On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton?
2019-05-30 · Guest: Chris Preble (Cato Institute VP for Defense and Foreign Policy) · 51:55
History and Principles of US Foreign Policy
Bob Zadek interviews Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute to discuss his book, Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy. They explore the Founders’ original intent regarding military restraint, the constitutional role of Congress in declaring war, and how the label “isolationism” is often used as a pejorative to dismiss advocates of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Topics: Foreign Policy, War Powers, Isolationism, U.S. History, Cato Institute, Constitutional Law Speakers: Bob Zadek (host), Christopher Preble (guest)
The Founders’ Vision for Foreign Policy [00:00]
Bob Zadek: You’re listening to The Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion with the smartest guests on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. I’ll introduce today’s show with a bit of a hypothetical. Imagine you were an editor of a well-known non-fiction book publisher, and your publisher assigned you the task. The publisher gave you the title of a book, and the publisher said to you, the editor, “Here is a title of a book.” And the title the publisher gives the editor is Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy.
If that editor knows what he or she is doing, that editor would pick this morning’s guest as the perfect author for such a book. An author who knows about peace, knows about war, and for sure knows about liberty—and also knows about foreign policy. With that introduction, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Chris Preble. Chris is the Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at Cato. Chris is a published author; he has published several books, including The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, also John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap, and also A Dangerous World: Threat Perception and National Security.
Chris also was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, served aboard the USS Ticonderoga. He holds a PhD in history from Temple and writes at War on the Rocks, which is a platform that deals with the analysis, commentary, and debate on foreign policy. So, Chris, the perfect author for the perfect book at a perfect time in our history. Welcome to the show.
Christopher Preble: Thank you, Bob. You’re too kind. I really appreciate you having me on the show.
Bob Zadek: It’s not kindness; it’s accuracy. So thanks so much for writing the book. And Chris, just to explain how the book is organized: your book is both a history of American foreign policy focusing on the instrument of war. It traces, of course, from the founding through and including probably the day you put the computer down, having finished the book. And then you go on to discuss current affairs, and you apply what you have explained to us in the first part of the book. You explain it to foreign policy today.
Now, Chris, tell us just to set the stage. Americans all carry—or most Americans, hopefully all, carry with them, with us in our DNA—this American view of how life and how a country and how an individual’s life should be organized insofar as its relationship to war is concerned. What country did the Founders give us insofar as the instrument of war is concerned, and also the relationship between war, which is a tool, and foreign policy, which is the principle by which war is carried out?
Christopher Preble: Right. So, I think that if you look at the writings of the Founders, and their views informed U.S. foreign policy for at least the first hundred years of our history, if not longer, they saw the ideal U.S. foreign policy as one in which Americans were allowed and encouraged to interact with others around the world as much as possible through trade, but where the occasions for actually resorting to war would be quite rare.
In particular, they put the war powers in the hands of the Congress, not the executive, because they believed—I think correctly—that if these decisions were closer to the people than made by a single person or a small group of people, that war would be less likely to occur. They also, critically, limited the president’s power through maintaining a small navy and really no permanent army. An army—if you needed a military to go to war, you needed to raise the army to go to war. And that placed an additional restriction on how often the United States waged war.
And so for the first hundred years of our history or so—a little bit more than that—the United States fought relatively few wars. The wars that were fought along the interior against Native American peoples and things like that, and a few wars against Mexico, for example, those were declared by Congress. They raised the necessary forces, they accomplished their objectives, and then the forces were stood down. That was the pattern. That was the way that the Founders intended it, and I think that by and large it served the country well because it allowed the United States to grow physically, but we grew our influence mostly through our example. And equally important, it restricted the power of the state, which allowed people to grow and prosper as individuals with minimal restrictions by a large, intrusive state.
The Myth of Isolationism [08:42]
Bob Zadek: Now, what’s important in what you said, and I’d like to just emphasize that a bit, is that those of us who advocate against the use of military force—the accusation by the war hawks, if I may, is that we are isolationists. And whether or not isolationism is good or bad, whether that’s a pejorative or a compliment, putting that aside—I don’t want to be cute, but isolationism generally is looked upon negatively, whether it should be or not, I don’t want to discuss right now.
