Isegoria

The United States is one of history’s most successful aggressor nations:

We conquered almost the entirety of continental United States through a series of small but undeniably aggressive wars against the Indians who were in possession. We also made a serious but unsuccessful effort to conquered Canada in 1812. Much of the Southwest was originally taken from the Mexicans who were in occupation by two wars, one by the Texans and then, when we annexed Texas, by us. There were still many Indian tribes who did not recognize Mexican sovereignty or our sovereignty when we replaced them. The wars with Geronimo in that area were among our most difficult aggressive wars. We of course bought Florida from Spain, but only after making it clear we would compel an exit by force if they decided not to take our money.

Let us consider first the Indians. It should be said that in many cases there were European powers who claimed parts of the future United States, and they were either were forced to “cede” those parts by war, or sold them to us, but in most cases north of Mexico the area was actually controlled by Indian tribes and the European sovereignty was more or less theoretical. Until our armies had driven out the Indians it is very hard to argue that these areas were actually in our possession.

Let me begin at the very beginning with the settlement of the English colonies. Beginning with the settlements in Virginia and those in New England, colonists had gradually build up a thin layer of essentially European civilization along the Atlantic Coast of what would eventually become the United States. This colonization had proceeded by simply seizing land, sometimes compensating the Indians already there and sometimes fighting wars with them. In general apparently no one ever really considered their rights in the matter. In these areas colonial powers issued charters to their colonists that rather assumed that they had a right to do this. Locke, for example, drew up a charter for the Carolinas in which people’s ownership of land came from their farming it. He paid no attention whatsoever to the natives already there.

But it should be said that the native tribes were not absolutely peaceful. Indeed small groups of Indians tended to raid outlying white settlements. This would continue to be true almost up to the 20th century. Indeed there was one raid in which Indians attacked a federal court in the late 1980s. In what the Europeans call the seven years war and we called the French and Indian war the two major powers in the North American continent, France and England, attempted to involve the Indian tribes in their war. There were raids from some tribes on the English colonies and English entered into treaties with some of these tribes under which they would protect our colonies in return for a guarantee of their keeping’s existing tribal lands. It was this guarantee that prevented or impeded the westward push on the colonists and they objected to it.

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It should be said that the Indians in general lived by hunting and gathering and required a great deal of land to support individual families and tribes. Efforts were made, particularly in the Louisiana Purchase to get them to farm the land but this was in general unsuccessful. Thus land that might support 20,000 settlers was occupied by perhaps only 500 Indians. Purchase of the land was difficult because the Indians had no clear-cut tribal or family ownership. The individual tribes were in almost continuous minor wars with each other and hence purchase of land from one would not extinguish the claim of another. Nevertheless, with rare exceptions, we and the other “European” claimants simply ignored Indian rights and issued charters to settlers or in Mexico, conquistadors.

It is interesting that with the occupation of the entire United States by Americans we stopped engaging in wars of conquest.

What happened after the Vietnam War, although covered by the newspaper, has been largely forgotten:

I suspect that the invasion of a large number of intellectuals, who regarded their antagonism to the war and their demonstrations to that effect as a high point in their lives, means that they must forget or suppress the mass murderers that followed the Communist victory.

The first of these mass murderers occurred in Cambodia. As soon as we withdrew our forces from Vietnam, it was possible for the Communist to take over Cambodia without any interference from us. They carried off what was the most intense campaign of mass murder anywhere in the world. They only killed 2 million people but as percentage of the rather limited population of Cambodia this was a record breaker. There was a brief attempt to blame it on United States, but that faded out very quickly. Now I think you can say that the whole thing has gone into the memory hole.

There were also the boat people. Apparently the Communist government in Vietnam was anti-Chinese and a large number of people, exact number is not known, were put into leaky boats and shoved out to sea. Estimates of the death rate run between three-quarters of million and million and a half. It may be that this was one of the reasons for China attacking North Vietnam. The boat people got a lot of newspaper publicity at the time and a number of people who been strongly supporting the North in the war signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in which they in essence apologized. The matter has, however, been largely forgotten since then.

