In the final chapter of his excellent collection of essays, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, Ralph Raico turned to the worthy work of historian Arthur Ekirch to confront a question that should trouble anyone still inclined to think of the United States as a republic of limited government: how did a nation born in revolt against empire become the world’s greatest military machine and sole imperial power?
This transformation, Raico argues, was neither inevitable nor accidental. It was the result of a long, tragic departure from an older liberal tradition—one deeply suspicious of war, standing armies, and foreign entanglements. That tradition—now largely forgotten—is essential to constructing a genuine critique of American militarism.
Drawing on Ekirch’s The Civilian and the Military and The Decline of American Liberalism, Raico emphasizes that Anglo-American liberalism was, from its inception, explicitly anti-militarist. This was no minor feature but a defining characteristic. The early liberals understood something modern policymakers studiously ignore: war is not merely one policy option among others, but the great and dangerous engine of state expansion.
James Madison captured the insight succinctly: war brings armies; armies bring debts and taxes; and these, in turn, become “the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
For the generation of 1776, independence itself was justified in part as a means of avoiding the wars of Europe. The ideal was not global management but peaceful commerce—“free trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” This was not naïveté; it was a sober assessment of the relationship between war and power.
Yet, as Raico notes, the betrayal of this tradition came early. Even figures like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, rhetorically committed to non-intervention, succumbed to the temptations of war. The War of 1812, driven in part by expansionist ambitions, helped awaken what Raico calls a “military spirit” in the young republic.
From there, the pattern became familiar. Each conflict, whether with Mexico or later in the Civil War, expanded the scope and authority of the state. The Civil War in particular marked a decisive turning point. Civil liberties were curtailed, taxation increased, central government fiat paper proliferated, dissent was suppressed, and conscription imposed. The federal government emerged not merely victorious, but transformed: more centralized, more powerful, and more willing to override traditional restraints.
Here Raico, following Ekirch, underscores a crucial point often neglected in mainstream historiography: war does not simply respond to state power, it generates it. Or, as Randolph Bourne famously put it, “war is the health of the state,” a formulation Raico highlights approvingly.
By the late 19th century, the United States had entered a new phase. Militarism—defined as the permeation of civil society by military values and institutions—began to take root.
This shift was not driven solely by abstract ideology. Raico points to the convergence of political ambition and economic interest. Industrialists, particularly in steel and armaments, found common cause with naval strategists and expansionist politicians. Figures like Alfred Thayer Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt advocated a powerful navy and overseas empire, pushing the United States towards competition for colonies far afield.
The Spanish-American War and the subsequent annexation of the Philippines marked the decisive break. The republic had become an empire, entangled in the rivalries of great powers and committed to a permanent military presence abroad.
Importantly, Raico does not present this development as uncontested. There were critics, men like William Graham Sumner, who presciently warned that empire would corrupt the American system and undermine its liberties. But they were overwhelmed by what Raico describes as a “powerful cabal” of political and economic elites.
On the other side, one of Raico’s more devastating insights is directed not at obvious statists, but at supposed defenders of liberty who nonetheless embraced war under the banner of moral necessity.
Again and again, figures who opposed state power in the abstract succumbed to the allure of the “just war.” Whether in the Civil War or World War I, even radical individualists abandoned their principles when confronted with causes they deemed righteous.
This, Raico suggests, reveals a fundamental weakness: a failure to grasp that war itself is the problem. Once the machinery of war is unleashed, its consequences, centralization, repression, and the growth of state power, follow with grim predictability, regardless of the cause.
The relevance of Raico’s analysis is difficult to overstate. Writing in the shadow of the Cold War, he already saw the United States as the world’s dominant military power. In the decades since, that position has only solidified.
Today, the language has changed—“humanitarian intervention,” “defense of democracy,” “great power competition”—but the underlying dynamic remains the same. War and preparation for war continue to justify unprecedented levels of spending, surveillance, and executive authority.
Raico’s great contribution is to remind us that this is not an accident, nor a necessary feature of modernity. It is the result of a historical departure from a tradition that once understood the intimate connection between militarism and the destruction of liberty.
To recover that tradition is not merely an academic exercise. It is a political and moral imperative. Raico and Ekirch are correct: the choice is not between engagement and isolation, but between empire and a free society.
Citing Ekirch and Schumpeter respectively, Raico concludes by noting that the end of the Cold War was “not sufficient to release the American people from the power of the Pentagon and its corporate allies,” and that it is a universal truth of the military establishments of all imperial powers, past and present that: “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”
We are living to see Raico and Ekirch proven tragically right.
