Posting #14. The story of Peace through Strength

We will always seek peace—but we will never surrender.  In short, we are neither “warmongers” nor “appeasers,” neither “hard” nor “soft.” We are Americans, determined to defend the frontiers of freedom, by an honorable peace if peace is possible, but by arms if arms are used against us.

President John F. Kennedy, November 16, 1961

The story:  A dominant story we Americans tell ourselves is that first, we are reluctant but dutybound to keep peace in the world and second, the story says, to keep peace means maintaining a robust armed forces, the one necessarily the most robust in the world.  Central to that robustness is money, money that can fund the war-making machinery and personnel to, as JFK says above, “defend the frontiers of freedom.” Despite the warning of JFK’s predecessor, President Eisenhower, about the “military industrial complex” only 10 months earlier, the story tells us that we must do whatever it takes to maintain peace, even if, paradoxically, it means going to war.  To paraphrase a US Army major during the Vietnam War, the story says that we must destroy in order to preserve.

My take on the story:

Judging from the consistent Department of Defense funding of the last sixty years, this story has been generally accepted by both liberals and conservatives.  Though DoD’s portion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined since the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, in dollar amounts it has increased tenfold. In 1973, the DoD received $81.47B, or 5.89% of GDP.  As I pointed out in Posting #9, “The Department of Defense’s Use of Taxpayer Money,” DoD every year receives at least half of the discretionary funds allocated by Congress, so that in fiscal year 2025, it will be granted $895.2B or about 3% of GDP. 

Despite the decline in percent of GDP that the US spends, it still commits a significantly larger percentage of GDP than any of the other G7 countries and it spends more on defense than the next ten countries with defense budgets combined.  Meanwhile, the US diplomatic arm, the Department of State, is allocated .7% of the GDP, or $84.03B in 2023. 

This apparently bipartisan agreement to provide such extraordinary funds means that the Department of Defense is primarily responsible for fulfilling the US duty to maintain peace.

It was President Ronald Reagan who applied the most long-lasting maxim to this story: “peace through strength.”  While other US Commanders-in-Chief (AKA Presidents) have implied as much, and the Republican party ran “Peace through Strength” campaign ads in the 1964 campaign between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barry Goldwater, it was during Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign that he introduced this maxim and made it real during his two-term presidency.  In an August 1980 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), candidate Reagan at once hailed the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” and also insisted that, contrary to President Jimmy Carter’s reduction in DoD’s relative share of the GDP, if he were President, and in alignment with his Republican predecessors, he would do otherwise:

There is an alternative path for America which offers a more realistic hope for peace, one which takes us on the course of restoring that vital margin of safety. For thirty years since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to preserve peace through strength. It is steadiness and the vision of men like Dwight Eisenhower that we have to thank for policies that made America strong and credible.

The last Republican defense budget, proposed by President Ford, would have maintained the margin.

… For a nation such as ours, arms are important only to prevent others from conquering us or our allies. We are not a belligerent people. Our purpose is not to prepare for war or wish harm to others. When we had great strength in the years following World War II, we used that strength not for territorial gain but to defend others.

Despite the standing ovation Reagan gained from this audience, you can see his protesting too much to allegations of his—and the United States—being a warmonger: “We are not a belligerent people.”  As The Washington Post told it at the time, “Reagan presented himself as a man of peace who would take ‘prudent and measured’ steps to rebuild U.S. defenses while always being willing to negotiate with the Soviets.”  Nonetheless, “it was Reagan's willingness to be ready for war rather than this promise to seek peace which won applause from the VFW, which recently broke an 80-year tradition of neutrality to endorse Reagan for president” (emphasis added).

Reagan was overwhelmingly elected to the office based a lot on his promise to enact “peace through strength” against foreign adversaries.  He followed through with this campaign promise, growing the US armed forces exponentially.  Whereas the DoD budget in 1980 under President Carter was $143.69B and 5.15% of GDP, by 1982 under President Reagan it was $221.67B and 6.81% of GDP.  (For perspective, now, in 2023, the budget is $857.9B and 3.1% of GDP .)

