a little bit less supportive of it.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Also, the United States was not a sprawling military empire in 1952. Today our empire makes war more likely, not less.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Especially in 52. We hadn't yet taken over for the British fully, particularly in the Middle East. This is pre Suez crisis, so we didn't yet have the entire world on our plate. Europe was still somewhat outsourced. Of course we had troops there. East Asia had historically been the primary concern for the United States beyond the Western Hemisphere. So there was some political buy in there, particularly amongst conservatives in the GOP for being a little bit more assertive in the Pacific than elsewhere. There's differences between the Democrats wanting to have a Europe first policy and some conservatives wanting to have a Pacific first policy. Those differences have evaporated. Now it's just global. And you've seen some echoes of that in the President with some prioritizers within the Republican Party who want to prioritize containment of China. As politics is nationalized, so has Americans vision for its role in the world. And now it's all or nothing in elite foreign policy circles.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, you know something your essay taught me, and I'll share a link to the essay in the show Notes to this episode as well as in my weekly newsletter is that there was some kind of a bipartisan tradition, if you will, to peace through strength length. But you know, I grew up in the Reagan era in 1990s and it became used as a tool to lamb base Democrats as being weaklings.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah. And it's interesting because in the 90s Harry Truman is retconned as a conservative. Oh, I cite a article on that from a scholar at AEI called Geoconservatism in which he he reimagines Harry Truman as a conservative because he was tough on communism as if that was the barometer for what constitutes a conservative. There are a lot of conservatives in the late 40s and 50s who were strident anti communists but were also non interventionists. So one of the ways that peace through strength mythos is born is that they just retcon conservative politics back to Harry Truman. In order to be a conservative you have to be a strident anti communist abroad in which that wasn't the case at the time.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

I think they're forgetting about the conservatives who oppose NATO post Korea. Those treaties passed with overwhelming majorities. But still, we'll get to that in a second. The conservative anti war tradition or just maybe anti intervention tradition or what some say was an isolationist strain. I don't know. That term isolationism is tricky. Barry Goldwater.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Dwight Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater)]

It is further the cause of Republicanism to remind ourselves and the world that only the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace. Now I needn't remind you or my fellow Americans, regardless of party, that Republicans have shouldered this hard responsibility and marched in this cause before. It was Republican leaders leadership under Dwight Eisenhower that kept the peace and passed along to this administration the mightiest arsenal for defense the world has ever known.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

He was not a liberal internationalist. He also called for using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Whether he would have actually pushed the button if he became president, we can't say. What was his take on peace through strength and why is that important in this story?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

I think it's basically like a Ronald Reagan on steroids. He was not a liberal internationalist. Yes, but if you go back and read, as everyone does, obviously read his 1964 acceptance speech and read Conscience of a Conservative. Now granted he didn't write Conscience of a Conservative. That was ghostwritten Brent Boswell. Nevertheless, he does accept a lot of the trappings of the post war liberal order in both of those documents. And one of them is a kind of tepid acceptance of NATO, a belief that American Freedom was at its zenith at the end of World War II. Almost all conservatives in the GOP in World War II would have seen it as its absolute nadir, not its height. He had a kind of optimism about America's role in the world, which I think many of his predecessors were just fundamentally pessimistic about these kind of things as they came of age in World War I, if not earlier. America was hoodwinked into World War II. We were hoodwinked into Korea, we were hoodwinked into the early Cold War. But I think once you get Goldwater and that generation, of course he was an older member of the greatest generation. But nevertheless, like they begin to imbibe almost just through osmosis some of the central assumptions about America's role in the world after World War II. But they take it in a more unilateralist direction than their liberal counterparts.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

