Liberal Wars ― Anglo-american Strategy, Ideology and Practice

This book addresses the relationship between the 'liberal' values of Anglo-Saxon cultures and the way that they conduct themselves when they are fighting - or preparing to fight - wars.

The United States and the United Kingdom are characterised by a consensus that their social and political arrangements are, in a very broad sense, ‘liberal’: they are limited by, and instrumental to, the ‘liberty’ of the rights-bearing individual, a liberty guaranteed by a domestic rule of law. Moreover, this consensus is universalist in tendency: it holds that the rights that are enjoyed by American and British citizens are rights that ought to be enjoyed by every human being, and that the British and American states should act in ways intended to promote them. War of its very nature involves activities that tend to threaten this self-understanding. Liberalism is peaceable and rule-based; war is violent and chaotic. Liberalism prizes openness; war encourages secrecy. Liberalism is universalist; war attributes a significantly diminished moral status to those who are identified as being enemies. Even if the actual fighting takes place in distant lands, war also generally involves a degree of interference with rights to liberty and property expected by the liberal polity’s own citizens.

The volume starts out from the observation that these familiar tensions are elements of astrategic problem. Liberalism is not pacifism, but societies self-identified as liberal must find a way to characterise their military actions as being consistent with a larger project of defending or promoting liberty. Failure to do so will erode the will to keep on fighting, perhaps to an extent that leads to military defeat. The essays here all deal with the following four questions:

- What understanding of war, and of the particular wars they fight, has made it possible for liberal states to understand the wars they fight as consistent with their liberal commitments?

- Have the constraints on liberal states arising from those commitments been changing over time?

- How has public opinion been reconciled to actual state behaviour?

-What, in consequence, might be an appropriate strategy for a modern liberal state?

This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, political philosophy, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

Alan Cromartie is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Reading, and author ofThe constitutionalist revolution (2006) and editor of Thomas Hobbes,A dialogue between a philosopher and a student, of the common laws of England (2005).