Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Foreign Policy & News "Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention"

War can be seen as a growth of economic competition in a competitive international system. In this view wars begin as a pursuit of markets for natural resources and for wealth. While this theory has been applied to many conflicts, such counter arguments become less valid as the increasing mobility of capital and information level the distributions of wealth worldwide, or when considering that it is relative, not absolute, wealth differences that may fuel wars. There are those on the extreme right of the political spectrum who provide support, fascists in particular, by asserting a natural right of a strong nation to whatever the weak cannot hold by force.[99][100] Some centrist, capitalist, world leaders, including Presidents of the United States and US Generals, expressed support for an economic view of war.

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? – Woodrow Wilson, September 11, 1919, St. Louis.[101]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. – Major General Smedley Butler (simultaneously the highest ranking and most decorated United States Marine (including two Medals of Honor) and Republican Party primary candidate for the United States Senate) 1935.[102]

For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based. – C. Wright Mills, Causes of World War 3, 1960.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. – Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961.