It seems likely that the actual reason for Johnson entering the war was neither the brush in the Gulf of Tonkin, nor the shelling of the American hospital, Gordon Tullock suggests:

I think Johnson simply saw that it would
make it much easier for him to defeat Goldwater if he stole from Goldwater his military position. In any event the sending of troops many of whom were drafted, and who were under command of a rather inept general, Westmoreland, rapidly developed serious domestic difficulties in United States for the war in Vietnam, but insured Johnson’s victory in ’68.

One of Gordon Tullock’s colleagues at Yale felt strongly that we should not help the French in what was then French Indochina:

Although no admirer of the French empire, I preferred it to the Communists, but I also felt it an unimportant matter from the standpoint of American foreign policy. At the time I was a Foreign Service Officer on detached duty at Yale to study Chinese, so he obviously expected me to express my views on the subject. More correctly he thought that I would express the Department of State’s views.

I responded by saying that Europe was more important than Indochina and we were attempting to restore the remnant of Germany to prosperity and give it possibly a little strength. The French were impeding this and I thought an implicit trade in which we gave them some minor assistance in their empire and they at least moderated their objections to the restoration of Germany would be sensible. He did not object to my statement about the world, but said, “I don’t think we should do this kind of trading.” Although this was only one person, his phrase stuck to my memory as representative of a general climate of opinion among academics studying the Far East.

Gordon Tullock explores the democratic peace:

Apparently many political scientists feel insecure in their teaching that democracy is the best form of government. Thus recently there has been quite a fad in political science arguing that democracies are one way or another peaceful. It’s hard to argue that the Roman Republic was a peaceful conqueror, and the Athenian democracy was hardly reluctant to get into wars. It could of course be argued that these are long ago and that maybe they’re not true democracies. I suspect, however, that they are left out simply because most modern political scientists know little about them. A classical education is no longer part of the normal background of a scholar.

Since democracies undeniably were involved in two major wars in the 20th century and United States succeeded in having a major war that was entirely internal in the 19th century, this contention seems hard to support. It has then been gradually modified in order to bring it into accord with the average political scientist’s gradually growing historical knowledge. The first step was to allege that democracies did not engage in aggressive wars. After this argument had gotten into print, somebody read a little bit about the 19th century in which European democracies seized much of the world by a series of aggressive wars. Thus that particular argument had to be abandoned. I should perhaps say that in no case did anyone say that the previous argument was in error, they just stopped using it.

This leads us to the final version, which is that democracies do not fight with each other. It is to
this myth that this paper is devoted. The two largest wars in recent times were the two world wars. In each of these there were democracies on both sides. This will surprise the average reader since the standard history in United States and England claims that our opponents were dictatorships. Indeed we normally call all of our opponents dictatorships. In essence the wars became virtuous because the democracies fought with, and in fact, defeated dictatorships.

Let us start with World War I. On one side was a German Empire that was a constitutional monarchy with an elected legislature that had the power of the purse. In fact it had a large number of socialist members in that legislature. Criticism of this from those who are proponents of the Democratic peace hypothesis normally point out that the upper house was elected by a method which permitted people of upper incomes to have somewhat more votes than the poor. This was true, but consider the upper house in England, which was hereditary. It is true that its powers had been somewhat restricted, but it still could exercise in almost completely effective veto.

Germany had permitted women to vote from well before the beginning of the war. England did not finish making women eligible to vote until 1931. Indeed during World War I there were many males who could not vote until the passage of the representation of the people act in 1918. The United States of course did not permit blacks living in the South to vote. I suppose it could perhaps be argued that this war does not contradict the thesis that democracies do not fight with each other because it could be argued that there were no true democracies on either side.

World War II raises somewhat the same problems in that Japan also had an elected legislature with a responsible cabinet and the power of the purse held by the legislature. The upper house was to some extent hereditary. The Peers elected some among their number to that house. The English legislature still had an hereditary upper house, but it’s power had been severely restricted.

