Donald Trump has embraced the popular “peace through strength” doctrine with his characteristic panache: “I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody—absolutely nobody—is gonna to mess with us,” Trump has said.
On other occasions he’s said similar things, such as, a year ago, “Nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history.”
There’s a surface appeal to all this, admits Sheldon Richman. Why not show the world the United States is so awesomely powerful that no one in his right mind would even think to get on its wrong side?
But in actuality, the way to achieve peace is not to prepare for war, argues Richman, but to reject militarism and empire, and embrace nonintervention. Prophecies of war are too easily self-fulfilling. Thus, as a pioneer of modern libertarianism, F. A. Harper, put it many years ago, “It is now urgent in the interest of liberty that many persons become ‘peace-mongers.'”
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