1990s, let's return to that decade. That's a tough decade to pigeonhole the no fly zones over Iraq. We intervened in some places, didn't intervene in others, trying to get along really well with Russia and did Bill Clinton had a very friendly, chummy relationship with Boris Yeltsin. And for a time there, it looked like the US and Russia might have a long term friendly, cooperative relationship. What was the nature of peace through strength during those heady days of the 1990s? Because for a bit, maybe just for a moment, that unipolar moment, it looked like the United States would not need to have all of this military hardware and the ideas underpinning it might change too, that there might have been a peace dividend. I mean, we know that didn't happen, but.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, right. For conservatives who bought into the peace through strength thing, they saw the 90s as a decade of misuse resources. And as I, as I cite in that piece, and frankly from my own memory, my dad's side of the family is very conservative and I, I vividly recall them complaining about Bosnia and Serbia and Somalia and these in Haiti and all these humanitarian interventions. And so they would say liberals blundered us into Vietnam and then they wouldn't let us win. And now they're blundering us all over through the developing world and these humanitarian things. A true peace through strength policy would not be engaged in nation building, but it would be involved in great power politics. We need to gear up for China. You know, they're just over the horizon. You know, all throughout the 90s, there had been a conservative Republican growing fear of China that presaged our current moment for them There was this belief that the United States, much like in the 1960s, was putting too many eggs into the idealism basket.

[Libsyn Ads Host]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Over extension.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Kind of. Over extension.

[N]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Yeah.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

People forget George W. Bush ran on a platform of not doing nation building.

[O]

But we can't be all things to all people in the world, Jim. And I think that that's where maybe the vice president. I began to have some differences. I'm worried about over committing our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. You mentioned Haiti. I wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti. I didn't think it was a mission worthwhile. It was a nation building mission and it was not very successful. It cost us billions, a couple of billions of dollars. And I'm not so sure democracy is any better off in Haiti than it was before.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

I watched the Bush Gore debates. I did an episode about the election of 2000 and man, what a weird world that was. Makes you forget where we've been the last 25 years. When you go to those debates arguing over who had the best plan to spend a budget surplus on education, healthcare or tax cuts and foreign policy doesn't come up very much. You mentioned Kosovo before. Americans forget how this affected Russians or Putin.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Or it was the transition from Yeltsin into Putin in those years. That intervention was out of theater for NATO.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

That's right.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

And the Russians looked at that as threatening because it involved another Slavic people in an area traditionally where Moscow viewed its backyard. It's the defender of the Slavs. And American or un, I'm not sure who it was. Western forces almost came to blows with Russian troops over an airport during that conflict.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, that was a big part of the spoiling of the relations between Russia and the United States. Again, something that conservatives, the United States were not too keen on. Narrowly defeated votes in the House declaring their opposition to this. All those lessons got forgotten after 9 11. Right. Because now all of a sudden, we're back in the saddle again.

[O]

The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. Thank you.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

The conversation continues. Tap subscribe now in the show notes to skip ads.

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[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

That's innerbalance.com the conservative anti war tradition in the modern era. We can go back to Henry Cabot Lodge and his opposition to the League

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

of Nations as I argue, and hopefully my book that will be finished at some point if we can just not have a war for a week. It basically argues that what we think of as a conservative tradition opposed to war comes out of a larger liberal opposition to war. An empire that is rendered conservative by the changes of politics. You know, the so called isolationism, and I'm using my scare quotes here, it has a liberal or a progressive component and a more conservative component. And the more conservative would be the Henry Cabot Lodges of the world. This belief that the United States cannot entangle itself in alliances. It has to maintain its freedom of maneuver in the world. It needs to keep Europe at arm's length because you know, we just fought a war and that kind of didn't go so well. And maybe that was a mistake. It needs to maintain some freedom of maneuver in Latin America and East Asia. But nevertheless, it wants to let markets work. Coming out of World War I, if you look at the Seven Power Naval Treaty, a big thought is that we're going to freeze imperial competition in the Pacific and just let capitalism kind of do the work of American interests. Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

There were caps on the size of naval fleets. Right?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Naval. Because at the time battleships were then the modern day nuclear weapon. The things that everyone wanted to keep under control. But then you had a more progressive component that was deeply anti militarist, far more anti imperialist than just non interventionist. Opposed American interventions in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, wanted to give up the Philippines. William Bora is probably the biggest encapsulation of this. These were the wings of opinion of American non interventionist sentiment which was dominant in the 20s and the 30s.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, Lodge was opposed to. He and his ilk were opposed to the U.S. as you alluded to compromising national sovereignty.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