Furthermore, at the outset of his second term in office, President Reagan announced during his 1985 State of the Union address the “Reagan Doctrine,” a policy designed to expand “peace through strength” by financially and militarily supporting anti -Communist/-Soviet Union/-“Evil Empire” “freedom fighters” around the globe. According to the US State Department:

To that end, the Reagan administration focused much of its energy on supporting proxy armies to curtail Soviet influence. Among the more prominent examples of the Reagan Doctrine’s application, in Nicaragua, the United States sponsored the contra movement in an effort to force the leftist Sandinista government from power. And in Afghanistan, the United States provided material support to Afghan rebels—known as the mujahadeen—helping them end Soviet occupation of their country.

(Instead of “prominent examples of the Reagan Doctrine,” I would call these “infamous examples of blowback,” given their outcomes—directly, the Iran-Contra scandal and indirectly,  9/11/01. But, whatever.)  

The Reagan Doctrine, a central part of which is “peace through strength,” has had plenty of critics, at the time and since.

·      In a 1981 critique of “The Myth of Peace Through Strength,” Professor Bernard P. Kiernan argues that “We [Americans] have been so concerned with being ‘winners,’ with being ‘Number One,’ that we have lost sight of our concern for peace and order in the world. In fact, we have become victims of that oldest and most self-defeating of illusions, that peace is achieved through strength, through being ‘Number One’.”  Instead, Kiernan asserts that the American exercise of “peace through strength” with the Soviet Union and the Third World have produced the hostility toward the United States. 

If we confront today a powerful, aggressive, hostile Soviet Union and a militantly anti-American Third World, these Frankenstein monsters are, to a greater extent than we are willing to admit, our own creation, the product of the foolish assumption that while we proudly and defiantly refuse to accommodate to Soviet, or Communist power, arguing “better dead than Red,” responding to any evidence of Soviet strength with a call to arms, we expect the Soviet Union and the Third World to be cowed by our policies of strength, pressured into accommodation by our power.

Hence, the story of peace through strength is a “myth,” a ruse.

·      In his 2010 essay, “The Western Way of War Has Run its Course,” Andrew Bacevich, a graduate of West Point who was a career Army officer during the Vietnam and First Gulf Wars, whose Army officer son was killed in Iraq in 2007, and who now is a historian makes a related point as he discusses how the United States and Israel both trust war to relieve their foreign policy challenges. “[B]elief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work,” Bacevich argues. “‘Peace through strength’ easily enough becomes ‘peace through war’.” Moreover, Bacevich alleges about both countries’ dilemmas,

Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren't intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more. 

To Bacevich, the primary reason for the American continued use of the “peace through strength” maxim was all about the defense industry’s self-interest:

For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.

·      In a 2019 libertarian reassessment of the two terms of the Reagan administration, especially in regard to the US Military, Marcus Whitcher comments that “The main criticism of Reagan, however, is that his administration increased the national debt by 186 percent.  Reagan’s insistence on dramatically increasing the defense budget (by around 35 percent) and his inability to decrease domestic spending led to an explosion of the national debt.  During his administration the debt increased by $1.86 trillion.”

Despite this line of criticism, Reagan is held up by many Republicans as the ne plus ultra, the best President in the last 40 years, mostly for ending the Cold War. 

But Reagan’s “peace through strength” legacy also endures through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute as its mission “is to complete President Reagan’s unfinished work and to preserve the timeless principles he championed: individual liberty, economic opportunity, global democracy and national pride.”  One of the most notable ways in which the Foundation “promotes his ideals” is in, since 2013, the annual conferring of the “Peace through Strength” awards.   This award makes clear the connection drawn between peace and the US military as it “honors those individuals whose courage and leadership in support of our nation’s armed forces, here and abroad, have contributed to the security of the American people and to the advancement of freedom.”  

Of the eighteen awards given (none were awarded in 2020), all but two have gone to defense-affiliated officials.  Secretaries of Defense have received five, Deputy Secretaries of Defense have received two, Chairs of the House or Senate Armed Services Committee have received six, two have gone to former Secretaries of State and current Reagan Foundation Trustees, and the remaining three have gone to the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, and the former Vice President of the United States. 