However, what you have explained in your introduction is that by no means did the Founders, nor should the country today, ever act or behave as isolationist. That is, it’s not a question of not interacting with the world; it’s a question of the form of those interactions. So help us understand and put into context this unpleasant use of “isolationism” as a rebuttal to those who say, “Let’s not go to war.”
Christopher Preble: Sure. I think that the use of the term “isolationism” is quite deliberate. It is intended as a pejorative. It was first deployed against critics of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, but it became in vogue in the period after World War II, where the attitude of many Americans to avoid involvement in the war was cast as isolationism, and therefore anyone who was a critic of warfare was an isolationist.
I think that’s fundamentally wrong. One of the other critical features of the 1930s was a restriction on foreign trade and severe restrictions on immigration, for example, that tried to create a much more isolated America than the one we have today. And it’s also particularly short-sighted to say that the only way that the United States, or the best way for the United States to interact with the rest of the world, is by force.
If we believe that these ideas that are, you know, at the foundation of America—the DNA, as you say—if we believe these ideas are as good as we say they are, then you shouldn’t have to impose them by force. They should be embraced by most people voluntarily, and they have been. So I think that when we privilege the military instrument over the other instruments of American power, we ironically undermine America’s influence, and therefore that creates more isolationism.
There’s been much more resistance to American ideas, including ideas of liberality, liberty, and liberalism as we define it. There’s been much more resistance to that over the last 20 years precisely because I think many people around the world believe that the United States is doing these things at the barrel of a gun. And I think that generates a lot of resistance, not surprisingly.
And so the Founders, of course, all believed that we should be a proponent, an example of Republican democracy—of democracy writ large, if you will—of personal freedom, of free trade. We should encourage that form of behavior worldwide, but not at the point of a gun, but by example. And so I need to—and I’d like you to remind our listeners how, given that we as a country seek to export the values that we cherish, there’s more than one way to export them. The bad way is to say, “Darn it, you are going to be democratic whether you like it or not, and we’re sending in the troops to make sure that you’re democratic,” or by setting an example that just shows others what the benefits are.
So help us understand how one could, and how the U.S. to some degree—to a meaningful degree—promotes freedom and free trade by example as opposed to by force, and how that sets it as a model for the rest of the world without force.
Christopher Preble: Sure. I mean, going back to the very beginning, when the United States created a constitutional government, a constitutional order where the people were the power and the government served the interests of the people, that was a fairly new concept. And I think that you see a number of countries over the ensuing hundred and fifty years or so wanting to emulate the United States. Why?
Christopher Preble: Because the United States during that period of relatively limited government and relative, uh, human freedom grew very prosperous, grew very powerful, and we demonstrated by our example that it was—that it was successful, that it actually delivered benefits to—to a greater number of people. And, w—you know, people wanted to—wanted to come to the United States, and if they didn’t come to the United States as immigrants, then they wanted to create, uh, similar governments, uh, in their places. So I think you look at the influence of American political ideas around the world, uh, it—it definitely impacted the—the growth and spread of liberal democracy and republicanism and things like that—small-r republicanism, that is, uh, representative government that—that is—that has certain, uh, uh, delegated powers. That was critical.
The other p—factor which we talked about is trade. Is that eventually the United States became an advocate of, uh, freer trade? We were not in the early days, not quite as much as we have—we became in the twentieth century, uh, but we saw the benefits of trade both to enhance human prosperity but also as an instrument of peace, because people who are trading with one another build up trust, uh, and therefore that, uh, reduces the likelihood of conflict when people are buying and selling things from each other as opposed to taking them from one another by force.
Bob Zadek: And just to supplement what you said, it’s—it’s a truism, doesn’t have to be defended. Uh, it’s a truism that people are less likely to kill their customers or their suppliers, uh, than they are otherwise. And if you are trading with somebody, um, your self-interest is not furthered by bumping off those people who are buying your product. Just an observation.
The Evolution to Permanent War [13:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, so we start in our country, and, uh, your book is magnificent in its treatment of its analysis and discussion of war. So the question that is stuck—that I’m stuck with is: here we are, we start with a country founded on the principle of, uh, no harm, do not harm others except in self-defense. Um, defense was important, and we—we evolved into a country that is permanently at war. Now, we’ll get into—I suspect, in a somewhat cynical but accurate way—that m—leaders of our country have found war to be politically useful. We’ll get into that in a second, but help us understand how we evolved—of course, for sure we did—from a country th—that was genetically opposed to war to one that is permanently at war more than any other country on the planet. What accounts for that bizarre evolution?
