A war most Americans support
In a June 2014 episode on partitioning Iraq, Bob Zadek put the problem of peace to Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. Zadek observed that there is no strong anti-peace movement in the United States, but that peace is sometimes unattainable, and that even the most peace-loving Americans would concede that there came a time when the country had to be involved in World War II. Eland agreed: people have a right to self-defense personally, and nations have a right of self-defense, and when you are under attack you have to answer that. In World War II, he said, the United States was attacked and did answer, and most people would support the war United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Eland’s center, as he described it, tries to bring home for people of all political persuasions the costs of war. He attributed the current appetite for peace to the brushfire wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, which had not turned out the way the country wanted, and to the memory of Vietnam. But he warned that the United States has sometimes been swept away by war fever, which he called intoxicating because people think they will get glory. More often than not, he said, the war goes sour or there are hidden costs. Among the hidden costs he named were the erosion of civil liberties and the growth of 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 United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Causes before Pearl Harbor
Eland’s central move was to insist on going back further than the attack itself. Americans, he said, wake up and say Pearl Harbor, and if asked why the Japanese attacked, they give blank stares — the same blank stares, he suggested, that follow the question of why bin Laden attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11. World War II, in his account, was World War I, Part Two, and 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, was whether the United States had to get involved in World War I at all. The country tipped the balance and let its allies run roughshod over Germany with reparations and war guilt clauses; Woodrow Wilson, in his zeal to get the League of Nations, let the French and the British rub Germany’s nose in the ground, and demanded the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. That, Eland argued, opened the path toward Hitler taking power later on United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Had the United States stayed out of World War I, Eland speculated, Germany would probably have won on a fifteen-round decision rather than a knockout, the borders would have been readjusted as in all European wars before American involvement, and the twentieth century would have been much different. He acknowledged this was water under the bridge but drew a methodological point from it: we need to go back in history farther than we often do to find the root causes of events. Applied to World War II, that meant noting that Roosevelt declined to negotiate with the Japanese, had cut off their oil and metals, and was trying to starve them of fuel because he did not like their intervention in China. Eland’s formulation was that we certainly need to fight World War II if we are attacked, but we also need to realize there are root causes to things United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Conscription and the “popular war” myth
A 2018 episode with Thaddeus Russell approached the war from the direction of the draft. Russell, discussing the history of American foreign policy, said he had been doing research on World War II and had realized that every single country involved — dozens and dozens of them — had universal conscription throughout the war. On that basis he rejected the label of a popular war: World War II, in which 65 million people died, could not be called a people’s war, he said, if every single army in it required enslavement Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018).
The exchange around that claim was about whether conscription or voluntarism better distributes the burden of fighting. Zadek argued that conscription assures, at least on paper, that rich people have to fight alongside poor people, and that without it only those with no better economic alternative take the job of soldier, producing massive social unrest. Russell disagreed with the premise: the United States has had a volunteer army since Vietnam, he said, and it is made up almost exclusively of poor or working-class people, yet the last real anti-war protest movement was during Vietnam and there is none now. He described being forced by the government to fight in a war he opposed as close to the worst thing he could imagine, and said that would be the one thing that might cause him to take up arms against his own country Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018).
Earlier in the same conversation, Russell had argued that the draft has been present in every major American war except the Iraq War, and that this tells you something about how committed Americans have been to those wars. He noted that two-thirds of the soldiers who fought in World War II were conscripts, and grouped the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea and Vietnam with it as wars that depended on drafts to happen. His question was whose foreign policy those wars had been, and whether they could be called the people’s wars if they all depended on conscription Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018).
Zadek also raised a lesser-known feature of the draft during the American Revolution and the Civil War: a drafted young man was permitted to hire somebody to go in his place, so that those who served were not middle class or upper middle class, and there were riots during the Civil War because it was a poor person’s war. Russell accepted the point but qualified it, saying there was still a real democratic ethos in America during the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, with a significant number of middle- and even upper-class volunteers, and that many Civil War generals and officers who lost limbs or their lives came from well-established wealthy families Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018).
War’s decline since 1945
John Mueller, in a 2022 episode on China, offered a different frame: war itself, meaning international war — the way nations fight each other to settle their disputes — has been declining, probably since World War II. Since 1945, he said, there had been 75 years without a war among developed states; World War III never happened. International war has declined elsewhere too: there are a fair number of wars, such as between Israel and Muslim states and between Pakistan and India, but those have not really been around for about 30 years, and there have been only about four international wars in the last 30 years China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller located the cause in a change in opinion. The main reason for the decline, he said, was a decline in the idea that war is a good idea — or, put another way, that international war is really stupid. That change took place after World War I, when people sat around saying that was really stupid and should not be done again; they tried to keep it from happening and failed, obviously, because of Hitler. Starting again after World War II, it has for the most part been a major success. Europe, which used to be the cauldron of wars, has had essentially no international wars since that time, though Mueller noted the verge of problems with Ukraine that might break the streak. Europe has been free of substantial international war for the longest period since the word Europe was invented about 2,500 years ago China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller was careful about what counts. Countries continue to have many problems and do many things he does not consider war: they intervene in civil wars, exact economic sanctions, sling cyber balloons, and may have minor conflicts along borders, but not near cities or garrisons. What has changed, he said, is that something as hallowed and sanctified and common as international war, which has been there forever, has basically been given up by a large number of countries, and increasingly it seems by pretty much all of them — a change of historical proportions, perhaps the most important ever China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Across episodes: the same question, different angles
The excerpts do not show a single argument developing across episodes so much as three different entries into the same subject. Eland, in 2014, treats World War II as the war that had to be fought once America was attacked, while insisting that its causes run back through World War I and Roosevelt’s refusal to negotiate with Japan. Russell, in 2018, treats it as evidence against the idea of a popular war, on the ground that every army in it required conscription. Mueller, in 2022, treats it as the beginning of the period in which international war declined, attributing that decline to a change in opinion that began after World War I and resumed after World War II. No speaker in these excerpts responds directly to another’s treatment of the war.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the course of the war, its campaigns, its alliances, its ending, or the number of American dead. They do not name the statutes, treaties or declarations that brought the United States into the war, and they do not discuss the Holocaust or the postwar settlement beyond Eland’s remarks on reparations and war guilt clauses after World War I. Roosevelt’s oil and metals cutoff is mentioned without the name of any measure or its date, and the Japanese decision for Pearl Harbor is treated only as a question Americans cannot answer. Mueller’s figures for international wars are given without the list of those wars.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not cover the war’s military history, its campaigns or its ending. They do not name the statutes, treaties or declarations by which the United States entered, and they do not discuss the Holocaust or the postwar settlement beyond Eland’s remarks on reparations and war guilt clauses after World War I. Roosevelt’s oil and metals cutoff is mentioned without the name of any measure or its date, and the Japanese decision for Pearl Harbor is treated only as a question Americans cannot answer. Mueller’s figures for international wars are given without the list of those wars.