This article was originally published by George Ford Smith at The Mises Institute.
Teddy Roosevelt would be so pleased if he could see the world today, with a US military presence virtually everywhere on the planet. The current savagery with Iran is only the headline conflict—having displaced the proxy missions in Ukraine and Gaza—but many more are quietly underway or waiting in the wings. No declaration of war, of course, since declarations require Congress to act in accordance with a set of rules nobody can agree on. In war, according to Sun Tzu, if the goal is victory, the only rule is winning as quickly as possible. But in a world governed by bankers and politicians, too much haste can be unprofitable.
The US, with its military prowess that comprises approximately 37 percent of all global military spending and exceeds the combined defense budgets of the next nine largest spenders, no longer worries about winning or losing wars. The point is to get them started—let the death and destruction begin. That’s where the money is—initially. Later, profits are made from rebuilding the countries that the attackers have demolished.
But there’s a looming question: Does the American state have the funds to pick on any country it chooses? The answer: As long as the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve remains functional and Americans remain ignorant of its work, the sky’s the limit, at least until people wise up or the ink runs dry on its printing press.
As for President Trump’s request for $200 billion more in Iran war funding, Mother Jones asked what else could that amount deliver? Given the leftist source, many suggestions were leftist projects such as “378 years of federal public broadcasting funding,” but others showed more imagination such as:
500 more White House ballrooms
2 million Kash Patel trips to Milan by private jet
2,666 Melania sequels
182 million miniature busts of Mount Rushmore with Trump’s face added
2,341 Trump heads on the real Mount Rushmore, space permitting
100 Pentagon name changes
And of course,
Approximately 1 tank of gas, when this is all over.
But war itself is anything but funny—especially wars that could be avoided. Looking back, almost every war was one of choice rather than defensive, including Lincoln’s war that began with his baiting of the South at Fort Sumter. His goal of saving the Union meant redefining the Union as “indivisible.”
Later, the Spanish-American War—inaugurated by McKinley with the battleship Maine blowing up—set the pattern for imperial wars.
Subsequent diplomatic failures to resolve the Maine matter, coupled with United States indignation over Spain’s brutal suppression of the Cuban rebellion [sound familiar?] and continued losses to American investment, led to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898.
McKinley’s war gave “the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.” The war with Spain was described as a continuation of Manifest Destiny, meaning the move west doesn’t stop at the Pacific.
World War I proved profitable except for the many millions killed, starved, or maimed. A handful voted for war—in the House 373 to 50, in the Senate 82 to 6. None of them were drafted, none volunteered—the 112,000 who died in the trenches of France and elsewhere had no say in the matter.
The US was attacked at Pearl Harbor and again on 9/11, and the public outrage from each incident powered the government’s response. But, in both cases, the American state was too far removed from its innocent beginnings to be innocent of intrigue. Pearl Harbor turned out not to be the surprise Roosevelt said it was, and 9/11 gave the Bush administration the excuse it needed to inaugurate the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—a neocon think tank devoted to figuring out how to impose the government’s will on other states and become the undisputed global hegemon.
In a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the [PNAC] predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”
How foreign military adventures that kill millions and destroy the lives of the survivors fit with our founding aspirations of live and let live is still largely unaddressed, especially in light of JQ Adams’s famous “Monsters to destroy” speech in 1821.
War Morality is Mandatory
Lincoln—in trying to turn his war into a moral crusade—issued his bogus Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The war wasn’t about mundane economic issues, such as a crushing tariff on the South; it was a fight to free the slaves, which the proclamation cleverly avoided. Lincoln’s war also gave the government a taste of genocide as Sherman marched through Georgia, an experience which later proved useful for obliterating and relocating Native Americans who stood in the way of white economic progress.
In early January, Trump said the US was “locked and loaded” if Iran killed peaceful protesters in Tehran, which, as we found out, it did, giving the subsequent intervention a fleeting moral flavor. Trump’s missile attack on February 28 that landed on a girls’ school in Iran, killing a reported 170 people, most of them children, obliterated Trump’s claim to a moral crusade. “I’ll live with it,” he said. More recently, Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s infrastructure undermines his concern for Iranian lives.
It’s said people don’t change unless they feel pain or experience some other profound incentive. States—by mostly insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions—get away with vile deeds that if undertaken by private individuals would be seen for what they are: murderous, thieving, and rotten to the core. As long as states exist, they will be amoral institutions.
In American Crisis V, published in 1778, Thomas Paine wrote:
If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war. Most other sins are circumscribed within narrow limits, that is, the power of one man cannot give them a very general extension. . . but he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death. We leave it to England and Indians to boast of these honors; we feel no thirst for such savage glory; a nobler flame, a purer spirit animates America.
Perhaps it did in 1778, but the growth of state power has since extinguished it. What’s worse is a propagandized public that takes the “State’s pretensions at face value,” as Nock wrote, “and regard it as a social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary.”
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