To fight or not to fight: war's payoffs to U.S. leaders and to the American people.

• Author: Higgs, Robert
• Position: Etceteras ... - Report

Fourteen years ago in a brief commentary (Higgs 1997), I called attention to the close association between war and the U.S. presidents ranked as "great" or "near great" in polls of historians. My essay has gained a fair amount of attention over the years. Even the quintessential establishment historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. saw fit to cite it with apparent agreement in a 1997 article in the Political Science Quarterly. After the Ludwig von Mises Institute distributed my essay again on Presidents' Day in 2007, it was linked and reposted widely and provoked a considerable amount of comment on the Web.

Although one can hardly quarrel with the close association between the presidents' intimate involvement in war and their presidential-greatness ranking, one can take issue--and over the years many writers have taken issue--with my conclusion that "[t]he lesson seems obvious. Any president who craves a high place in the annals of history should hasten to thrust the American people into an orgy of death and destruction. It does not matter how ill-conceived the war may be" (1997, 1-2). For the most part, the disagreement pertains, first, to my general argument that many, if not all, of the wars from which the most highly ranked presidents gained their reputed greatness were clearly unnecessary and, second, to my specific indictment of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson for "their supremely catastrophic war policies" (2).

Although we cannot expect to resolve a Great Historical Debate by means of a simple, cut-and-dried approach, we can perhaps clarify our thinking about this matter with the aid of a more systematic representation of the relevant issues. I propose that we organize our thoughts along the lines laid out in the accompanying analytical array (table 1), whose content I will explain. The array displays a slightly complicated, two-by-two cross-classification.

At the top, the array shows whether the threat to the American people at large (as distinct from, say, the threat to the government itself or the threat to certain domestic or foreign special-interest groups) is "existential" or "lesser or spurious." Of course, dividing all perceived threats into only these two discrete classes is a crude way to differentiate them, and dividing them into more than two classes or ordering them along a continuum is conceivable, but for my present purposes such additional complications are unnecessary.

By an "existential threat," I mean one that poses a danger to national survival. During World War II, Americans often described the conflict as a "life and death struggle" or a "war for national survival," but I do not believe that it actually was such. None of the enemies of the United States in that war, whether acting alone or in concert with all of the others, had the economic and technological capacity to destroy the American nation, "take over the country," "destroy our way of life," or inflict a comparable amount of harm. Those who dispute my belief should bear the burden of showing, with cogent evidence and argument, that the Axis powers had the capacity to carry out such a takeover or utter destruction. Simply repeating the mantra that Hitler "wanted to take over the world" is not an argument, but an excuse for not making one. An existential threat can arise, however, and indeed one prevailed for decades during the Cold War. An all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR, an apocalypse into which each side was all too prepared to enter at a moment's notice, would have wreaked such horrifying devastation that the survivors probably would have envied the dead, and economic life would have become, at best, extremely primitive and incapable of sustaining a large population.

In contrast, a threat to the American people may be "lesser or spurious"--in other words, not be a risk to national survival or even to national flourishing and perhaps not be a real threat at all. Most wars in U.S. history clearly belong in this category, which undoubtedly comprises the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, both wars against Iraq, and the U.S. war in Afghanistan that has been under way for the past decade, not to mention the many minor U.S. military actions throughout the world, from the attacks on the Barbary Coast more than two centuries ago to the attacks on Serbia twelve years ago.

Although the secession of the Southern states in 1861 threatened the continuation of the existing political union, it need not have caused anyone's death, and the War Between the States became the terribly devastating affair that it was only because Lincoln and those who rallied to his leadership refused to accept the secession peacefully.

Like Bruce Russett (1972), I believe that the Germans and their allies did not constitute a "clear and present danger" to the American people at large prior to U.S. entry into World War II, and hence the Roosevelt administration had no compelling public-interest reason to provoke the Japanese Empire with a protracted series of economic sanctions, threats, and demands in order to open a "back door" for entry into the war in Europe. (1) As Garet Garrett wrote in May 1941, when Roosevelt had already made the country a de facto belligerent in countless ways, "The alternative had been to create here on this hemisphere the impregnable asylum of freedom and let tyranny in Europe destroy itself, as tyranny always has done and is bound to do again" ([1939--42] 2002, 165). I need hardly add that very few...