Dr. Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director, Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute, has written a powerful and provocative book titled, The Empire Has No Clothes.

He has spared neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, arguing that both parties, at least since the presidency of William McKinley, have engaged in the same virulent, nasty, heavy-handed, and addlepated foreign policy that has resulted in what revisionist historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, referred to as “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Both parties have ignored the prescient warnings of the founders who spoke loudly against foreign interventions and entanglements, and the cost in lives and treasure have been enormous.

Eland accurately points out that President Wilson’s successful effort to draw the United States into World War I, which was supposed to be “the war to end all wars,” had the deleterious effect of destroying the established European order, and resulted in the rise of both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The Twentieth century’s butcher’s bill, because of Wilson’s “progressivism,” would be over 150 million dead.

The author’s historical overview touches on the failed empires of Greece, Rome, Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Japan. And, he goes to great length in explaining the cost to citizens, in lives, wealth, and liberty, that results when government devolves from a federated republic, to a social democracy, to an imperialist power.

Eland’s two chapters, "Why Conservatives Should Be Against Empire," and "Why Liberals Should Be Against Empire," are in-depth analysis of the philosophical foundations of these disparate ideologies and the application of their principles to the question of empire. The author takes delight in tweaking the nose of the hypocritical silence emanating from President Clinton’s liberal supporters during the American incursions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, and the anti-empire conservatives who kept silent while President Bush II invaded Iraq.

But, contemporary American interventionism may be the result of “public choice theory,” in that “the government itself can develop interests separate from its citizens. The government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them.” Dr. Eland further explains, “Despite the risk of blowback attacks on Americans at home and abroad, the interests of the government, the foreign policy elite, and other pressure groups are furthered by an interventionist foreign policy to maintain the American empire.”

And, American interventionism is the direct result of our federal legislature’s abnegation of constitutional responsibilities, namely its obligation to vote on the question of war. The author covers in detail this failure and the resulting rise of the “imperial” presidency in some detail, beginning with President Truman’s Korean “police action.”

Eland writes, “Conservatives should be against an American empire, because war is the primary cause of big government, including government encroachment in non-security related areas.” And, he provides a statistic that is singularly telling, “The United States is already overextended, accounting for almost 40 percent of the world’s military spending but possessing only little more than 30 percent of global GDP.” In effect, the American government has made the American taxpayer responsible for the military protection of Europe, Japan, and much of the globe.

Dr. Eland argues that the American interventionist foreign policy requires an imperial presidency that has resulted in a distortion of republican principles and weakened individual liberties. The same policy also underscores the inherent weaknesses in the “two-party” system -- a political arrangement that has devolved into “one party,” at least in matters of foreign policy. America desperately needs a viable third, fourth, or even fifth party that will challenge the political power now held by the Remocrats and Depublicans. But, the truth is our people have become politically ignorant and lazy; it isn’t likely that the citizenry will return, any time soon, to republican principles.

Dr. Ivan Eland’s book, The Empire Has No Clothes, is an evocative and forceful argument for America to engage in a more restrained and farsighted foreign policy. We can either continue with an interventionist policy that has resulted in massive American casualties, the threat of “blowback,” punitive taxes, a decline of individual liberties, and the loss of the moral imperative or we can adhere to the doctrine of the founders and avoid foreign alliances and entanglements.

The Empire Has No Clothes is available on Amazon.com.

Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

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