Christopher Preble: Well, a couple things. So I think, first of all, it is relatively easy for the United States of America to wage war because we have a large military. It is deployed in many places around the world. It is staffed by professionals whose job it is to wage war or at least to prepare to deter—deter war. And it was not always the case, as I pointed out. In the past, when the United States wanted to wage war, it had to raise a military in order to do it. But because the President now has that military at his disposal, it effectively puts—it effectively flips over the premise and says the President uses the military and then dares Congress to cut off the funds for that military, which never happened or almost never happened.
So, first of all, it’s easy. It’s relatively easy for us to wage war in a way that it—it is not easy for most other countries and wasn’t easy for the United States. Second, we redefined what it was required to keep the country, uh, defended. After World War II, we created, uh, the National Security Act of 1947. Among other things, it created an Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and things like that. But critically, it redefined the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Prior to that, there was a Department of War and a Department—Department of the Navy.
So we defined defense after World War II, uh, as not, uh, primarily defending the United States and the approaches to the United States at sea, but to defending an idea that had to be defended forward, which is mostly in Europe and Asia. That is—that’s why U.S. forces, uh, uh, remained in Europe and Asia or were sent to Europe and Asia during the Cold War. The argument was that in order for the United States to be secure, we had to be—the military had to be, uh, deployed, uh, abroad.
And thirdly, um, just, uh, one other quick point on the—on how easy it is to go to war. The Constitution makes it hard to do things. That was another one of the insights of the founders. It was—you need a large public groundswell to make major changes in public policy. You need all the branches to align. And—and those occasions are quite rare. And of course, we’ve seen the sort of paralysis that afflicts our government in most domestic policy matters. War, by contrast, is the easiest of all things the President can do. Uh, and so I think it’s the combination of this new idea about what it is—what’s required to keep us safe, one that I think can and should be challenged, but also just the mechanics of it that make it so easy. Uh, and I—and I think that we be—we don’t have a debate about foreign policy and especially about the use of force, uh, precisely for that reason, because for most people it’s—it’s not worth debating. It seems just sort of obvious and easy.
Congressional Abdication and the AUMF [17:45]
Bob Zadek: And of course, implicit in what you said, uh, in fact, explicit in what you said, is Congress was given this weighty responsibility that only they can declare war. And what has happened in our country, and we all are quite aware of it, is that Congress, uh, those who are elected to Congress, uh, are focused primarily and perhaps not surprisingly on the preservation of what turns out to be a pretty gosh darn good job, and they’d like to keep it, all things being equal. And the best way to keep your job, if you’re an elected official, is not do anything that’s going to cause you to get yelled at.
So Congress, in order to preserve their wonderful job—free parking and National Airport, Reagan Airport, and the like; it’s a pretty good job—in order to preserve that job, the best thing to do is to take all the hard decisions and push them out to other branches of the government: the executive and the judicial and the judiciary. And therefore, Congress can pass lofty, broad bills that preserve peace, but just say that we leave the details to others. That way the others, the judiciary and the executive, will get all the heat and we get to keep our job.
So, uh, and the history of war, as you explain in your book, uh, all of the wars we have been in have never been specifically declared by Congress. They are all illegal wars or not wars. Uh, Korea was, of course, a police action. There never was a declaration of war. So help us understand just a bit about how many wars we’re in that were never declared. Therefore, in a manner of speaking, all of the wars we’re in were just plain unconstitutional.
Christopher Preble: Right. So since World War II, uh, the—the la—was the last time you had a formal declaration of war where Congress actually, uh, you know, authorizes, uh, and declares war. You’ve had several occasions since then, uh, a few significant ones, like the first Gulf War in 1991. There was a congressional authorization to use military force. There was a congressional authorization to use military force after 9/11, and there was another one, uh, leading into the Iraq War.