If we're in a article 10.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Yeah, article 10 of the league of Nations. Why do we have to go to war to defend some country where we really have no interests that'll actually get us involved in more unnecessary wars. Whereas the Wilsonian said, no, we need to have a collective security pact, otherwise it will incentivize. I'm just kind of coming out with the words here. I'm not quoting Wilson. It'll incentivize aggression. We can't have a repeat of World War I. Right. So we need a collective security environment to avert more wars or if they start, prevent them from going the way of World War I, which went on for four or five years and killed something like 10, 15 million people. Both sides are approaching this as the best way to avoid conflict. That was the same argument that taft used in 1949. Right. Article 5 under NATO.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right. Whether it's William Bora or it's Lodge, there's also this concern for what war does at home. They just lived through World War I, which probably, I mean besides slavery in the United States was the absolute nadir of civil rights in America. People were lynched in the street, thrown in prison for not wanting bridges for the draft. And even conservatives who supported American involvement in the war were like, oh hey, this whole Sedition act thing is a little much. So coming out of that, there was a real concern for American civil liberties. As I argue in my work, once you get the New Deal and the approaching of World War II, this earlier norm of American non intervention that was rooted in the Founders but refracted through their own politics, it becomes rendered conservative because the New Deal changes political incentives. So what does that mean? So, like for instance, American labor groups. American labor used to be strongly anti war or at least have anti war components. Through World War I, through the interwar period, they very much supported disarmament efforts in the United States. So. But because of the incentives of the New Deal coalition, they're now firmly in line with intervention by 1940, 41. Same thing with the American Legion. Believe it or not, the American Legion coming out of World War I was opposed to intervention abroad, despite being a staunchly conservative organization. They supported some efforts at disarmament and they supported the Neutrality Act. But by the spring of 41, they're firmly in line with intervention. The way that sectional politics worked in the United States. You used to have a strong element of southern opposition to American involvement in war during World War I. But because of the New Deal and the way that the incentive structure is aligned, be it material or ideological, by the time you get to the eve of World War II, the South and the north, dominated by the Democratic Party, are firmly in line with intervention. So what's left? What's left is now a conservative Midwest in the GOP that is hanging on to these earlier norms of America's role in the world, but they're now considered to be reactionary or conservative.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, it was a harder argument to make after the Second World War that the United States should go home.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, it was hard in the spring of 41 too. I mean, one of the interesting things about this is you go back and look at the debates, the so called great debate about American involving in war too. And it was nasty. I mean, I think it was Schlesinger who said it was even worse than Vietnam. People are just accusing each other of being foreign agents and anti Semites and German espionage is all over the place. And the America First Committee is in league with the Nazis and a lot of reputations got destroyed. A lot of people were fired from their jobs. One of the interesting things for me, so there's a guy named Felix Morley. He was a liberal editor of the Washington Post. He was fired from his job because of his position on the war. Oswald Garrison Villard, who was a progressive, wrote for the Nation magazine. He quit because of his position on the war. Harry Elmer Barnes was a historian who lost his job because he opposed American involvement in the war. Garrett Garrett, who was another columnist. I think it was a Saturday Evening Post, he was fired for his position on the war. So there was this whole crop of like liberal anti war voices in 40, 41 and so they either leave their positions or they can. So where do they go? Well, they go to the right because the right are the only people who don't want to see America involved in the war.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, this is where I think fdr, maybe you disagree with me as a Cato conservative, but FDR was a visionary and his leadership was right on the money here because he understood the United States was not going to be able to stay out of that war forever. His hands were tied by five neutrality laws passed between 1935 and 1940. But there's also, on the other side of that argument is if Hitler had never declared war on the United States after Pearl harbor In December of 1941, we can wonder how long it would have taken for Congress to proactively get involved in the European theater. Obviously, the Japanese made up our minds for us.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, there could have been a limited naval war in the Atlantic. So as you say, I am not an FDR fan for a number of reasons, but I think one of them is this reason. I think he really did stoke domestic fear in the United States of what the Germans were really capable of in terms of threatening the Western Hemisphere. I mean, people really thought that the Germans were going to cross the Atlantic and then goose step up from Brazil up through Mexico and then invading that. People really did believe this, by the way. This was not like fever dreams. I've been, I've gone through the interventionist literature and they were really concerned that the Axis powers were going to make a play on the Western Hemisphere. This is happening while they couldn't even cross the English Channel and then bogged down fighting the Soviets. And then there was just the whole Fifth Column fear. Right. This notion that for those who don't know, the idea of the Fifth Column comes from the Spanish Civil War. That as Franco was marching on Barcelona, he said, we have four columns and we have one in the city itself. So it became this shorthand for the enemy within. And he talked about saboteurs and Nazi agents. And while of course, there were some of those, there weren't nearly as many as people let on. They weren't nearly as effectual as they let on. But I also think he, he stoked the fears of panic that rendered perfectly reasonable views about America's role in the world as being toxic or somehow in league with the enemy. His FBI was involved in all kinds of illegal wiretapping, including members of the U.S. senate. Gerald Nye Lindbergh's phones were tapped. You had the FBI running around gathering up derogatory information. On people and then the press. There were abuses.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

