Mises Institute Associated Scholar Paul Gottfried writes today in The American Conservative:
Although the president should never have expressed his intention to intervene militarily if Assad employed chemical weapons, and although he may now be losing additional credibility by appearing to waver, I am delighted that the neoconservative foreign policy, which my late friend the economist Murray Rothbard described as “perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace,” is falling into disrepute.
Rothbard borrowed the phrase form Harry Elmer Barnes whose 1953 collection of essay Perpertual War for Perpeual Peace became a seminal work of revisionist historical analysis. Barnes wrote in Chapter 1:
While the First World War headed the United States and the world toward international disaster, the Second World War was an even more calamitous turning point in the history of mankind. It may, indeed, have brought us — and the whole world — into the terminal episode of human experience. It certainly marked the transition from social optimism and technological rationalism into theNineteen Eighty-Four pattern of life, in which aggressive international policies and war scares have become the guiding factor, not only in world affairs but also in the domestic, political, and economic strategy of every leading country of the world. The police state has emerged as the dominant political pattern of our times, and military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism.
For more, see Chapter 1 here, and the final chapter here. Here is the full book in PDF format.