During the war I used to annoy people by asking them the name of the Japanese dictator. Sometimes they replied ‘the Emperor” which simply showed hopeless ignorance of the Japanese system. He was greatly respected but with rare exceptions (one of which was the decision to surrender) respected his Cabinet’s advice. Even on the decision to surrender he did not go against his Cabinet, he merely introduced the surrender and might well have given up had the Cabinet objected.

A second potential dictator of Japan was the prime minister. Inconveniently, for people who favored this particular view there is the fact that right in the middle of the war he was replaced. That doesn’t happen to dictators. I have occasionally encountered people who say that the military class was the dictator. This involves a peculiar usage of terms, but I suppose it could be argued that it was an oligarchy rather than a democracy. So far as I know there are no studies of how the military controlled the government if it did. Thus I have produced two wars with democracies on both sides. The second I agree is a little shaky but the first is clear.

The political scientists will have to find another argument for democracy. Fortunately such other arguments are easy to come upon. The real issue here is why this rather peculiar and new argument was ever introduced.

The third war the United States lost was the Korean affair:

The North Koreans drove us back to Pusan, we then drove them back more or less to the Yalu when the Chinese, aided by the Russian air force entered and drove us back nearly to Pusan. We then recovered and moved back north to an approximation of the pre 1950 dividing line. The American generals were seriously handicapped by the fact that Maclane was the Officer in the British Embassy in charge of liaison on the Korean War. He kept the Russians and through them the Chinese fully informed on our plans. MacArthur thought somebody was betraying his plans because the enemy so often pre-empted them. At the time, there was a tendency to discount this, but we now know it was true.

In any event, the war ended more or less where it had started. After much death and destruction, nothing had been gained. We may not have lost, but we certainly did not win.

The second war the United States lost started when Jefferson decided he would try to put pressure on England:

The English held Canada, which we wanted and had a habit of stopping American ships at sea (including at least one American frigate) and removing seamen who they claimed were deserters from the Royal navy. Modern historians agree that there were many such seamen on our ships, but it is not obvious that the Naval Officers were good at distinguishing them from native-born Americans. This led to an outburst of indignation on the part of the Americans.

Before Jefferson became president, Adams sent our leading diplomat, John Jay, to England to negotiate a treaty on the matter. Under the treaty a commissioner in each American port would issue a certificate that there were no English deserters on a given ship after having inspected it to make sure. For some reason this also led to an outburst of indignation, and Jefferson never even sent it to the Senate for ratification. He invented the embargo that has caused so much difficulty in the diplomatic history of the United States. The absurd idea that a third rate power, without a real navy, could coerce the then two leading powers, France and England was absurd. It did cause more difficulty for the English than for Napoleon, but England did not stop impressing our seamen.

The situation remained in a more or less deadlock with the principle people injured being the maritime interests in New England. They were mainly federalists, so Jefferson and his successor Madison were well able to withstand their pain. Finally, just as Napoleon was marching on Moscow, We entered the war on the French side. Our major objective was Canada, but preventing impressment of our seamen was also thought important. England fought a war that strategically was defensive although tactically it sometimes involved taking the offensive. They had fought a major war with France for twenty years, and the United States had more than doubled in population since independence. Actually occupying it would have been an immense task and they didn’t want to try.

Our navy consisted of a small set of very good frigates and some half built ships of the line. Our frigates distinguished themselves, but were only an annoyance to England. The British blockade of our coast together with occasional landings was also mainly an annoyance, but a more severe one than that inflicted by our miniature navy on them.

The effort to take Canada was a frost, mainly because of the poor quality of our generalship. Scott, a very young and junior general did well, thus starting what was to be a long and distinguished career. The quality of Madison’s other appointees is illustrated by a general in command of 1200 soldiers near Niagara who surrendered unconditionally to an English general with 300. The American general was the only one of our generals sentenced to death by court martial. Unfortunately, Madison commuted the sentence.

The war continued badly and the treaty of peace did not mention any of our war objectives. I remember that my high school history text emphasized our defeat. Politically, however, Madison did well and was able to hand on the Presidency to another member of his party.