Whether or not “peace through strength” and its accompanying use of the US military has been appreciated by Americans and non-Americans, one thing we Americans could count on was that this “strength” would be used outside of the United States to create peace inside.  The premise of the mantra is deterrence: that American military might is so great that any enemy nation daring to counter it would be utterly destroyed as a consequence.  This threat of decimation is what offers the “peace.” As presidential-candidate Reagan said to the VFW, “Our best hope of persuading them [the Soviets] to live in peace is to convince them they cannot win at war.”

It is not so astonishing, then, that another Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in his 2016 campaign invoked Reagan’s “peace through strength” to address how he would deal with disturbances abroad. Candidate Trump vowed in his September 2016 speech to the American Legion,  “In addition to teaching respect for the flag, we also have to make sure we give our military the tools they need to defend that flag and to deter violence and aggression from our foreign adversaries.  We will rebuild our depleted military, and pursue a state-of-the-art missile defense. We will do it based on those three famous words: Peace Through Strength” (emphasis added).

While he pledged in this campaign to do away entirely with the Islamic State group and to “rebuild” the US military, he was unable to fully accomplish either. Despite his appropriating Reagan’s maxim, Trump was criticized for not proceeding strategically in exercising “peace through strength” as Reagan had.  Building on “initial steps” taken by President Jimmy Carter, Reagan:

believed that his administration must restore U.S. and Western strength before any eventual summit with Moscow. He knew that he had to set the geopolitical table in such a way that the United States could demand and achieve high standards in U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, whether the subject was arms control, human rights and political liberalization within the Soviet Union, or the settlement of ongoing East-West conflicts in the Third World.

Instead, 2016 candidate and then President Trump proceeded to use “peace through strength” in a way “that would have been anathema” to Reagan, most notably in trying to delegitimize NATO, in signaling removing sanctions against Russia, in not punishing Russia for election interference, and in joining Russia in counter-terrorism moves such as those in Syria.

Still, in an NPR report, some analysts herald Trump’s “peace through strength” legacy: “The increase in budgets, readiness levels and modernization efforts will be sort of like a 'mini Reagan period,' " Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute says. "Fifteen years of war and several years of budgetary dysfunction had left things frayed." Others, however, criticize Trump’s reallocating Department of Defense monies (which he was not supposed to do) to build his wall on the Mexican border, “calling the shift in funds for the wall one of the ‘worst legacies’ of the Trump years.”  Furthermore, Trump’s version of “peace through strength” was, like so many of his acts in office, transactional, using senior officers politically and ignoring the military justice system:

But in the end, several analysts say, what stands out is the damage Trump did to civilian-military relations. He used troops — and senior officers — in clearly political events, at times referring to “my generals.” One senior officer, who is not authorized to speak publicly, recalled that in his dealings with Trump, the president was surprised to learn the military is apolitical.  Moreover, Trump brushed aside a military justice system that found service members guilty of war crimes, granting them pardons.

Nonetheless, President Trump’s invocation of “peace through strength” was largely aimed at bolstering, internally, the US armed forces in order to act on external adversaries…until the summer of 2020, when protests around the country against George Floyd’s killing led Trump to threaten invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and using the active-duty US military to quell the unrest. On June 1, 2020, Trump declared that “If governors throughout the country do not deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers to ‘dominate the streets,’ …the U.S. military would step in to ‘quickly solve the problem for them’.”  It was Trump’s primary military advisors—the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley—who argued with Trump that invoking the Act would be an utter and illegitimate mistake.  Esper even threatened to resign if Trump ordered him to deploy the 10,000 troops armed with the rifles and bayonets Trump wanted.

So what?

So what that then-President Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy armed active-duty forces to a few states?

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and the Insurrection Act of 1807 work together.  The post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 “forbids the U.S. military — including federal armed forces and National Guard troops who have been called into federal service — from taking part in civilian law enforcement. This prohibition reflects an American tradition that views military interference in civilian government as being inherently dangerous to liberty.”  The Insurrection Act of 1807, however, “temporarily suspends the Posse Comitatus rule and allows the president to deploy the military to assist civilian authorities with law enforcement. That might involve soldiers doing anything from enforcing a federal court order to suppressing an uprising against the government” (emphasis added).

