Today, antiwar sentiment is apparent on both sides of the political divide. Since George W. Bush’s Iraq War debacle, every successful U.S. president has run on an antiwar platform. Obama did it in 2008, noting that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he had opposed the Iraq War. Trump ran as the antiwar candidate in 2016 and 2024, and Biden in 2020 said that he would work to end the so-called “forever war.” Yet, they all failed, in various ways, to live up to their campaign promises. Indeed, it took Trump just a few months to break his 2024 antiwar pledge by bombing Iran in June 2025. Trump’s neoconservative critics, who generally despise him, lauded this decision.
If being antiwar is so popular among the American people, why can’t presidents do what is popular and avoid war? Moreover, if opposing the use of violence abroad has so much bipartisan support, why is there so much violence within the United States? William James had a very interesting answer to these questions. He believed that war was, in a sense, part of our DNA, or as he put it: “our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.” James was quick to add that he was an “antimilitarist,” that he rejected a “fatalistic view of the war-function” as pure “nonsense,” and that he ultimately believed “in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some of sort of socialist equilibrium.” James believed that the kind of virtues that a wartime society produces could be redirected toward peaceful ends.
But this could be achieved only if states preserved what he called the “old elements of army discipline.” Hence James’s notion that there needed to be a moral equivalent of war to galvanize that discipline. The achievement of a “socialist equilibrium” would require intrepidity, surrender of private interest, and obedience to command. James argued that if those who opposed war did not manage to find an ethical substitute for war’s disciplinary function, they would fail to achieve their goal of a peaceful society. In short, James thought that the pacifists and antiwar advocates of his times had the right ideals but were often too lazy and undisciplined to achieve them. James’s essay is still relevant because it raises a question typically passed over by the many Americans who say they want the country to end its forever wars. What kind of people do we have to become in order to achieve peaceful cities, societies, and states?