War and Foreign Policy

Much of this moving book lies outside the scope of The Mises Review. The Unabomber selected Mr. Gelernter as a target; and in June 1993, a package exploded in his office at Yale University. 

Among the conventional weapons in the arsenal of the modern Warfare State, none is crueler or more indiscriminate than economic sanctions. While a bomb, missile, or other military ordnance can devastate an entire neighborhood in a moment, the slow death of economic strangulation can so degrade an entire people that they are reduced to a pre-civilizational state, modern savages living at a subsistence level.

The Free Market 16, no. 2 (February 1998)

The centralized, executive state makes corruption at the top a political inevitability.

Freedom Betrayed is a spirited polemic in support of a contradictory thesis.

The contributors to this outstanding volume have grasped a simple but unfashionable truth: war is a great evil. 

Free trade and peace go together; protectionism is the handmaiden of war. These were key teachings of the early classical economists, as well as the Austrians. Consistent libertarians have never doubted it. But recently the theory has come under fire from all sides—and led to dangerous coalitions pushing for the worst of all worlds, autarky and military belligerence.

It is no surprise that a bureaucracy would study itself and conclude that neither its budget nor its policies should change. Neither is it a shock that the Pentagon has bypassed the question of why we need to involve ourselves in any foreign wars. After all, the U.S. long ago abandoned the Constitutional ideal of a strictly defensive military posture.

The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It's all in a day's work for the "world's indispensable nation"—the administration's new name for itself.

Great Britain learned an important lesson from World War I.