That's what happens in wartime. I'm not making excuses.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

I think FDR though understood that it was in the US interests for Europe not to be dominated by the Nazis. He understood that.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah. There is a perfectly reasonable geopolitical reason for entering World War II. I don't want to react to that. The more idealistic ones, oddly enough, played better among some segments of the population.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Where fdr, I would criticize him is his handling of the Pacific theater prior to Pearl Harbor. And David M. Kennedy has made this argument in his great book Freedom from Fear. And that is China was not worth a war. The US did not have important enough interests in China to create a conflict with Japan over China's fate. And that may sound cold hearted because Japan was extremely abusive to China during these years. And of course the oil embargo and everything there. It was really unnecessary.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

I'm rather ambitiously working on two books at once. I don't recommend it. Well, one of the other ones is go through letters to senators from their constituents. We forget that there was a draft on the eve of World War II, before the war. Right. So the United States had its first PeaceTime draft.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

The FDR started to prepare the country for what he saw as a right inevitability and I think correctly. But go ahead.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

But a lot of people were just the reason why they didn't want America to go to war was pretty simple. They didn't want the children to die.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Yeah.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

And it's the same reason why parents were upset about Korea and Vietnam. World War I for sure. And also just debt and deficits like this is before we totally unhooked the gold from the dollar. And so all of these things have to be paid for in taxes or

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

just pretend that there's no bill ever, which is what we're doing now.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

We didn't have that leeway then. And so you had. Even amongst progressives. One of the interesting things that I'm trying to wrap my head around is you had Midwestern progressives who had all of the same positions on war and peace as Midwestern conservatives. And one of those was about balancing the budget. There was this notion that, well, if we, if we ramp up the military. Well, they didn't call it the military industrial complex. They call it the merchants of death or the war system. This is going to hurt the economy, it's going to hurt workers, it's going to hurt farmers. Their purchasing power is going to be inflated away. So there were real material concerns where People did not want to fight the Second World War. And I think because it is considered a moral crusade, we forget that. And we think that all of those people were just benighted or they were all secretly bigoted. And there was certainly a lot of that, don't get me wrong. But like, you know, going to war kind of sucks, man. Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

No, no, you're right. And it wasn't, it wasn't fought to. Well, before I tangled myself into a. An incoherent sentence here. I guess it's kind of a.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Kind of a revisionist. So you don't have to offend me.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

It's part, it's part myth that the United States did this for idealistic reasons.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right. And the Holocaust. Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Although the Atlantic Charter does have high principles in it, annoyed Churchill because he wanted to keep his empire.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

We forget that part.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Yes. Churchill was fighting. He did not want to liquidate the British Empire. He did not want to invade Normandy in France, although he eventually agreed to it. He wanted to go into the Balkans to protect British assets in that part of the world. But to your point about why people oppose war. Yes, because the experience of war is so destabilizing and so destructive and leaves such a terrible legacy of rancor, ethnic hatred, distrust, instability. The most popular song in World War I in the United States, we know this from record sales, was I Didn't Raise my boy to be a soldier.