The Brennan Center notes that one of three sections of the Insurrection Act has been invoked most frequently, the section that “allows the president to deploy troops if a state’s legislature (or governor if the legislature is unavailable) requests federal aid to suppress an insurrection in that state” (emphasis added).  Thus, the US federalist system abides: states can request military assistance but the president should not, except under the most dire circumstances, compel states to bear the brunt of active-duty military forces deployed to their states.  This mutual discretion of presidents and governors when it comes to deploying armed-for-battle US military forces, I would wager, is what we Americans have come to expect.  We Americans don’t expect nor condone “banana republic” martial law in our country, which is what using the Insurrection Act without the approval of states can produce.

According to Wikipedia, since the outset of World War II, the Insurrection Act has been invoked by US presidents a dozen times, most recently by George H.W. Bush in 1989 and 1992.  In both of those most recent cases, the state requested the federal government’s assistance.  However, in four of the twelve instances, federal assistance was not requested by the state: once in 1957 by President Eisenhower “to protect the Little Rock Nine,” and three times by President Kennedy, largely having to do with desegregation of southern educational institutions following Brown v. Board of Education (September 1962, June 1963, September 1963). 

Do the math: it’s been sixty years since a president invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed active-duty forces without the will of the state.  

Because he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act late in his term as President, it is not out of the realm of possibility that, were candidate Trump to be elected as President again in 2024, using the rhetoric of “peace through strength,” he would again try to invoke the Insurrection Act.  This time, though, rather than wait for the conclusion of his term, he has said he would do this from the beginning. In a late-November 2023 article, the AP reports 

Campaigning in Iowa this year, Donald Trump said he was prevented during his presidency from using the military to quell violence in primarily Democratic cities and states. Calling New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago “crime dens,” the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination told his audience, “The next time, I’m not waiting [to send federal troops]. One of the things I did was let them [Democratic governors and mayors] run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait [to be invited] any longer” (emphasis added).

But 2024 candidate Trump’s appropriation of Reagan’s version of military “peace through strength” aimed at foreign adversaries with what is to all intents and purposes domestic martial law aimed at some of us Americans was most evident during his 2023 Veterans’ Day “Truth Social” posting and his New Hampshire rally on the same day.  In the posting, he wrote “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream” (emphasis added).  This makes clear that Trump would only be president for some of us, not all. Peace would only be for some of us, and strength would be used against others of us.

But at his Veteran’s Day New Hampshire rally, not only did he use the same menacing language, promising to “root out ... the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”—he also doubled down on it: “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within” (emphasis added).

And, ironically, the background placards held by the crowd standing behind him as he delivered these threats read “Peace through Strength.”

So where would this leave the US Military, if Trump were elected president and immediately invoked the Insurrection Act to, as he has said at various times, enact “peace through strength” to seek “retribution” against “the threat from within”?  What if the military is called by states, as they have been before, to college campuses to suppress protests, as when Richard Nixon sent them to Kent State in 1970 and four people were killed and nine injured?  Or when Lyndon Baines Johnson used them in 1968 to quell riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination and 39 people were killed and 3500 were injured?  Or when George W. Bush used them in 2005 to prevent looting following Hurricane Katrina when innumerable people lost their lives?  In 1987, Ronald Reagan sent active-duty troops without the state of Georgia requesting them to enforce federal law at a federal prison in Atlanta, but the conflict was resolved before the troops arrived.  

So what if, without being asked by the states, Trump, emperor-like, chooses to send in active-duty troops, troops armed with bayonets and weapons of war whose training is for warfighting?

The Posse Comitatus Act was “enacted in response to the abuses resulting from the extensive use of the army in civil law enforcement during the Civil War and the Reconstruction.”   Were Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act at the beginning of his term in office, given his previous proclivities, it is likely that as the Commander-in-Chief he would deploy armed forces for civil law enforcement. This could be called a declaration of war, as Americans will certainly die by the hands of federal forces.

Is that what is meant by “peace through strength”?  If Ronald Reagan is the ne plus ultra of recent Republican presidents, how does his version of the phrase line up with Trump’s?  Not at all, I think, betraying just how beyond the pale Trumpism is with Republicanism.