So there are occasions when Congress actually does, um, vote, but they are rare. And even those authorizations, the way they’re constructed—and they’re not declarations of war—are a sign of Congress’s willingness to, um, uh, to give up its, uh, its authority to and hand it over to the executive because basically they say, “If you, Mr. President, uh, decide that it is in—in the United States’ interest to go to war, then this authorization gives you that blank check.” Um, they are tr—they are notoriously open-ended, and so that—that authorization, uh, is still exists. There are people who will be deploying to Afghanistan this year who were not born at the time of the passage of the 2001 AUMF. Um, you have people fighting under the 2002 AUMF, uh, on pre—on, uh, pretenses that are completely phony to the—to the war in Iraq.
So the—the Congress has really, um, uh, has given up this power, and as you say, they’ve done it in a—in a fairly cynical and self-interested way. Two other quick points. First of all, Madison, uh, of course, uh, famously the—effectively the author of the Constitution, or at least one of the principal authors, he called the War Powers Clause the most important in the entire document. Uh, so he understood how important it was. And the other thing is for—for people who—who—who comment on Congress’s willingness to give up its power over war and say, “Well, it’s important for the, you know, the—the President,” uh, I wonder how people would respond if Congress routinely gave up other, uh, powers that are explicitly delegated to it in the Constitution.
The Dereliction of Congressional Duty [21:01]
Christopher Preble: For example, if the Congress just said, “Well, we’re not really sure whether or not raising taxes is such a good idea, but we’ll let the President decide, and then he can catch take the heat if the—if taxes go up.” Or originating of spending bills, which is also vested in the powers of Congress in the Constitution. If they decided, “Well, in fact, the President’s budget submission isn’t just a suggestion, it’s actually the law of the land, and we’ll just—we’ll just treat it as such.”
If—if Congress routinely, um, relinquished the powers granted to it by the Constitution, I think most people would be—would feel that they were not doing their jobs. It was literally a dereliction of duty. And yet somehow, when they, uh, choose to avoid weighing in on matters of war and peace, uh, the public sentiment is, oh, you know, sort of to shrug the shoulders.
I think we really need to turn the—the tables on this whole process and say it is—it is politically, um, damaging for a member of Congress to not weigh in on matters of war and peace, because it—it is—it is truly one of the most important decisions that, uh, that he or she can make, uh, as an elected official. Of course, as an aside, Congress has, uh, delegated huge swaths of legislative authority through, uh, the administrative state. That’s the regulatory state. That’s for another—that’s for another show.
Bob Zadek: And when you mention Madison—and we’re gonna go to break in a second, Chris—when we come back, um, I’m going to ask you to help us understand the blurring of the lines. Once war—we’re at a war footing, how the target of the war easily slips from a foreign threat to a domestic threat, that is, the people who are listening to this show. Because that is a serious issue, which Cato has focused on extensively.
And before we go to break, since you mentioned Madison, and as an introduction to the “war on Americans,” which I’d like to discuss after the break, once we have war footing, as Madison observed also—and this is a quote—“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” Oh my goodness, how did he know?
This is Bob Zadek, um, spent—spending the morning speaking with Chris Preble. Chris has written Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy. Chris is a vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. We’ll be back in lots more, including war by the military against us, not to protect us. This is Bob Zadek. We’ll be back in 30 really short seconds.
Redefining Defense and the Non-Aggression Principle [26:45]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio—the show of ideas, never ever, not once, the show of attitude. This morning we are speaking with Chris Preble. Chris has written Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy. And this book is important because it is so timely, and it’s important for another reason.
Uh, I spent a lot of my life trying to understand politics, uh, political theory in America and around the world. I, for most of that time, I avoided foreign policy because I felt it was, A, too complicated, B, it was all conducted in secret, and I could never understand it because I didn’t know what was happening behind my back and in closed doors. Well, foreign—it’s important that we all understand foreign policy. And if you want to read one book—one book that is written for every listener in America out there right now—this book sets it all out. It is, if you can believe it and you must, a page-turner. It is an essential both primer and scholarly text on the history of peace, war, and liberty. And if you have any desire whatsoever, as you must, to understand what’s going on in the world around us, this book must be read.