[N]

A million mothers hearts must break for the world who died in vain, Head fell down in sorrow in her lonely years I heard a mother murmur through her tears. I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier. I brought him up to be my pride and joy.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

You know, though, because of World War II and the total victory of 1945, propelling the United States to a global superpower, the so called American century, all of these arguments you've raised became much more difficult.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

That's right, yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Problem there is there's only one 1945, only one Adolf Hitler. Not everything is another. Not everything is another Munich. And we still hear the Munich stuff still.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right. There is a strain of revisionism that runs through right wing non interventionism. Some of it's kooky and some of it butts up against Holocaust denial and some of these more fraught topics. But one of them I think is a perfectly valid question is like, how did World War II happen? And one of the arguments is what happened because we got involved in World War I. So like that is the dissident right wing story is that this story does not start in Munich, it starts in 1914, 1917, 1919. And that had the United States just minded its own business, where they see the story as beginning, we wouldn't have had a rupture in the, in the power balance in Europe that ultimately arose in Hitler had Germany created commitments in places like Korea and Vietnam. Because one of the interesting things about the people I study is, you know, they view Korea as a mistake. Like some of the hard right in the United States. Yes, you had MacArthur and these people who wanted to go to China. You also had. Had others that wanted to wash their hands of this entire project and say, like, no more Koreas. We're not getting involved on any more land wars in Asia. And one way to do that is through nuclear deterrence, maintain a small army, a kind of fortress America. And that's one of the. And Eisenhower, oddly enough, even though he wasn't an internationalist, was able to kind of co opt that vision with his New look policy in the 1950s.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

A couple of bones I have to pick with that revisionist argument. Although I can't say I'm entirely familiar with it, although I've heard it. No one can foresee the future. So in 1917, 1918, you're not thinking, oh, Germany's gonna start another war, and 20 years. Also the primary responsibility lies in Germany and with Nazis and Adolf Hitler and wanting to reverse that verdict. But again, no one could see that coming in 1917, 1918, 19. And also, Margaret Macmillan has made a really convincing argument, even about the Treaty of Versailles. You can't draw a straight line from the Treaty of Versailles to World War II.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Sure, yeah. But this is one of the, this is the odd thing about revisionism, because the interventionist argument is also predicated upon a counterfactual school, which is, have the United States involved itself, therefore there'd be no Hitler. Like, the United States was not disinterested from global affairs. Right. It helped to refinance German debt in the 20s. I mean, it was really the Great Depression that brought all that about. But you're right, you cannot foresee the future. But I think there are valuable heuristics that we lost. And one of them is, I hate to say this, it's kind of an American chauvinism. It is kind of a American particularism. Like the people who opposed American entry in World War I. Many of them were first. First or second generation Americans who were from Sweden and Norway and Ireland. And they really globbed on to the American project. They really bought into the civic nationalist promise of America. And they hated Europe. They viewed it with utter contempt. Right. This land of monarchism and socialism reaction, this illiberal cesspool of, like, European empires. And I, and I'm not even being that. That hyperbolic. They really did hate Europe. They thought if we get involved in this place politically, we're never going to get out.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Sure. Is it your.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

They're kind of right.

[Fleur de Mall Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Is it your position that NATO was a mistake?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Well, obviously, who knows? I think leaving land troops, I think. I think garrisoning Europe was a mistake. Yeah. I could see an argument, a kind of Taftian argument, that we're going to be involved in NATO as a political device. We may even extend our nuclear umbrella to Europe, but we're not going to garrison it forever. And this was not a radical position. Like every president has said this, but he has some that would lead to

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

a costly arms race, would provoke the Soviet Union. Well, both sides were concerned about provoking the other. You know, that's war. Our moves are defensive. What the other guys doing are offensive and threatening.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Right.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

NATO expansion after the 1990s may have been a mistake, but you gotta remember Poland, Czechoslovakia, or the country had already been split in half by then, I guess. And Hungary, the first three, they wanted to join NATO because they didn't trust Russia, because Russia was already, you know, the Grozny stuff in the Chechen war, acting aggressively in its near abroad. One other question I wanted to ask you about World War II. Pat Buchanan wrote a book which I have not read, but apparently he argues that it was a mistake for the United States to get involved in World War II. What do you think?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Do you want to comment on that?

