Transaction Publishers • 1997 • 450 pages • $44.95 cloth; $29.95 paperback
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World. He formerly served as a special assistant to President Reagan.
Advocates of limited government have long known that war and preparation for war are enemies of liberty. War obviously destroys lives and consumes wealth—new technologies have made genocide a simple matter of pushing a button. But war has another, long-lasting consequence: it centralizes power. “War is the health of the state,” observed Randolph Bourne.
Many conservatives were willing to pay this high price during the Cold War because of the threat of hegemonic communism. But now America reigns supreme internationally. Those who believe in individual liberty must work to limit government power internationally as well as domestically.
John V. Denson’s The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories provides a desperately needed call to arms. As he explains: “[B]ecause liberty is so fragile, its true defender recognizes that war is its greatest enemy, and therefore the true patriot is often the courageous individual who opposes a particular war because he recognizes that it is unjust—that it would be fought for the wrong purposes or that the risk for the loss of liberty is greater than any benefit to be gained by the war.”
The Costs of War emphasizes the fragility of liberty and chronicles the devastating impact of past conflicts. This comprehensive volume covers everything from the War of Northern Aggression (sometimes called the Civil War) to the role of conscription and the record of Winston Churchill.
Denson leads off with a sweeping essay on U.S. history. The nation’s founders feared the costs of war, which is why they worked to prevent intervention in foreign conflicts. Their fears were well founded: the Civil War and Spanish-American War both spurred the growth of federal power. World War I, however, was a truly epochal event. Not only did the national government institute mass conscription and seize control of the economy, but, as Denson relates, “President Wilson followed Lincoln’s example and ruthlessly crushed the civil liberties of those Americans who opposed his war.” Although government power receded some after the conflict, World War II and the Cold War fueled state growth anew.
The lack of serious opposition to warlike policies today conflicts with America’s long anti-interventionist tradition, of which Justin Raimondo, of the Center for Libertarian Studies, writes: “It wasn’t just the founders who opposed fighting other people’s wars. There was strong opposition to the Spanish-American War and World War I—which is why Wilson resorted to jackboot tactics against his critics.”
What makes The Costs of War particularly valuable is its willingness to slaughter sacred cows. Such as Abraham Lincoln and his war for the Union—which ended up killing more than 600,000 people, distorting the constitutional order, and violating civil and political liberties. History professor Richard Gamble explores Lincoln’s ugly legacy of the “destruction of the old Republic, a more modest federation with a regard for localism and states’ rights, a sense of limits, and a relative freedom from foreign entanglement.”
Equally subversive, but also persuasive, is the analysis of Winston Churchill’s record by historian Ralph Raico. There is perhaps no more venerated figure from World War II, but Raico’s view is rather less positive. He contends that “Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state.” Indeed, argues Raico, war “was his lifelong passion.” This is the record that virtually no one knows.
Some of the impacts of war are unintended and even unimagined. Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute explains how war swells the state; in turn, “as the state grows, the family declines.” He warns that the military today is “being used to re-engineer our society to serve the total state.” He therefore calls on conservatives to “cast off lingering delusions about the ‘conservative traditions’ of the military.”
Real patriotism means risking the lives and wealth of Americans when their future as a free people is at stake. The Costs of War illustrates why there may be no more important duty today for advocates of limited government than to steadfastly oppose war.
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