So, Chris, thank you very much for all the work you did on writing that book. Now, Chris, uh, in the book, you do a wonderful job discussing, uh—and I’ll tee up the issue with—preemption versus preventative wars. Uh, wars in anticipation of a threat. And that involves of all things, uh, the word “defense.” And now, as a practicing lawyer, I teach those who work with me that I use two words to help remind them how to draft documents. And the two words I use are: “Words matter.” Words matter. And the word “defense” has become polluted and captured so that it has lost its dictionary meaning and it has been used now as a—to defend, sorry for the pun—to defend foreign policy initiatives that have nothing to do with defense, how—in the way that any rational person would use the word. So help us understand defense versus “defense.”
Christopher Preble: Right. Um, so, uh, as I said earlier, we—when we redefined or renamed the Department of War the Department of Defense, uh, we—we implied that in order for the United States to defend itself, we would actually have to be fighting more wars and be present in lots of places around the world, which we have been since the end of World War II. Again, that’s very different from the way that we had practiced it for most of our history.
And we see it play out—dare I say, even in some cases, aggression, which is, uh, not defensive at all, right? We—we do draw a distinction between actions taken, uh, to protect one’s life and liberty, uh, from those, uh, taken to—to, uh, to deny others life and liberty. I mean, I think there’s a basic critical concept of the non-aggression principle, which libertarians understand very well.
Um, having said that, there are occasions for the use of force. I’m not a pacifist, and I think that we can look at certain instances in American history where, uh, the use of force was appropriate, and, uh, it was, uh, truly for those rare cases where for our own security it was necessary to take preemptive action. That is, there were evidence—there’s evidence of an imminent attack or imminent danger to the United States, and—and preemption in that sense is a legitimate form of self-defense.
Uh, prevention, uh, is much more like aggression. Prevention is, uh, espying, uh, across the room or across the world, some future danger, and saying, “Rather than me risk, uh, that future danger actually materializing, we’re going to take them out, uh, ahead of time.” And—and again, to most, uh, independent observers, that would just look like aggression.
And so I think it’s important for us to differentiate between defensive measures that are designed to protect us from harm and those that are actually, uh, uh, that—that are much more aggressive in nature and therefore, uh, likely, frankly, to stimulate resistance to the United States or resistance to our actions around the world and undermine our ability to be a model of liberty, which is what we talked about at the start of the show.
Bob Zadek: And, uh, one of the podcasts that I heard you were on, Free Thoughts, which is, uh, a podcast sponsored by Libertarianism.org, and you mentioned, uh, Afghanistan—our initial foray into Afghanistan—as an example of a justifiable use of military force. I found, uh—I was thinking about that, Chris, and I thought to myself, that was kind of in my mind on the border. Uh, I wasn’t as “all in” as you seem to be on Afghanistan. Help us understand, just so you can show how the principle that you have enunciated is actually applied. Uh, what is there about Afghanistan that made it, uh—well, I’ll say, uh, an obnoxious phrase—a “just war,” but made the use of military force in Afghanistan appropriate, uh, under the principle of defense?
Christopher Preble: Sure. I think that it—it—it connects entirely to Al Qaeda, to the events of 9/11, and to Al Qaeda’s demonstrated ability to do harm to the United States. Of course, the war, uh, effectively started—the war against Al Qaeda effectively started in 1998 after the bombings in Africa, in, uh, Kenya and in, uh, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. And the—the—those attacks were sort of when the United States started to take seriously the threat from Al Qaeda and to actually consider, uh, military operations against it in—in the places where it was operating. In and after 9/11, of course, we went after Afghanistan; that’s where the base camps were.
Christopher Preble: Um, I think that once we—that usually the use of force is not particularly effective against terrorist organizations because the hard part with terrorists is finding them, not killing them. Once you know where they are, killing them is fairly easy. So most of the effective work that’s done to reduce the danger of terrorism is by law enforcement and some intelligence and cooperating with other law enforcement agencies around the world. That’s where most of the successes have occurred.
Um, but I thought that that was—the intervention in Afghanistan, and I agree, I understand it’s a debatable proposition. I know there are some people that don’t think that was a justified use of force, but I think in the case of Afghanistan in September and October of 2001, the presence of Al Qaeda camps and Al Qaeda personnel in a physical location that was targetable by military force—then that use of force was appropriate.
