The Left is often assumed to be a major force against war and intervention to the point that many on the Right and Libertarians try to appeal to the left based on the agreement on the issue. This assumption ignores how the left’s opposition to war has mostly been when politically beneficial.
While leftists can point to a few left-wing idealogues who started Anti-War movements or protests and periods when there was a significant left-wing presence in the movements, leftists in actual positions of power have been at the forefront of warmongering U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the 20th century.
Looking as far back as President William McKinley, the first Progressive Republican was a faux anti-imperialist who used revolutions in Latin America and southeast Asia as a pretext to expand American territories and resources which led to the Spanish-American War. This war is where the more left-wing Journalists and the State formed their relationship to provide ample justification in the eyes of the public which has since been titled “Yellow Journalism”.
At the turn of the century, the left Liberal intellectuals, particularly in Britain, were a small minority that was drowned out within the left by those who supported British involvement in the First World War. In America, most pacifists and anti-war activists, despite being portrayed as communists, came from religious movements and far exceeded left-wingers in terms of those who did not support the war, as “their churches supplied many conscientious objectors…”.
President Woodrow Wilson drew more conservative and religious support in his re-election for keeping the country out of the war. This was certainly the case as his re-election campaign slogan ironically became “He Kept Us Out of War”. The quote becomes ironic when Wilson, a progressive politician, quickly joined war efforts after re-election in April 1917 when he called on Congress to declare war on Germany.
He cited two incidents for this 180 in the policy. First was the sinking of the Lusitania in the English channel, which left the harbor despite warnings of attack from both the British government and German governments if it was to enter what was currently a war zone. The second was the Zimmerman Telegram which proposed an alliance between Mexico and Germany to attack the United States if the U.S. were to enter the war.
Now both examples invoke some clear antagonism from Wilson and the U.S towards Germany. The first required the Lusitania to enter a war zone with a civilian ship, despite warnings from both sides that they would not be protected. Second, Germany does not propose a first strike on the U.S. but admits it intends to keep the U.S. out of the war and only proposes a “worst-case scenario” in which it tries to gain Mexico as an ally. Neither would be sufficient to claim America’s declaration of war was a defensive one.
We see much of the same with the Second World War, largely caused by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles created by Wilson. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a progressive as well, also feigned a sense of neutrality at the start of the war. From supporting aggressive embargo policies and navy deployments in the pacific to combat Japan without “direct measures” to the “Lend-Lease” program which supplied the Allies before the official U.S. involvement, FDR acted despite the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s to provoke the Axis into attacking the U.S. by making the U.S. neutrality virtually untrue without an official declaration of war.
The opposition to FDR’s warmongering was also not from the left, but from the right with the America First Committee’s campaign to keep the U.S. out of the war. Additionally, Congressional support for Neutrality was greatest among Republicans.
Finally, looking at when the left’s “anti-war” convictions were greatest in the Vietnam War we can see that the timing of their protests seemed to coincide with the presidency of Nixon. While protests against the war in Vietnam existed before 1970, it was not until Nixon announced an invasion into Cambodia, a new offensive in the region, that the “New Left”’s protests became widespread. During Johnson’s presidency, the movement was substantially smaller.
Again, we see that the real substantial opposition to the war came from the right, not the left, as Nixon himself in the 68 Election put a public face of condemnation for further involvement in Vietnam. Of course, as we know Nixon betrayed such trust and continued the war, despite the assurance to the Anti-War right that he was surrounded by the “right people”. Though this would ultimately be his administration that ended the war and had begun removing troops as early as 1969.
This is not to say that Nixon was anti-war, far from it, but it was not the left who were the ones ending Vietnam, but the right, as it had been in the previous wars of the 20th century. As Rothbard characterized during the 1992 election between George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton that the right had a better history of keeping us out of conflicts than the left, even if marginal. His words remain true, even as Bush Jr. would enter us into two wars at the beginning of the 21st century. This is because his successor, Barack Obama, would go on to only escalate the conflicts and try to drag us into more even as he tapped into the “anti-war left”.
The mask of “Anti War” leftism has completely fallen as the Ukraine/Russia conflict goes on. Democrats have consistently more likely to support aggressive foreign policy around the conflict than Republicans. This is especially true on the topic of No-Fly Zones, as more Democrats support them than Republicans. Though this does not mean the Republicans are completely against escalating this conflict as a Florida Republican in Congress said she supported a no-fly zone despite not knowing what it means. The numbers are still relatively high for Republicans, we can see that the bulk of opposition again is on the right, proving Rothbard’s point in 1992 right again.
