Review of The Failure of America's Foreign Wars
reviewed by: Edward J. Bander

This libertarian treatise believes that every war we have engaged in from the War of 1812 to date was wrong in concept, against the constitution, and deprived the American people of their right to live in peace no matter what goes on elsewhere on the planet. It has nothing to say about our pillaging of the area from the American Indians of the civil war. Its list of combatants represents the right and include Doug Bandow, Richard M. Ebeling, Robert Higgs, Jacob G. Hornberger, Simon Jenkins, Ralph Raico, Sheldon Richman, Wesley Allen Riddle and Joseph Sobran (the author of Outing Shakespeare(1997) that attempts to prove that Edward de Vere wrote the plays, not Shakespeare).

Bu this book is not about war, but about FDR's socialism. A typical sentence is "With the NRA, AAA, SEC Social Security Administration, and all of the other new regulatory and redistributive agencies in the 1930's, Americans turned their backs on the fundamental God-given rights of life, liberty, property, and conscience, and unconditionally rendered these rights to Caesar to do with as he wished."(p. 297)

Typical of the thinking in this book is Mr. Ebeling's discussion of the Panama Canal. He is outraged that we turned over the Panama Canal to Panama instead of privatizing it (p. 302). Mr. Sobran is concerned that "the West has virtually ceased to think of itself as Christian." (p. 287)

The premise of this book is good. All wars represent failures in humans to reconcile their differences. To think that the United States is separate and apart from humanity is monstrous and no political theory is worth the air spent in mouthing it if it does not concern itself with the entire planet.