William S. Lind explains why conservatives hate war:
Few countries go to war expecting to lose, but wars are seldom won by both sides. The effects of military defeat on social order can be revolutionary.
Russia’s involvement in World War I gave us Bolshevism. Germany’s defeat made Hitler possible. As the First World War shows, if a conflict is costly enough, the victors’ social order can suffer nearly as badly as that of the vanquished. Not only did the British Empire die in the mud of Flanders, but postwar Britain was a very different place from Edwardian Britain.
The plain fact is, conservatives loathe unpredictability. They also know that vast state expenditures and debts can destabilize a society, and no activity of the state is more expensive than war. America’s adventure in Iraq, driven in no small part by the quest for oil—which will now mostly go to China—has already cost a trillion dollars, with another trillion or two to come caring for crippled veterans. Even the peacetime cost of a large military can break a country, as it broke the Soviet Union. American conservatives used to be budget hawks, not warhawks.
If we look beyond dollars, francs, pounds, and marks, the toll of war grows endless. After World War I, there were no young men on the streets of Paris. As one British observer noted, the German casualty lists from the early battles in that war read like the Almanach de Gotha, the book that catalogued the German nobility. Most frighteningly to conservatives, wars like World War I can destroy a whole culture’s faith in itself. It may well be that European civilization’s last chance for survival was a German victory on the Marne in 1914.
One gain that comes out of war is as disturbing to conservatives as any of the losses: an aggrandizement of state power. The argument of “wartime necessity” runs roughshod over all checks and balances, civil liberties, and traditional constraints on government. In the 20th century, American progressives knew they could only create the powerful, centralizing federal government they sought by going to war. It was they, the left, who engineered America’s entry into World War I. Nearly a century later, 9/11 gave centralizers in the neocon Bush administration the cover they needed for the “Patriot Act,” legislation that would have left most of America’s original patriots rethinking the merits of King George. Just as nothing adds more to a state’s debt than war, so nothing more increases its power. Conservatives rue both.
WWI was a cultural catastrophe for Europe. The generation that fought it was the last to produce any art or literature or music. Their children and their descendants can best be described as degenerates, and they are now being displaced by third world immigrants. This is probably a good thing overall.
“Conservatives hate war”… depends what you mean by conservatives. Traditional aristocracies saw fighting — whether in duels or in wars — as one of their core functions.
In the run-up to WWI, those Europeans pushing for aggressive military action tended to be more on the Right than on the Left. Once the war started, of course, the Left in all countries fell into line quickly.
Traditional aristocracies definitely saw fighting as one of their most important roles, which put them in a similar position to modern military officers — believing in the importance of military power, but in no hurry to exercise it too frivolously. Hindsight’s 20/20, as they say…
My understanding is that the Left was against the war, because it was a war between Nations, when what they wanted was an International war between Classes.
Lind’s beloved Austria-Hungary, in the person of Count Leopold Berchtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Frättling und Püllütz, was the empire that gave the Younger Moltke the opportunity to launch his preemptive war on Russia. That preemptive war ended up creating complications.
Nicholas I’s much taller uncles and cousins weren’t going to give him any peace at family parties if he backed down again as in 1908. The aristocracy brought their own fate down on their heads. If Alexander III had married a much taller princess then maybe WWI wouldn’t have taken the shape it did. What earlier Romanoffs lacked in brains they made up for in size.
The man who destroyed Europe’s old order, as his former ultra allies loudly proclaimed at the time, was Bismarck.