What Happened to the Peace Progressives?
Robert Farley comments on the chapter of George C. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower that deals with the interwar period:
Herring pays a fair amount of attention to the Peace Progressives, a group of mostly Midwestern, mostly Republican lawmakers. The Peace Progressives believed in both world peace and fiscal responsibility; in so doing they made the (almost heretical in the current political climate) connection that weapons cost money, and that the interest of small government is best served by tight limitations on the size of military forces. The pursuit of international routes to peace (Kellogg-Briand Pact, for example) abetted the interest in fiscal responsibility by reducing the need for large military establishments. I think it’s odd that this combination (preference for low tax, low domestic expenditure, low defense expenditure) seems to occur so rarely in the American political context; perhaps the development of the military-industrial complex served to capture pro-business (such that the term has any meaning…) legislators, or the perceived threat of communism helped purge Republican party doves?
I think the factors Farley mentions certainly do play a role. The dawn of the Second World War and then the Cold War made the case for a large defense establishment much stronger on its merits. But the prolonged existence of said defense establishment helped establish support for a large defense establishment as an entrenched commitment of the American right.
But I would also point to another factor. If you look to, say, the Cato Institute you’ll find some admirable work on defense budget issues that in a lot of respects is the heir to the thinking of the interwar “peace progressives.” And that’s about as it should be since if you want to find modern-day admirers of Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, you’d best look to outfits like Cato. But one important difference between the peace progressives and today’s right-wing defense skeptics is that the peace progressives were committed internationalists who believed in things like the Washington Naval Treaty, the Kellog-Briand Pact, and other multilateral arms control and conflict prevention efforts.
In my view, the approach to world affairs that’s broadly skeptical of the desirability of gargantuan military forces and aggressive use of force simply isn’t tenable without that component. A modern-day worldview that aims to reduce unnecessary defense expenditures and allow those resources to flow to productive use needs to be engaged with things like the effort to pass a Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the efforts to restrict the use of land mines and cluster bombs, the effort to establish an International Criminal Court, etc. These days, such an approach to foreign policy tends to be advocated by people (like me) who have a more social democratic approach to domestic issues. Which is good for us. But I think we could use more allies on the small government right.
33 Responses to “What Happened to the Peace Progressives?”
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February 15th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Considering how many people employed directly and indirectly by our bloated war machine, this doesn’t seem like a very promising time for bit time cut backs.
February 15th, 2009 at 11:54 am
So why don’t those Cato types like the international treaties? Because it’s just more government? I don’t know them well enough.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
I think that one of the lessons that was internalized in the post-WWII era was that the method of building alliances and multi-lateral agreements was done through military agreements and the expansion of military bases around the world. The Peace Progressive might recognize that, yes, the military costs money, but that this is the cost associated with multi-lateral cooperation. For more than 60 years, our entire model of “keeping the peace” has been to foster military cooperation with a country, and provide military and infrastructure (mostly interchangeable) aid in order to keep the peace and give our military more access to the region.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
The Peace Progressives of the ’20s became the isolationists of the ’30s who were wiped out on December 7, 1941.
The idea of unilateral U.S. supremacy, which has not been an economic fact since the 1960s and not a geopolitical fact since the Gulf War, is not a political thought at all. It’s religio-nationalism, and its adherents don’t give a damn about reality.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
5: That’s a bizarre date to pick for the end of US supremacy. I’d say that the United States enjoy far greater supremacy now than at any time during the Cold War. Remember, there was a time when our Western European allies had to fear their annihilation by a conventional military force. That hasn’t been in a couple decades. I don’t know if we’ve every qualified for ’supremacy’ but if we ever did, it’s now.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
So why don’t those Cato types like the international treaties?
They do like international treaties they just can’t stand dealing with these international idealist types like Matt. Like on the law of the sea, most of it is quite reasonable but progressives and anti-state idealists have hijacked enough of it to make it unreasonable. The same can be said for almost every international treaty (e.g. Kyoto) that America has not ratified. And just because you oppose treaties you feel are not in our best interests doesn’t mean you won’t support them when they are.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
A yes, the Washington Naval Treaty, the League of Nations… the roaring twenties, yes.
“Give peace a chance”
“We did give it a chance, and we got World War II. That’s a mistake we’re not making again.”
February 15th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Why? What does not building a military massively more expensive than anyone else in the world have to do with international treaties? It seems to me that the less military involvement we have worldwide, the less we need to concern ourselves with these treaties; if we’re not going to invade Iran anyways we don’t need to worry so much about what Europe or Russia thinks about us; if we aren’t going to threaten Russia then the nuclear issue with them will reduce on its own; if we don’t commit war crimes then we don’t need an ICC to prosecute us.