I also think, while we’re at it, I also think it was appropriate to explicitly punish the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda, which they did, and for sending a message to other countries that might have been tempted to do the same thing. So I do think there is some deterrent effect that that carries with it when you take action against terrorist organizations in foreign countries. But that does not mean that it’s an easy call. It does not mean there are not risks.
I think the risk we’ve seen in Afghanistan is that the mission has evolved considerably since when we went in, and what we’ve been trying to accomplish in Afghanistan for the most part since November or December of 2001, frankly, is not easily defended on counterterrorism or on national security grounds.
Bob Zadek: Then can you—is there an easy standard, or maybe just impossible, as citizens of our country have to decide whether our leaders are acting in our best interest? Can you give any guidance at all as to how we can tell or make a judgment whether the use of military force in a foreign country is justified under the narrow definition of defense, or whether it is too expansive, or is it just a judgment call and you know it when you see it?
The Erosion of Civil Liberties on a Permanent War Footing [35:45]
Christopher Preble: Right. Well, I think first of all, it requires a certain degree of skepticism on the part of all Americans, but especially our elected officials—that is, members of Congress who we elect to help communicate our preferences. They should be skeptical of claims by the president or his advisors of a national security threat. They are empowered. Some of them have access to information that would allow them to assess the nature of the threat. I think they should have a very skeptical view of those things.
I think journalists need to be much more critical and skeptical of the information presented to them precisely because of what we now know—and I document this in some detail in the book—what we now know about how the major media handled information about the supposed threat from Iraq leading up to that war. Frankly, many of those news organizations just did not do their job effectively. They did not scrutinize these claims.
I think that that’s a critical point. The other thing is, just to be very blunt, precisely because for the United States it is so easy for us to wage war, which is what I just talked about at the outset, we should be extraordinarily careful in doing so because we need to ask these questions. It is easy for us to wage war, but that doesn’t mean that other countries around the world are just going to roll over and take it. And that’s the part that I think we forget.
So I think that it starts with a certain amount of skepticism and a certain amount of empowerment on the part of individuals to be willing to question the claims that they are presented and to seek out other sources of information that might suggest that the danger is not as great as we’re told.
Bob Zadek: My greatest—and maybe there are eight fears all tied for first, but I’ll say my greatest fear du jour is what has happened in our country, which is once we are on a war footing, which we have been certainly since 9/11, and certainly before 9/11, but 9/11 was a sea change. What happens is the focus or the mission of the military starts to get blurred with being focused on foreign threats from foreign powers and focused inwardly—the so-called “war on terror.”
Of course, you cannot have a war on a feeling, but a “war on terror,” so that the domestic civil rights and freedoms become threatened. Madison knew that would happen. Madison observed no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Madison and others knew that war was the way that government accumulated power against its citizens.
So help us understand what has happened once we are on a war footing, how the distinction gets blurred, the targets get blurred from foreign to domestic, and something which is really important to libertarians and all Americans is the loss of our civil liberties and our natural rights.
Christopher Preble: Right. So when the United States or any country, frankly, is engaged in foreign conflict, there is a tendency for individuals to mute their criticism, to sort of self-censor, to avoid criticizing their country’s conduct because, for perfectly understandable reasons, to seem disloyal at a time of war is not a particularly pleasant place to be in, right?
And I also talk about it in the context of the growth of the state in general. The measures that the country has to employ to mobilize military power and to maintain it in foreign countries—those kinds of things would not be tolerated in peacetime, and yet when we’re at a position of war, in a state of war, people grow quiescent. They just sort of allow certain things to happen and they say, “Well, I’m not going to criticize it.”
And the example that I used in the book is, you know, during World War II it would have seemed particularly petty to complain about rationing or, you know, gas stamps or things like that when your neighbor’s son has been killed in combat, right? So the people just become sort of self-censored.
Then on top of that, you have government routinely engaging in legal action against critics of war. That happened famously—infamously—during World War I where Eugene Debs spent a good part of the war in, you know, from a jail cell; he ran for president against Wilson from a jail cell. You had, of course, the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, which is one of the more notorious cases.
But you also just have a general tone of stifling of dissent, sometimes actively arresting and prosecuting people for behavior that in any other context would just be normal. It would be the kinds of rights and liberties that we expect in a free society. So I do think that being in a state of permanent war steadily erodes human liberty in ways that are not always perceptible when they’re going on, but afterwards, or if we sort of ponder it, we can see just how much we’ve given up in terms of our ability to criticize our government and to raise questions about the powers that it’s taken to itself.
