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

Wars were a tool of the political rulers and were fought with comparatively small armies of professional soldiers, mostly made up of mercenaries. The objective of warfare was to determine which dynasty should rule a country or a province. The greatest European wars of the 18th century were wars of royal succession, for example, the wars of the Spanish, Polish, Austrian, and finally the Bavarian successions. Ordinary people were more or less indifferent about the outcomes of these conflicts.
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It is different with the princes or ruling aristocracies. They can increase their power and their tax revenues by expanding the size of their realms. They can profit from conquest. They are bellicose, while the citizenry is peace loving.

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President Woodrow Wilson was fully convinced that what was needed to make the world safe for peace was to make it safe for democracy. During the First World War it was believed that if only the German royal house of the Hohenzollern and the privileged German landed aristocracy, the Junkers, could be removed from power, a durable peace could be achieved. What President Wilson did not see was that within a world of growing government omnipotence this would not be enough. In such a world of growing government power, there exist economic causes of war.


Ludwig von Mises
This is the major part of a lecture delivered in Orange County, California, in October 1944.

The basic cause of modern war is the international rivalries inseparable from capitalism and the capitalist class's domination of the world's resources. World War Two was no exception.

The particular background to this, the most destructive war ever, was the formation of the German-Italian-Japanese alliance in the 1930s and their concerted effort to expand at the expense of weaker neighbours and the older colonial powers, notably Britain, France and Holland. Italy and Germany had long before 1914 entered into the colonial scramble but they developed late and found all the best territories, strategic positions and trade routes already dominated by the 'older and fatter' bandits. The line-up before 1914 was, on the one side, the 'Triple Alliance' of Germany, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and arrayed against their expansionist ambitions the 'Triple Entente' of Britain, France and Russia.