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Well, we kind of covered it. I mean, I even argue that the war in the Pacific or the conflict with Japan over China was unnecessary. But go ahead.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

You can't change the past. I mean, I think all things come at a cost. I think World War II came at tremendous cost. The United States, there's this belief that it somehow created this big boom for the economy. I don't buy that. Of course, then again, I'm also a libertarian. So whether or not we should have gotten involved or not, we can't change that. I think. What are the lessons that we learned from it? And I think the lessons that the traditional orthodox lesson is that we should have gotten involved sooner or that it was our fault because we were absent from the world in the interwar period. I don't think those are the lessons to learn from. I think the lessons to learn from it is that of tragedy, that war is terrible, it should not be taken lightly. We don't live in a linear world where Whig history reigns because that's the only way to make sense of it. If you hold a liberal, orthodox position on it is like that war has to mean something because otherwise all those millions of deaths were for naught. So you have to create this notion that out of this ashes, this sort of American phoenix will rise and govern the world lest it happen again.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Too much triumphalism, total victory, total defeat of the enemy, the occupation, conquering of their lands by millions of soldiers on both sides of Germany, the Western Front, the Eastern Front, obviously the total subjugation of Japan and the occupation of Japan after 1945. MacArthur was the first post war leader of Japan. He wrote the Japanese constitution, said, take it or leave it. We're not going to see that again. We're not going to invade Iran. Let's hope 3 million troops and occupy the country for 10 years. Germany didn't get its sovereignty back for a decade and joined NATO. West Germany joined NATO and that was part of the deal. So today, last thing here, we're at war in Iran.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

I believe in combat operations. Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

Why?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Why? Yeah.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

What are we trying to accomplish? Can Iran not just simply rebuild its missiles at some future date? If that. Is that the objective? To blow some things up on the ground? Let's set those specifics aside. As far as the ever changing aims and motivations and rationales by the administration, I think there's just a broader pattern here. It's just become way, way too easy to start a war for an American president and then put on the drapery. We're doing this to liberate the Iranian people. We can't break that pattern.

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

We can't. The imperial presidency is just so hard to deconstruct because for one, I don't know if it's just partisan brain rot, but it's like everyone's fine with their president launching a war without Congress. I will say this is probably the most egregious. I'm not a historian of presidential politics, but like, darn, does it feel like it's the worst. Right? Because at least with Korea, you know, there were troops in contact. It would have taken a herculean amount of, of political courage on Truman's part to pull them out under fire and say we're not going to fight that. That's not going to happen.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

And the UN did approve it, although the Soviets weren't there to.

[N]

But go, right?

[Brandon Buck (Cato Institute Research Fellow)]

Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, of Course, like Libya is sort of the same thing. There's, you know, there's no vote on Congress. At least there is this kind of tissue thin reading of existing AUMFs. It was fought in the, in the context of the global war on terror, which is still occurring. This is just the whim of one man and they're trying to apply the lessons of limited war to a fairly sizable state. You know, one of the interesting parallels between Obama and Trump is that both became casualty averse because of Iraq. So they tried to do the same thing things through air power to special forces for Libya. There's no way they were going to invade it with conventional forces. So they just armed up a bunch of separatist groups and then bombed the regime from the air. That's been the way that the President has maintained his foreign policy as well. Syria with isis. You warm up the Kurds, bomb the Snada out of isis. Not necessarily opposed to that, but they're now trying to apply that model everywhere else, including Iran. This notion that we can just use air power alone to affect regime change has literally never happened. I mean the closest you can come to Serbia, but even then that's not a very good example either. So they're trying to get maximalist aims or maximalist goals with very minimal effort. And there's no way to do that. If that was possible, past presidents would have done it.

[Historical Speech Voice (Possibly Barack Obama)]

Of course there is no question that Libya and the world would be better off with Gaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders have embraced that goal and will actively pursue it through non military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

On the next episode of History As It Happens. Who was the supreme leader? Ali Khamenei, one of the world's longest rangers ruling autocrats 37 years. His time on this planet ended in the blink of an eye in an Israeli airstrike. But he left a lasting legacy and it was a disaster. That is next. As we report History as it Happens, make sure to sign up for my weekly newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.

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[Megan McArdle (Reasonably Optimistic Host)]

Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McArdle and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic and it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.

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It does seem to me that there is some awakening of a desire to act together to solve problems where they are.

[Podcast Host (History as it Happens)]

You know, I am a believer in America and it's worth fighting for.

[Megan McArdle (Reasonably Optimistic Host)]

Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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