The only way this argument makes sense is if our current military is actually used in place of all these internationalist treaties. Do you really want to argue that? Care to explain how our military acts to limit cluster bombs and land mines?
February 15th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Why does our government segue so smoothly from one big war to another and fill whatever brief interregnums with a multitude of smaller wars which of course demands our mammoth defense budget?
This post suggests that it is the result of some sort of policy dispute between well meaning political thinkers of all stripes when it is in fact the bedrock of American domestic and foreign policy and has been at least since the late 1860’s. Our Republic certainly did not survive the Gilded Age.
All of the Peace Blah Blah Blah is allowed and indeed encouraged because the US Government must wear a mask of civilized behavior. This not to fool the world who well know our true selves for better and worse but for our own citizens who must constantly be lullabied by the most egregious lies.
And of course this is not unique to US though I am hard pressed to think of another nation since the Caliphate who have made war so much and so continuously the center of the national identity.
Anyone who thinks that our current financial distress will actually lead to a real reduction of our military budget is simply kidding themselves with yet more lies.
The Obama administration is expanding the size of our armed forces.
The Obama administration is making use of British research facilities to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.
And any troops withdrawn from Iraq have already been allotted by the Obama administration to the Afghan tarpit.
February 15th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Josh R: this doesn’t seem like a very promising time for big time cut backs
Indeed. About half of the country thinks government spending on WWII ended the Great Depression, the other half thinks it was government spending on infrastructure via the New Deal (and then there’s some overlap of people who think it was both).
Virtually every Republican who is against the stimulus plan/infrastructure spending is in favor of government spending on the military as an economic stimulus. I would like to hear more haranguing of this bizarre logic than a “my government spending is more stimulus-y than yours” debate.
February 15th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
The U.S. largely demilitarized after WWI. It was WWII that gave us our permanently large government and military (in spending — manpower has gone down significantly). That’s why many Americans opposed our entry into WWII, because they anticipated this.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
WWII did stimulate industrialization of the US on a massive scale.
At the same time, it flattened all the other industrialized countries, but I don’t suppose we should hope for that.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
What Happened to the Peace Progressives?
Well, there’s the Ron Paul wing. Which I grant you, is neither progressive nor internationalist, but then again I don’t think right wing ‘peace progressives’ of the pre- WW2 era were both of these things either.
WIth the various political shifts since then, the group of ‘mostly republican, mostly midwestern’ folk in the body politic would map onto mid-sized city, pro-Obama professionals. These folk are somewhat isolationist now, due to the end of the Cold war and the fiasco of Iraq, and they were rather isolationist then. They are at their heart, Jacksonian, not Wilsonian when it comes to foreign policy*. So I think MattY overstates the commitment to internationalism in the group being discussed, and specifically the treaties he mentioned, at least among the rank and file. (There is also the fact those to the right of center who did not like Bush’s foreign policy are exclusively composed of two groups: 1)those who found Bush’s foreign policy too Wilsonian 2) those who wound up voting for Obama)
*which is why, for instance, it took us so long to get overtly involved in WW2, Roosevelt was politically restricted until we were attacked. And is also why this decade’s gulf war was popular at first.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
We also dramatically demilitarized after WWII. That is why Truman had such a difficult time fielding a decent army or any kind of navy early in the Korean War. US military spending dropped from 37.5% GDP in 1945 to 3.5% by 1948 and we went from 9.1% of the population in uniform down to 1% at that low point. WWII did not give us a permanently larger military. That only happened after Korea and the beginning of the Cold War.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
the prolonged existence of said defense establishment helped establish support for a large defense establishment as an entrenched commitment of the American right.
You are hopelessly naive if you believe that this commitment to outlandish military spending is not equally shared by the so-called liberals. Almost nobody with any power in the US wants to cut military spending. You have to go back to Eisenhower or team up with Kucinich and Nader – good luck with that. There’s simply too much money involved for all the interested parties. As it stands, the only hope is that the US will spend itself into the poorhouse.
February 15th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
WTF??? According to novakant’s link (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/01/02/military_spending/), the stimulus plan costs more than our entire FY08 military spending! (which is more than the rest of the world combined)
February 15th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
That reported amount of military spending is a number that conveniently leaves out a lot—like what we’re spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I would argue that Andrew Bacevich falls quite nicely into this mostly extinct category of small government, defense skeptics that are also “committed internationalists.” It’s a little hard to say what his views on domestic policy are, but you see often him described as a cultural conservative.
This piece he wrote for the Washington Post is a pretty good example of Bacevich’s perspective and hints at his economic conservatism:
February 16th, 2009 at 10:24 am
JT:
If you would like to gain a deeper understanding of the long history of the US constantly creating wars for nefarious purposes, google “Smedley Darlington Butler”.
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