Description:
Domestic Causes of American Wars offers a unique and critical take on the causes of major American wars throughout its history. Unlike most histories that designate foreign threats as casus belli, this work examines their important underlying economic triggers, reaching the striking conclusion that many were unnecessary for national security nor were they as heroic in upholding American values as commonly concluded. Further, conventional histories often dwell on the positive outcomes of those wars rather than on their much more important domestic ill effects--the erosion of the American founders' constitution and of the civil liberties and constitutional checks and balances therein, while enabling the rise of an imperial presidency.
This historical volume addresses those often-buried domestic causes and effects, in particular how the American elections cycle often affects U.S. entry into wars and how economic motives incentivize war. America's early wars - the 1812 war against Canada, the Mexican war, the wars against Native Americans - all concerned territorial aggrandizement and acquisition of the rich resources therein. The industrial north fought the Civil War to prevent the expansion of the South's cheaper mode of production based on slavery into the expansive territories acquired during the Mexican War. The Spanish American war marked the U.S. lift off beyond its new domestic borders, in pursuit of domination and exploitation in Latin America and the acquisition of new territories overseas.
The United States entered World War I to save its trade and loans with Britain and France. During World War II, a unique permanent U.S. military-industrial complex arose that lobbied for continued weapons production during peacetime to sustain its fragile local economies. Thus, by exaggerating the Soviet threat, pressures arose for military interventions in Korea and then Vietnam during the Cold War. The threat of terrorism similarly served to keep the war economy afloat during the post-Cold War era by an overly expansive war on terrorism. The prospect of accessing Iraq's oil incentivized the war in that country. The need for ongoing wars to feed the voracious appetite of the military industrial complex through billions of dollars of arms sales has been an ever-present factor in the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Brief description: Ivan Eland has worked for more than four decades in the foreign policy, national security, energy, and presidential studies fields, including 16 years working for the U.S. Congress. He currently is the Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. Eland has written and published eight other books, written many pieces in prominent newspapers and journals, appeared on hundreds of major TV and radio interviews, and has testified before congressional committees. He has a PhD in defense policy, an MBA in business economics, and a BA in Poli Sci/International Relations.
Review Quotes: "Once you start reading Domestic Causes of American Wars: Economic and Political Triggers, it will be difficult to put it down. In each chapter, Eland demolishes widely accepted conventional interpretations using devastating logic and careful research. He exposes an all too consistent pattern from the 1790s to the present. Repeatedly, he finds that narrow personal and opportunistic motivations rather than lofty principles, have dominated the decisions of politicians to wage war. A tour de force." DAVID T. BELTO
Professor Emeritus of History, University of Alabama