“Peace Through Strength” has been a Republican mantra for decades. The slogan holds that peace can be achieved by maintaining a powerful military capable of deterring potential adversaries. It is said that sufficient military power – occasionally showcased by stomping on those who would seek to question its overarching authority – instills fear in America’s adversaries, leading to peace and safety.
While this concept of statecraft can be traced back centuries, its modern interpretation in the Republican lexicon was popularized by President Ronald Reagan. His version of the strategy focused on maintaining military power, and using it as a tool to credibly deter nations – in his time, the Soviet Union – from expanding and spreading their negative influence.
“American strength is a sheltering arm for peace and freedom in an often dangerous world,” Reagan explained. “And strength is the most persuasive argument we have to convince our adversaries to give up their hostile intentions, to negotiate seriously, and to stop bullying other nations.”
This view of foreign policy has been expressed by Republican politicians and talking-heads all throughout the almost four decades since Reagan’s departure from power. However, if we honestly assess American foreign affairs post-Reagan, peace has been hard to come by.
The way that Reagan originally described his doctrine – build a strong military to deter enemies, thus achieving a lasting peace – is far different from how later Republicans interpreted the concept. The “Strength” portion of the slogan has served as a justification for military intervention, while “Peace” remains the promised destination that never quite arrives. Having already presumed that peace can only be achieved by strength, those who use this slogan risk becoming the proverbial hammer, to which every conflict looks like a nail.
The United States has been involved in a rolling series of military conflicts for decades, all while invoking “Peace Through Strength” as its justification. Whenever a new war begins, we are assured by our GOP political and media elites that the military action is in service of a broader peace effort. “A war to prevent another war,” if you will.
This reasoning has been used just this year, as President Trump and the Republicans have sought to justify this latest adventure in Iran. As is always necessary when selling the populace on a new war, the GOP must create a narrative, one which presents the American people with a false binary: launch this war or face certain attack. We are told that the enemy, equipped with a totally random hatred for freedom and the American way of life, is arming up to preemptively attack us. Therefore, the only rational option is to strike first.
As the war – which was based on provable lies – rolls on without an end in sight, the “Peace Through Strength” message has persisted, with the slogan being used by Republicans to reassure the war-weary public that peace is the end goal.
However, peace has remained elusive for modern American presidents.
The problem is that Reagan’s vision rests on a set of assumptions about government that are difficult to reconcile with the incentives inherent in political power.
“Peace Through Strength” requires some key presumptions in order to logically make sense. For it to work, it must be the case that we live in a system where those in power genuinely, through good faith, seek a peaceful world. Put simply, those with the legal authority to create war must be willing to forgo the temptation.
This slogan also relies on the assumption that the government does not have incentive structures within it that make war profitable for industries dependent on military spending. This would leave the system vulnerable to an industrial complex of war-racketeers, seeking to sway Washington’s decision making to their benefit. This doctrine relies on our leaders keeping foreign governments – who may have an interest in encouraging American military intervention, and may pursue these ends through lobbying efforts – at arm’s length.
Most importantly, Reagan’s belief relies on governments doing something they despise most: resisting the urge to expand their power. In times of war, the government is able to grow in ways it cannot justify to the population in peacetime. Mass surveillance expands. New agencies are created. Military spending increases. Executive authority grows. With the birth of these new institutions and precedents comes a constituency of people who benefit from them and seek their preservation.
Bureaucracies whose authority and budgets are justified by the presence of a threat have an inherent incentive to emphasize and exaggerate that threat – and, by extension, the necessity of their own existence.
Even more fundamentally, why would we expect the entity with the legal monopoly on the use of force to voluntarily restrain itself?
Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian political theorist, wrote an essay titled Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, which contains logic about the nature of humans that can be applied to the nature of government.
In the 1974 piece, Rothbard argues that the egalitarian project of imposing equality upon society represents a rejection of the natural differences between human beings. Rothbard explained that equality is not the natural state of man, as all individuals are equipped with unique, irreplicable traits, attributes, and abilities. Any attempt to restrict this variety inherent within humanity, Rothbard argued, would be a “revolt against nature,” and those who would seek to reorganize society to achieve universal equality, “deny the very structure of humanity and of the universe,” and are “profoundly antihuman.”
Rothbard was writing about human nature, not the institutional incentives of government. But the same logic applies. The “revolt against nature” can be seen in the belief that a government, especially one as large and bureaucratic as the United States federal government, can accumulate such vast power and consistently resist the inherent incentives to use it.
What we have seen instead, in administration after administration, is the temptation for our leaders to become “wartime presidents,” who reshaped the world in their image. Presidents often see it as their job to use the American military as a means to stamp their names in history. Rather than pursue peace, or America’s strategic interests, many instead seek to deepen their own mythology, as great men of history.
Nowhere in this equation is the pursuit of peace that Reagan promised.
The core misunderstanding within the “Peace Through Strength” doctrine is the assumption that the government will reliably restrain itself rather than expand its power. This slogan is asking the state to become powerful enough to wage war at a moment’s notice, while simultaneously remaining too virtuous to do so. This is not merely a dangerous assumption. It is a revolt against the nature of political power itself.
Nolan Denaro is a political analyst, writer, and host of “The Quest For Clarity” podcast, available on YouTube and Spotify. He is a columnist at Antiwar.com, and his work has been published by Responsible Statecraft, the Libertarian Institute, The Daily Caller, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes on U.S. foreign policy, economics, and current events, with a particular focus on war and imperialism. He writes opinion pieces on his Substack, and you can follow him on X @nolandenaro. Nolan can be reached for correspondence at nolansdenaro@icloud.com.
