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Ivan Eland

5 min read

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, a think tank Bob Zadek described as located in the Bay Area. Zadek introduced him as a graduate of Iowa State University with an MBA in applied economics and a PhD in public policy from George Washington University, a former director of defense policy studies at Cato, and a veteran of 15 years working with Congress, and as the author of Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014). Eland appeared on The Bob Zadek Show at least twice: in June 2014 on Iraq and in January 2017 on deficit spending.

Peace, liberty, and the costs of war

Eland framed his center’s work as bringing home the costs of war for people of all political persuasions—liberals, conservatives, libertarians and independents. He conceded a right of national self-defense and said most people would support World War II because the United States was attacked and answered. Beyond that, he argued, wars more often than not go sour, as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or carry hidden costs. Among those hidden costs he named the erosion of civil liberties and the growth of executive power beyond what the Founders intended, producing what he called an imperial presidency United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).

Iraq, oil, and fabricated reasons

Eland traced the first Gulf War to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but said the stated satellite evidence of Iraqi forces massing on the Saudi border turned out to be false, since French and Russian satellites picked up no border moves. He cited a study by David Henderson, an economist under Ronald Reagan, showing that even if Saddam had taken over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, US GDP would have been cut by less than half of a percent, because Saddam would have had to sell the oil. He applied the same logic to ISIS in Syria, which he said grabbed oil facilities while letting other opposition groups absorb the casualties United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).

On the second Iraq war, Eland said the younger Bush denied doing it for oil and instead invoked weapons of mass destruction, which he called a pretext. He credited the elder Bush’s advisers with being more honest—he recalled Jim Baker saying “jobs, jobs, jobs”—while calling the underlying logic flawed. Eland also volunteered the Mexican War as a deliberate provocation by the United States to get Mexico to attack so that it could take Mexican territory, adding it to the list of wars whose reasons were fabricated United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).

Defense versus power projection

In the 2017 episode, Eland called the national debt the greatest non-military threat to national security. He noted that Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said the debt was the biggest threat to national security, and that the incoming Defense Secretary had said something similar—though Eland observed that neither wanted to cut the defense budget, only everything else. He put the national debt at almost $20 trillion and said the United States spends what the next seven or eight countries do combined each year on defense, giving it crushing conventional and nuclear superiority; politicians who say the military has been eroded, he said, are talking nonsense The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).

Eland agreed with Zadek’s distinction between defense and offense, saying most of the military exists to project power overseas, impose US will on other countries, or defend allies such as South Korea, Europe and Israel from countries poorer than they are. He said Trump had “hit the nail right on the head” on that aspect of his policies. On the fiscal outlook, Eland predicted tax cuts plus increased infrastructure and defense spending without entitlement reform, producing a wider deficit, and he cited Congressional Budget Office projections as generally better than any administration’s The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).

Writing on the presidents

Eland told Zadek he writes books on the presidents. He described a forthcoming book on presidents who promised small government over the last 100 years and whether they delivered, and an updated version of Recarving Rushmore, which he said ranked presidents as the founders might have ranked them. He said the high ratings in his view went to presidents who stuck within the constitutional limitations of the presidency and gave the country peace, prosperity and liberty—rather than to Roosevelt and Wilson, whom historians admire for getting the country into wars The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017).

Across episodes

The two episodes touch different subjects—Iraq and intervention in 2014, debt and military spending in 2017—and the excerpts show no development of a single argument between them; the later episode’s claim that debt is the chief security threat is a separate thesis from the earlier episode’s critique of the Iraq War, though both rest on Eland’s distinction between defending the country and projecting power abroad.

What the sources do not cover

The excerpts do not state where the Independent Institute is beyond Zadek’s reference to the Bay Area, nor the founding date or full institutional history of the Center on Peace and Liberty. They do not give the contents of Partitioning for Peace beyond its title, nor any specific partition proposal for Iraq. Eland’s congressional career, his Cato tenure, and the details of his presidential rankings are named but not described. The excerpts also break off mid-conversation at several points, so positions Eland may have taken later in those segments are not available.

Episodes

2 appearances, 2014–2017.

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