Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works

Cable news keeps informing the country that "peace through strength" was dreamed up in 1980 by an actor with a nice head of hair. It is a wonderful line, and it makes a wonderful applause line, and it is also roughly sixteen centuries old. The people who sneer at it as a bumper sticker have never once explained what they would put on the bumper instead. "Peace through a strongly worded letter" does not fit on the bumper, and it has never fit anywhere else either.

Here is the claim of this post, plainly. The idea behind the phrase belongs to no party and no decade. Rome stated it, the first President put it in a message to Congress, a Republican President turned it into a fleet, and the twentieth century proved it in the most expensive way possible: every time America disarmed and hoped, somebody took the hope as an invitation. Then Ronald Reagan gave the idea a slogan and a budget, and it worked again. Let's walk through the record, and then I'll give the other side's best argument its full hearing, because it deserves one.

An old idea with a Roman address

The oldest version most people can trace is from a Roman writer named Vegetius, who wrote a handbook on military affairs, De Re Militari, in the late fourth or early fifth century. The line usually quoted from him, in English, runs: let him who desires peace prepare for war. The Latin version people repeat at dinner parties, si vis pacem, para bellum, is a later compression of his sentence, but the sense is his.

Notice what Vegetius is not saying. He is not saying go looking for a fight. He is saying that the state which is ready to fight is the state that is least often forced to. That is a claim about human behavior, and it is not a very complicated one. Burglars check which houses have a dog. Nobody has ever needed a Ph.D. to understand it, which is probably why so many people with Ph.D.s have trouble with it.

Washington tells Congress to be ready

The Americans who founded this country did not need Rome to tell them. They had just won a war against the strongest military power on earth with a ragged army, a French alliance and a great deal of luck, and they had no illusions about what had made it so hard. In January 1790, in his first annual message to Congress, President George Washington said that to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. That is not me paraphrasing a slogan onto him. It is the sentence, and it is worth looking up in the text of the message, which is easy to find.

He followed it with practical advice: a uniform, well-organized militia, and the means to supply arms and ammunition at home rather than depending on foreign suppliers. The first President's idea of strength was not a standing empire. It was the ability to say no and be believed. Keep that in mind, because the "strength" conservatives are defending in this post is not conquest. It is credibility.

Roosevelt sends the fleet around the world

Fast forward to a President who understood theatre. Theodore Roosevelt loved to tell people that the way to deal with the world was to speak softly and carry a big stick, a line he said he was borrowing from a proverb, and he delivered it in a speech in 1901. But a stick that no one has seen is a rumor. So in December 1907 he sent sixteen battleships out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, painted white for peacetime, on a voyage around the globe that lasted until the fleet steamed home on February 22, 1909.

The Great White Fleet had an audience in mind. Tensions with Japan had risen after the San Francisco school crisis of 1906, and Roosevelt wanted Tokyo and every other capital to see that the American Navy could cross an ocean, coal itself, and arrive in good order. The fleet visited ports across Latin America, the Pacific, Asia and the Mediterranean, and it was received in Japan with courtesy. No shots were fired. That is the point. A show of force that never has to be used is the best kind of force there is, and you cannot get it on the cheap. You have to build the ships first, and the voters have to be talked into paying for them, which in 1907 was a bigger fight than the cruise itself.

The interwar experiment

Now the other half of the lab. After the First World War, the world tried a different theory, and it was a charming one. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and 1922 produced a treaty limiting battleship tonnage among the great naval powers, and it set the famous ratio of five for Britain, five for the United States and three for Japan. Later came the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which a long list of nations solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. It was signed with great ceremony and enforced by nothing at all, which is the polite way of saying that it was a very large greeting card.

In 1931 Japan took Manchuria. The response was a diplomatic note. In the mid-1930s Congress passed neutrality laws designed to keep America out of the next war by pretending it was not coming. Germany rearmed, and the democracies debated whether that was impolite. When Hitler's armies crossed into Poland in September 1939, the American military was not remotely prepared for what followed, and it took Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to turn that unpreparedness into a national crash program.

Let me be careful and fair here. America did not cause the Second World War by being weak. Hitler, Mussolini and the militarists in Tokyo caused it. But weakness lowered the price of aggression, and when you lower the price of something, you get more of it. The aggressors looked at the democracies, counted the divisions, and drew a conclusion. That is the lesson Vegetius would have recognized.

Korea and the hollowed-out force

After 1945, America did what it always does and demobilized at breathtaking speed. Within a few years the force that had won a war across two oceans had been cut down, and by the end of the 1940s the defense budgets were tight. In January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech at the National Press Club describing the American defense perimeter in the Pacific, and South Korea was left out of the line he drew. Critics have argued about how much that mattered, and honest historians disagree on whether it was a green light or just an accurate description of American policy. What is not in dispute is the sequence. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded the South.

