Mises Spotlight: Brandan Buck | Mises Institute

The Misesian: On February 28, the United States declared war on Iran with Operation Epic Fury. How should Americans view this new conflict within the context of the global war on terror and the broader history of American military intervention?

Brandan Buck: In the past, you always had at least some sort of tenuous reading on an existing authorization for use of military force, like in the global war on terror. Those are often laughable, legally speaking, and often not very sound, but they were there.

Also, there was always a degree of material pull, like troops were already in an area or already under contact—think Korea as a good example of this. The status of the peninsula in the early Cold War was up for debate. No one was really sure if it was within the American defensive perimeter or not. But nevertheless, once the war starts, US troops are on the ground, and they’re in contact. In Vietnam, you’re talking about a 10-year run-up and then a crisis and a vote in Congress. So at least there was this incremental logic of involvement.

This time you have a much shorter period. The US government was in negotiations with the regime in Tehran. The buildup was short in terms of war propaganda. You’re talking about a few weeks, and it was pretty ham-handed propaganda. I’ve often called it a low-effort information operation. The result is that there’s pretty weak public support for this from the start.

TM: It seems that for the past decade, the one issue unifying the Democratic Party has been opposition to Donald Trump, yet when it comes to war in Iran, they were unable to effectively organize any political resistance to the conflict. How should Americans view this apparent bipartisan acceptance of executive military power?

BB: I think the divides are not unlike the divides within the GOP in the Trump era, as well. It is an elite-popular divide. The youth in the United States, across the board, are starting to sour on US-Israeli relations and US foreign policy generally.

But the establishment in the Democratic Party, much like within the GOP, as I think we’re finding out now, is still in line with the policy of the War Party, which is to grant tremendous discretionary war powers to the president. On the issue of Iran, you can recall that during the last crisis, Chuck Schumer attacked Trump from “his right” for being too soft on negotiations.

One of Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s chief criticisms of the Trump administration’s policy in Venezuela is that it distracted from regime change in Iran.

I think there’s a tremendous amount of policy inertia and cultural inertia within both parties for intervention abroad. The chief difference has been whether they want to put a multilateralist veneer on it, as the Democrats want to do, or if they just resist this new emerging pseudo-neocon foreign policy that’s more unilateral. So I think that the divisions are more of style than substance.

TM: Trump repeatedly campaigned on a promise of “No New Wars,” yet polling immediately following the strikes in Iran reflected overwhelming support among his voters. What is the current state of the antiwar movement within American politics?

BB: One reason for optimism is definitely in the generational divide. I think the polling is pretty clear that young people, whatever their politics, are much more skeptical. I’ve taken to calling this war the last boomer war in the way that it’s been sold to older voters as a form of payback for the hostage crisis in 1979 and all of the hostilities with Iran since.

Those narratives don’t quite have play amongst younger voters, even those who consider themselves to be conservative and work in Washington. I’m often surprised to hear that the younger people who maintain congressional staffs are far more skeptical of these open-ended interventions, even if their Congress members are too scared to speak out on foreign policy or are explicitly more hawkish.

I think there’s certainly a reason for optimism that these younger voices will eventually punch through. I would caution, however, that popular opinion rarely informs policy. So, actually getting those voices into positions of political power still has to be done.

Unfortunately, I think if this war goes badly, conservatives or libertarians might have to wait out the next Democratic president, and when they inevitably screw up, there will be a window to act again.

TM: You’ve repeatedly mentioned the influence of Murray Rothbard on your own career, and here we have a new American war launched very close to what would have been his 100th birthday. Given how fundamental opposition to foreign conflict was to his work, what are some of your biggest takeaways from his scholarship and what is his continuing relevance in 2026?

BB: Well, there are two. One is his use of elite theory, and one is his penchant for historical revisionism.

There’s a massive divide in this country on foreign policy opinion between the elites broadly described and “the people.” You see this in the past, with a transatlantic elite and their particular opinions on American involvement in the world wars. You certainly saw it in the Cold War. And we’re seeing iterations of it now, with both US-Israeli relations and Latin American policy. I think it’s become clearer that the people who are really calling the shots on foreign policy do not represent any kind of broad swaths of the American public but are rather a coterie of people with fairly narrow interests.

Related to that is this use of historical revisionism to reexamine the past and ask whether events happened because they were inevitable or because they were contingent. I think any study of history or even the present ought to rely on the belief in contingency, that human action is what drives history, not broad deterministic sweeps of things that human beings are not in control of.

I think that’s in some ways a message of hope. We’re not slaves to forces outside of our control.