Bob Zadek: And just to show the proof of what Chris has said, just imagine—think back how many times in recent memory has our government taken actions that compromise our individual freedoms in the name of—and I choke up when I mention these words, I despise them so much—“national security.”
Trump has used—and I’m not trying to single out Trump, it’s just recent memory, he’s our president—national security as a basis to impose tariffs on Mexico, or importing Toyotas from Mexico. It is in the name of national security. What goes on at the border is national security. The word has become cheapened, or the words, so it has no more meaning. And the word “defense” has become cheapened, so it has no more meaning.
It becomes political cover for the government to always temporarily compromise, take away our personal freedoms in the name of national security. And I think, Chris, that is what has happened as a result of us being on permanent war footing. We have been temporarily, permanently been denied our liberties, and the liberties never come back.
And Chris, the mind game I love to play with myself and with others is we are conducting a war on terror. Chris, the question I will ask you—and I’m not doing it to embarrass you in front of an audience, I’m doing it for obvious reasons.
The War on Terror as a Tactic [42:14]
Bob Zadek: How as a—as somebody with a military background, how will we know when the war on terror has been won? What will be the event by which we can declare we won?
Christopher Preble: Right, there isn’t one. Uh, because when you declare war on a tactic, which is what terrorism is, uh, you can never be certain that someone is not, uh, thinking about planning, uh, whatnot, to act to use violence against civilians for a political purpose, which is what terrorism is. So the very framing of the war on terrorism as a—as a war against an idea and a tactic, rather than against a—a group of individuals or a particular organization, means that it is open-ended by its very nature. Which is why it is so critical for the Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed after 9/11—that must be revisited. It must be, I think, sunsetted; it must be repealed. Uh, and if in the future a president believes that such an authorization is necessary to fight a particular organization or group of people, then he should have to come back to Congress and make that case explicitly.
Um, so I think that you—you fix on the precise problem. If we were to declare a war against submarine—the use of submarines, for example, then does that mean that every single country that has a submarine is therefore entitled, you know, we—we are entitled to, to you know, uh, bomb them in the harbor? If—if every single country that employs, um, uh, trade sanctions as an instrument of policy, you know, the various techniques that, uh, individuals or groups or even countries employ, uh, those are tactics and those are techniques. They are not, uh, uh, an object of war in a traditional sense. And I think we need to be very careful about allowing, uh, the—those terms, uh, to become the frame for con—conducting, uh, war around the world.
Bob Zadek: And we’ll take a caller in a second, just—just to continue this thought. As Chris observed, once you declare war on a concept—war on poverty, war on drugs, uh, war, um, on terrorism—that is a—if you’re a dictator or if you want to aggrandize yourself and you’re in government, the perfect way to do it is to declare war on a concept, because there will never be peace. That means whatever powers you have accumulated in fighting a war on “blank,” those powers will be with you for so long as you are in office. Nobody can ever take them away, because nobody can ever prove that you have won the war. So it is a permanent erosion of liberty once we have war on a concept. And the war on terror is nothing other than the latest example of using, uh, empty, vacuous words to create an, uh, enlargement of government power at the expense of our citizens.
The Pacific Defense Perimeter [45:00]
Bob Zadek: Now we have a caller. Jacob, are you still there?
Jacob: I am. How are you this morning? Good morning, Bob. Uh, Mr. Preble, um, uh, there was this Maginot Line in France, uh, decades ago, and then there was the, uh, Iron Curtain following, uh, that. Uh, Dean Acheson—I’m sure you’re, uh, familiar with that character, that figure in American foreign policy at the time of President Truman—they had this defense, uh, as Bob was stressing the word “defense,” they had this, uh, foreign policy concept, this defense, uh, line that was, uh, mainly, uh, was described in the Far Pacific, uh, going, uh, around, uh, uh, Japan and, uh, down, uh, uh, including, uh, the Philippines, uh, include New Zealand and Australia. Uh, but they left out the Korean Peninsula, and that some say that led to war.
