Comment & Debate
James Bovard. “The Democratic-Peace Fraud”. The Future of Freedom Foundation. 23 May 2008 – Some democratic-peace theorists sound as if the simple act of popular voting somehow makes government nonaggressive. And regardless of how much the government deceives people about the likely costs of a war, citizens will still demand peace. Randolph Bourne noted one reason that popular preferences could not rein in bellicose governments:
In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.