Chris Preble is a vice president for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a published author on foreign policy, and a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy who served aboard the USS Ticonderoga. He holds a PhD in history from Temple and has taught history at St. Cloud State University and Temple. He appeared as a guest on The Bob Zadek Show to discuss war, constitutional power, and American foreign policy. War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013)
War as a rationale for extra-constitutional power
In a 2013 episode, Bob Zadek framed the discussion around the claim that politicians have discovered that once they invoke the three-letter word “war,” they give themselves a free pass to undo constitutional safeguards. Zadek argued that no politician ever declares such a war won, because doing so would mean surrendering accumulated powers, and that war measures declared around the time of 9/11 remain in place. War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013)
Preble identified the two most important post-9/11 statutes as the USA PATRIOT Act, which he said allowed a range of surveillance and investigatory powers to the federal government under the guise of preventing future terrorist attacks, and the Authorization to Use Military Force, the original authorization to go into Afghanistan. He said the PATRIOT Act shifts the burden of proof from the government to the individual and erodes the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Of the AUMF, he noted that more than eleven years had passed since 9/11 and that individuals who were seven or eight years old at the time of the attacks were somehow being targeted under that authority; his preference was for it to be sunsetted after combat operations in Afghanistan drew to a close, with a year or two allowed to wind down. He also described the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as at best a mixed bag, citing a former colleague, David Rittgers, who wrote a paper for Cato calling for abolishing it. War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013)
Preble said no one disputes the President’s authority to defend the country in the event of an imminent attack, and that libertarians take the Constitution seriously — the Cato Institute has handed out or sold something like five million copies of it. He rejected the argument that the Constitution was designed for a different era with different threats, saying the threats were much greater when the Constitution was created in 1787 and that the threats of today pale in comparison. He added that he served in the US Navy in the waning days of the Cold War, that the threat posed by the Soviet Union was serious and legitimate, and that the country managed to defend itself without a wholesale violation of civil rights and civil liberties; the real excesses of that period are now looked back on as a great mistake and a stain on our history. War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013)
Zadek read from the US Supreme Court case Reed v. Covert, quoting that the Court rejected the idea that when the United States acts against citizens abroad it can do so free of the Bill of Rights, that the United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution, and that its power and authority has no other source. War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013)
The Founders, war powers, and the isolationism label
In a 2019 episode devoted to Preble’s book Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy, Zadek described the book as both a history of American foreign policy focusing on the instrument of war, tracing from the founding, and an application of that history to current affairs. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble said the Founders saw the ideal U.S. foreign policy as one in which Americans were encouraged to interact with others around the world as much as possible through trade, but where occasions for resorting to war would be quite rare. They put the war powers in the hands of the Congress rather than the executive, he said, because they believed that decisions closer to the people would make war less likely. They also limited the president’s power by maintaining a small navy and really no permanent army — if a military was needed to go to war, the army had to be raised to go to war, which placed an additional restriction on how often the United States waged war. For the first hundred years or so, the United States fought relatively few wars; wars along the interior against Native American peoples and a few wars against Mexico were declared by Congress, the necessary forces were raised, objectives were accomplished, and the forces were stood down. That pattern, Preble said, allowed the United States to grow physically and to grow its influence mostly through its example, and it restricted the power of the state, allowing people to grow and prosper as individuals with minimal restrictions by a large, intrusive state. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
On the charge of isolationism, Preble said the use of the term is quite deliberate and intended as a pejorative. It was first deployed against critics of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, he said, and became in vogue after World War II, when the attitude of many Americans toward involvement in the war was cast as isolationism, so that anyone who was a critic of warfare was an isolationist. He called that fundamentally wrong, noting that the 1930s also featured restrictions on foreign trade and severe restrictions on immigration that tried to create a much more isolated America than the one of today. He argued it is short-sighted to say the only or best way for the United States to interact with the rest of the world is by force: if American ideas are as good as Americans say, they should not have to be imposed by force, and when the military instrument is privileged over other instruments of American power, America’s influence is ironically undermined and resistance to American ideas increases. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble said the Founders believed the United States should be a proponent and example of republican democracy, personal freedom, and free trade, encouraging that behavior worldwide by example rather than at the point of a gun. He traced the influence of American political ideas to the creation of a constitutional order in which the people were the power and the government served the interests of the people — a fairly new concept — and said a number of countries over the ensuing hundred and fifty years wanted to emulate the United States because it grew prosperous and powerful and demonstrated by example that it delivered benefits to a greater number of people. On trade, he said the United States eventually became an advocate of freer trade, seeing the benefits both to human prosperity and as an instrument of peace, because people who trade with one another build up trust and are therefore less likely to come into conflict. Zadek supplemented this with the observation that people are less likely to kill their customers or their suppliers than they are otherwise. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Ukraine
A 2022 episode brought Preble back to discuss the Ukrainian-Russian-U.S. issue. Zadek introduced him as the author of Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy and of The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free, and noted that Preble was co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, having spent lots of time at the Cato Institute before joining that initiative. Zadek framed the episode as an effort to sort out what was going on and, at least equally important, the principles listeners ought to apply in reaching their own individual decisions on the appropriate policy for the United States. Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022)
Across episodes
The same questions — the Founders’ design for war powers, the pejorative use of “isolationism,” and the constitutional limits on presidential war-making — run through the 2013, 2019, and 2022 episodes, with Preble advancing the argument in each; the excerpts show no development in his position between the earlier and later treatment, only its restatement against different occasions.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Preble’s birth date or place, his full employment history, or the details of his naval service beyond the ship and years named. They do not give the outcome or holding of Reed v. Covert beyond the passage Zadek read, nor do they describe what Preble said in the portions of the 2022 Ukraine episode that follow his introduction. The excerpts also do not cover his departure from or return to Cato, or the substance of his other books beyond their titles.
Episodes
3 appearances, 2013–2022.
- War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013) — War as a political tool to bypass constitutional safeguards. VP for Defense and Foreign Policy at Cato
- On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019) — History and Principles of US Foreign Policy. Cato Institute VP for Defense and Foreign Policy
- Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022) — US Foreign Policy Principles and the Ukraine Crisis. Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security