The war as a limit case for peace
Ivan Eland, described by Bob Zadek as director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, opened his discussion of peace by conceding that the concept has limits. Zadek framed World War II as the case even the most peace-loving Americans would admit required involvement, and Eland agreed: nations have a right of self-defense, and when under attack they must answer it. In World War II, he said, the United States was attacked and answered, and most people would support the war United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Eland’s center, he explained, tries to bring home the costs of war for people of all political persuasions. He listed domestic costs that he said people do not often attribute to war: erosion of civil liberties and increasing executive power past what the Founders intended, producing what he called an imperial presidency because of the wars of the twentieth century and partly into the twenty-first. The nexus between war and the erosion of liberty is what the center studies, across both international and domestic aspects.
Root causes and the road from World War I
Eland argued that Americans tend to wake up to Pearl Harbor without asking why the Japanese attacked, just as they ask why bin Laden attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon without knowing the history that came before. His answer was that World War II was World War I, Part Two, and that World War I was the more historically important event because it took the United States down the road of a new foreign policy. The real question, he said, is whether the United States had to get involved in World War I at all. American entry tipped the balance, letting the allies impose reparations and war guilt clauses on Germany; Woodrow Wilson, in his zeal for the League of Nations, let the French and British rub Germany’s nose in the ground and demanded the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Eland said this opened the path toward Hitler taking power later, uncontested. Had the United States stayed out, he speculated, Germany would probably have won on a fifteen-round decision rather than a knockout, borders would have been readjusted as in earlier European wars, and the twentieth century would have been much different United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Eland extended the same root-cause reasoning to Iraq, saying al-Qaeda in Iraq originated from the American invasion, that the country was artificial and held together only by a dictator, and that al-Qaeda in Iraq had morphed into Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He concluded that the United States certainly needed to fight World War II if attacked, but that Roosevelt declined to negotiate with the Japanese and had cut off their oil and metals, trying to starve them of fuel because he disliked their intervention in China.
Conscription and the “popular war” question
Thaddeus Russell told Bob Zadek that every single country involved in World War II had universal conscription throughout the war, and that in a war in which 65 million people died, he did not think it could be called a popular war or a people’s war if every army in it required enslavement Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018). He had said earlier that two-thirds of the soldiers who fought in World War II were conscripts, part of his broader claim that every major American war except the Iraq War depended on a draft. Russell called the draft enslavement — being forced by the state to risk your life — and said he considered every draft resister in American history a national hero.
Zadek raised the Civil War practice by which a drafted young man could hire someone to serve in his place, producing riots because it was a poor person’s war; Russell agreed but said there was still a real democratic ethos in America during the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, with officers from wealthy families and middle-class men enlisting as regular soldiers. Zadek also noted that Milton Friedman was probably the leading thinker who helped get rid of the draft, and Russell said Friedman called it the worst thing a state can do. Zadek observed that conscription assures on paper that rich people fight alongside poor people, and that without it only the lowest rungs of the economic ladder would take soldiers’ jobs; Russell replied that the post-Vietnam volunteer army is made up almost exclusively of poor or working-class people, yet the last real anti-war protest movement was during Vietnam.
The decline of international war after 1945
John Mueller told Zadek that war — particularly international war, the way nations fight each other to settle disputes — has been declining, and that since 1945 there had been 75 years without a war among developed states; World War III never happened. International war declined elsewhere too: conflicts such as those between Israel and Muslim states and between Pakistan and India had not really been around for about 30 years, with only about four international wars in the last 30 years China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller attributed the change to a decline in the idea that war is a good idea — that international war is really stupid. The shift in opinion took place after World War I, when people said that had been really stupid and tried unsuccessfully to prevent its recurrence because of Hitler; it resumed after World War II and was for the most part a major success. Europe, once the cauldron of wars, had essentially no international wars since that time, though Mueller noted the verge of problems with Ukraine that might break the streak, calling Europe’s freedom from substantial international war the longest since the word Europe was invented about 2,500 years ago. He described the change as perhaps the most important of historical proportions: something as hallowed and sanctified and common as international war had basically been given up by a large number of countries, and increasingly by pretty much all of them.
Across episodes: the same question, differently framed
The excerpts show no single argument carried across episodes so much as three distinct treatments of the same subject. Eland, in 2014, treats World War II as the sequel to World War I and asks whether American entry into the earlier war was necessary; Russell, in 2018, treats it as evidence against the popular-war thesis because every belligerent conscripted; Mueller, in 2022, treats the postwar period as the moment international war began to be abandoned. The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatments — each guest advances his own claim, and no speaker responds to another’s.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the course of the fighting, the Holocaust, the Pacific theater, or the war’s ending. They do not state when the war began or ended, which countries fought on which side beyond passing references, or the name of any treaty, statute or case. Roosevelt appears only as the president who declined to negotiate with the Japanese and cut off oil and metals; no excerpt gives his full name, title or party. Casualty figures appear only as Russell’s 65 million dead and his 600,000 Civil War dead, and no excerpt states a source for either.