Uh, so now it seems, uh, the, uh, sixties and seventies, somewhere did that concept, that defense perimeter there, uh, disappear? Maybe after JFK, uh, died—was assassinated, uh, some—sometime after that, that this—that concept disappeared. Philippines seems to be no longer within that defense di—uh, uh, perimeter. Philippine, uh, people are, uh, uh, in a, uh, a state right now where there’s a lot of disagreement. There the country is being flooded by Chinese from, uh, communist China and they’ve—
Bob Zadek: Jacob, Jacob, just, uh, switching to the question of communications. What—what happened to that defense perimeter in the Pacific? Is that a dead issue?
Christopher Preble: No, I, uh—thanks for the question, Jacob. I—I think the—the what you’re talking about after World War II, it’s true. The United States created a defensive perimeter in Asia and also in Europe because the countries of Asia and Europe were not in a position to defend themselves against first the Soviet Union and then communist China. The difference today is that China is surrounded by capable, wealthy, um, uh, empowered states like South Korea, which is, uh, quite wealthy; Japan, which is still the third wealthiest country in the world; uh, India, which is a rising democratic power. Uh, they are—uh, they also have interests. They also have the ability to defend themselves.
And so whereas—whereas I think it was not unreasonable for the United States to think that only we could defend these countries immediately after World War II, uh, we never revisited that basic bargain. So even in the case of the Philippines, which you just noted, um, the Filipinos are, um, are as much torn apart by from within as they are from—from without. Uh, these countries need to—need to, you know, take responsibility for their own defense. I think that’s a factor; I think that’s a—a concept that many Americans understand. Uh, and I think that that—that’s something we need to take very seriously. Is the United States, uh, is simply not in the same position that we were, uh, after World War II. We are simply not strong enough; we are not powerful enough to do all of this by ourselves. Uh, and I think that’s—that’s, uh, one of the messages that I try to convey in the book.
Free Trade and Cultural Intercourse [49:00]
Bob Zadek: Chris, in your book, we have, uh, only a few minutes left. Uh, an important message in your book, maybe the most important, uh, is your emphasis on free trade and interaction with other countries peaceably in exchange of goods, services, and humans, uh, with open travel as a way to accomplish much more effectively the same goals that we have with adventuresome war. I’m not talking about defense. I’m talking about war. We have a couple of minutes left, Chris. Help us understand what our—what our listeners would learn from your book on that topic.
Christopher Preble: I think that if you look at trade, uh, both as an instrument to advance human prosperity and betterment, but also as an instrument of peace, uh, the evidence is quite clear, uh, as it was famously said, “When goods cross borders, armies don’t.” Uh, I think that is still the case. I think that if the United States were—were as committed to principles of free trade as we were in the immediate aftermath of World War II, uh, and trying to reduce, uh, levels of tariffs, uh, around the world which occurred, creating rules governing the r—the, uh, trade between nations—all of those things occurred. If the United States were to, uh, embrace those principles, uh, and—and continue to push them forward, I think it would lead to a more peaceful world, uh, even more peaceful than the one we have right now.
And I am troubled by the fact that some Americans seem perfectly okay with protectionism—naked protectionism—just throwing up artificial barriers to protect the domestic industries at the expense of American consumers. I think that’s a huge problem. The other factor is cultural exchange. The way you learn about other countries around the world is often by visiting them. Uh, we, uh, welcome, you know, tens of millions of—of foreign tourists into this country every year, uh, and—and Americans, uh, famously, you know, travel around the world. It’s—it’s a way that we, uh, communicate our, uh, peaceful intentions, uh, and I think it’s something that we should embrace. Uh, it’s something that I, uh, take it—take advantage of. I think, uh, a lot of Americans do. Um, that is every bit as much, uh, uh, an instrument of American power and influence as our military. And so I think that those kinds of—that trade, that intercourse, that—that cultural exchange is all critical to U.S. foreign policy.
Bob Zadek: And that will leave America as what it should be: the shining city on the hill, an example to the world—not an example of military power, but an example that peace and freedom actually work. Chris, thank you so much for your book. Chris’s book is Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy. It is a must-read if you want to understand what your elected officials are doing for the better or, regretfully, for the worse. Thanks so much, Chris, for the book and for giving us an hour for your time. Bob Zadek saying so long for now. Have a nice Sunday.