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constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal govenrment in debt, break in upon private and public morality.” He went on:
    Taft’s prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions—and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, an intolerant “democratism” imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America’s domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the “garrison state,” a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.
    Richard Weaver, still another central figure in the history of conservatism and perhaps best known for his book
Ideas Have Consequences
, opposed the atomic bombing of Japan and spoke with contempt of Theodore Roosevelt, who would “strut and bluster and intimidate our weaker neighbors.” Weaver wrote an extraordinary essay on the immorality of total war in his book
Visions of Order
, arguing that “of the many things which cause us to feel that spirit indispensable to civilization has been weakened, none should arouse deeper alarm than total war.”
    The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet reminded his audience that war was revolutionary, not conservative. He likewise warned that socialist proposals have often, under wartime conditions, become the law of the land.
    These last three figures—Kirk, Weaver, and Nisbet—share something in common. One of the most useful and respected studies of American conservatism, George Nash’s book
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
, identifies these three men as the most important thinkers among what he calls traditionalist conservatives. That means the three most significant traditional conservative intellectuals in the postwar period were all wary of militarism to one degree or another. None were pacifists, naturally, but they all believed that war was something so materially and morally catastrophic that it genuinely had to be considered only a last resort. And since, as Randolph Bourne said, “war is the health of the state,” they also understood the undesirable domestic side effects of war, such as taxes, debt, lost liberties, centralization, and the emasculation of the Constitution.
    How does Israel, with which the United States has long enjoyed a special relationship, fit into this picture? I see no reason that our friendship with Israel cannot continue. I favor extending to Israel the same honest friendship that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers urged us to offer to all nations. But that also means no special privileges like foreign aid—a position I maintain vis-à-vis all other countries as well. That means I also favor discontinuing foreign aid to governments that are actual or potential enemies of Israel, which taken together receive much more American aid than Israel does. Giving aid to both sides has understandably made many average Israelis and American Jews conclude that the American government is hypocritically hedging its bets.
    I oppose all foreign aid on principle, for reasons I detail in a later chapter. Foreign aid is not only immoral, since it