221 CHRONICLESnrespect. Unlike the liberals, they at least know what they arendoing.nLenin claimed that it is the “men with ideas” who arendangerous to society. But without Trotsky’s creahon of thenRed Army and its victory in the Russian civil war, thenBolsheviks might have found in the end that their ideasnwere dangerous mainly to themselves rather than to thenworld at large. Before Mao said “power comes from thenbarrel of a gun,” Lenin and Trotsky (and Stalin) had shownnit to be true. Communism has spread entirely by militarynmeans and has never been stopped or overthrown by othernthan military means.nBut Communism is not the only example of a system ofnbelief that has relied on force. It took only 50 years for thenMohammedan Arabs to conquer an empire stretching fromnNorth Africa to India in the 7th century; an empire thatnestablished Islam as a major religion still at the center ofnworld events 1,300 years later. Islam might have spreadnfurther had not its armies lost to Leo III at Constantinoplenin 718 and to Charles “The Hammer” at Poitiers in 732; ornif Malta had not withstood the siege of 1565 or Vienna thensiege of 1683. When Constantinople did finally fall to thenTurks in 1453, the Christian empire of Byzantium fellnunder the Moslem yoke.nWhile there have been exceptions, in general ideas havenconsequences only if those who hold them have (or canngain) sufficient power to impose them on society. Individualsnmay be converted by debate or meditation, but thenmasses are won from the top down by the exercise ofnauthority and the establishment of sustaining institutions.nThus the Roman Empire was Christianized by Constantinenafter he read a message in the sky before the battle of thenMulvian Bridge. The Protestant cause survived because thensword-arm of the Counter-Reformation, the HapsburgnEmpire, proved unable to subdue Europe under Charles Vnor his successors. In our own day, Nazism was driven fromnEurope not by persuasion or election, but by conquest. Butn”democratic capitalism” took its place only where thenarmies employed by democratic capitalist states were able tonadvance.nTo the modern liberal, this view of the world is toonpainful to face. Indeed, this is a view against which thenliberal must contest to preserve his own values. As ArthurnEkireh warned the American Historical Society in 1957,n”military history involves the danger that its very bulk . . .nmay result in our literature as well as our society becomingnfurther militarized.”nThis statement is typical of the liberal desire to discussnthe military only as a domestic interest group, thus implicitlynrejecting the idea that the military still performs annecessary function as a fighting force. This is reminiscent ofnRichard Cobden’s claim, made nearly a century and a halfnago, that the military and naval forces of the British Empirennndid nothing more than provide “outdoor relief for thenaristocracy.”nThe basis for this view is not objective scholarship butnmoral principle. In his recent study of Liberalism andnNaval Strategy, Bernard Semmel has traced the origin ofnthis doctrine to Immanuel Kant, who died the year Cobdennwas born. Kant espoused all the liberal positions onninternational relations: disarmament, nonintervention,nanti-imperialism, free trade, international law, and a worldnfederation. These ideas were further spread by the disseminationnand secularization of the doctrines of Dissent.nDissenters were convinced that God—and secularnRadicals that historical progress—intended anmillennial reign of peace, and that this new era wasnat hand. To prepare for war displayed annunredeemed nature. . . . They stood for a truenChristian ethic. For them “strategy,” any plan fornexerting or projecting military or naval force wasnipso facto wrong.nSemmel fears for the future because “liberals appear asnunwilling as ever to confront questions involving power andnstrategy.” But if to study war is to perpetuate it, does thisnmean that if war is ignored it will go away? Or will it merelyncome as a surprise? Judging by recent experience, Americannever ceases to be surprised.nHistory for the liberal simply leads him to agree withnOtto Hintze that “power politics, mercantilism and militarismnare all related” without sufficient consideration givennto the context in which Hintze was speaking. That “in anperiod of permanent political tension . . . the internationalnsystem as well as the absolutist state and the standing army”nwere created “in order that single states could preserve theirnindependence and thus the basis of all prosperity andnculture.” Only where geography provided insular securityn(England and later the U.S.) could institutions of a freernkind develop. And then this “surplus” security was used toncreate global empires.nWhile it is easy to see how this liberal outlook has beenncarried over from Kant and Cobden to today’s liberal-left innthe United States, it should be noted that conservatives havennot been completely immune from its harmful effects. Atnthe operational level, conservatives are nationalists andnanti-Communists, but these positions spring from the factnthat at a deeper level conservatives are realists. Respect forntradition and the “lessons of history” in regard to thenenduring characteristics of human nature have led them tona healthy skepticism towards ideologies based on abstractionnand sentimentality. But over the last half-century, conservatismnhas been weakened by the indiscriminate incorporationnof classical liberal economic theories which cannot bencompletely severed from the larger liberal world view fromnwhich they developed. More recently, these libertariannideas have been strengthened by some elements among then”neoconservatives” who have carried various liberal notionsninto the conservative camp from another direction. Thus antension has developed within the right. Conservatives knownthat the world is a dangerous place with myriad threats tonthe nation’s security and interests, but at the same time theynare inhibited by liberal influences from taking those stepsnnecessary to overcome the challenges that confront then