The first American ground troops to meet the enemy in Korea, a small task force sent from Japan in early July 1950 and remembered as Task Force Smith, found out how thin the cuts had made the Army. Their antitank weapons, the old bazookas, could not stop the Soviet-built T-34 tanks the North Koreans drove down the road. Soldiers who had been trained for occupation duty, not for war, were asked to stop a mechanized army. The cost of the lesson was paid in blood and in a war that lasted three years. The National Security Council paper known as NSC-68, written in the spring of 1950, had already argued for a major buildup. It took a war to get it funded.

That is the pattern. Disarm, hope, get surprised, rebuild at ten times the price, and then claim you were against the surprise all along.

Reagan gives the idea a budget

When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, "peace through strength" was his organizing idea about defense. Be fair about the setup: the last Carter budgets had already begun to increase defense spending after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. But Reagan took the idea much further. He pushed for the B-1B bomber, for modernizing the missiles, for a Navy buildup that included Secretary John Lehman's goal of a 600-ship fleet, and in March 1983 for missile defense, which we cover in The Star Wars Joke That Helped Bring the Soviets to the Table.

The critics said it would bankrupt us and lead to war. Neither happened. The Soviets came to the table, and in December 1987 Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty eliminating a whole class of missiles, something no arms control agreement had managed before. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. The test of a strategy is what it achieves, and by that test the strategy that was mocked as reckless did what the strategy of patient accommodation had failed to do for a generation. For the fuller story, read Seven Myths About Reagan, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War, which tests the claims on both sides.

The best objection: doesn't strength provoke war?

Here is the strongest version of the other side's argument, stated in terms it would accept. Arms build-ups create what political scientists call a security dilemma. When one country strengthens itself for defense, its neighbors cannot tell defense from offense, so they build up too, and the spiral ends in a crash. The classic example is Europe before 1914, when Britain and Germany raced to build battleships and the great powers locked themselves into armies and mobilization schedules. If you pile up weapons, someone will eventually use them.

It is a serious argument, and here is the answer, in four points.

1. The 1914 spiral is real, but it is a different thing from what the phrase describes. Peace through strength is about deterrence: making an attack a bad bet. The alliance rigidity of 1914 was a system with hair-trigger timetables, where each side thought the other would blink. A deterrent posture built to be seen and understood, with clear lines and a credible response, is the opposite of that.
2. Aggressors pick weak targets. Poland in 1939, South Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990 were not chosen because they were strong. The pattern of the last century is that attackers attack where the cost is low. We have never seen a nuclear-armed United States directly invaded by a major power. That is not proof by itself, but it is a consistent record, and the other side has to explain it.
3. Weakness has its own spiral. If the aggressor reads hesitation as permission, the democracies end up forced to respond later, at a higher price, with fewer options. That is the story of the 1930s.
4. The honest caveat belongs to the right, too. Strength costs money, and money can be wasted. A conservative who says "peace through strength" and then waves through every contract without asking what it buys is not doing what Vegetius advised. Strength means the right ships, the right munitions, the right training and a logistics chain that works, not the largest number on a budget chart. For how to read those numbers, see A Worksheet for Reading Any Defense Budget Number Without Being Fooled.

None of this means force is always the answer. Reagan himself used it sparingly: the Grenada operation of 1983 was short, and the decision to withdraw from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing of October 1983 was a hard one. Strength includes judgment about when not to fight. It also includes the habit of making your intentions clear, a point we develop in Why Deterrence Is a Promise You Have to Be Willing to Keep.

What the record asks of you

Three habits of mind follow from the history, and they fit on a napkin.

First, look at the sequence, not the slogan. In nearly every case in this post, the cut came first, the crisis came second and the rebuild came third. Whoever tells you that spending on readiness is "provoking" someone should be asked to explain which crisis was prevented by the cuts.

Second, ask what is being deterred, and who has to believe it. The Great White Fleet had an audience. A missile defense program had an audience. A treaty with no enforcement has no audience, only a signing ceremony.

Third, ask what the money actually bought. A strong military is a lot like a strong roof. You do not notice it on a sunny day, and you pay for it in advance, and the people who sell you a cheaper one are betting on the weather. The cost is real, but so is the other cost, the one that arrives with a telegram.

If you want the larger intra-party debate on how muscular a Republican foreign policy should be, that argument is older than Reagan too, and Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World tells it well. And for the nuts and bolts of what readiness looks like, see Seven Tests of Whether the Military Is Really Ready for a Fight.

The bottom line

• The slogan is Reagan's, but the principle is Vegetius's, Washington's and Theodore Roosevelt's. It is a conservative idea because it starts from how people actually behave.
• Every major American disarmament binge in the twentieth century, from the interwar treaties to the cuts before Korea, was followed by a crisis that cost more than the savings.
• Strength is about credibility and judgment, not appetite. It means ready forces, clear commitments and a President willing to say no and be believed.
• Hold your own side to it. Demand that the money buy real capability, not contracts, and ask your representatives what the readiness numbers are before you ask what the budget total is.
• When someone tells you the way to peace is to show less resolve, ask them to name the war that approach prevented. Then wait for the answer. It will be a long wait.