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“Peace through strength” has long been a nebulous phrase in political rhetoric. While it has been marshalled by both political parties, it has been used by Republican hawks and their supporters to assail liberal Democrats as both reckless and feckless, too quick to commit troops to war and too weak to lead them to victory. While users of the phrase have presented it as a departure from liberal interventionism, it has preserved the core assumptions of a fundamentally liberal postwar order. Advocates of “peace through strength” have used it to advocate for seemingly every foreign policy position, from containment to rollback, prosecuting wars, and pursuing diplomacy. Despite its malleability, it has, however, consistently served as a rhetorical bait and switch, entrenching the very liberal world order that conservative hawks claim to oppose.

Despite the phrase’s eventual popularity with conservative hawks, it was initially used to promote an explicitly liberal internationalist vision of foreign policy. This was true of both foreign policy professionals and politicians, who adopted the slogan after World War II to signal a vague realpolitik. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his cabinet often used alternative wordings rather than the exact phrase, they consistently tied the idea of peace to the projection of strength—thereby indicating continuity with the preceding Truman administration and the foreign policy status quo.

Coming off the height of the Cold War, many still feared the specter of global Soviet domination, yet were equally wary of the human cost a direct war with the USSR would bring. Indeed, a 1952 Pennsylvania newspaper poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans preferred “peace through strength” when stacked against “go to war against Russia” and reaching a “settlement with concessions.”  Yet, much like in subsequent periods, this slogan was not merely a tool for courting public opinion, but also a political bait-and-switch. It provided both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations with indirect justification for incorporating politically unpopular policies, such as foreign aid and diplomatic commitments, into what appeared to be a hard-nosed realist foreign policy strategy.

However, such a principle was not in line with the Cold War strategy Americans preferred. Although many Americans indeed supported a form of measured deterrence against a Soviet attack on the United States, the Korean War left the American public war-weary and skeptical of protracted containment. Underlining this point was that the very same newspaper poll, which cited support for “peace through strength,” noted that this support shrank by over half when the prospect of "fighting small wars such as Korea” was put on the table. While many Americans interpreted the “strength” part of the phrase to refer to defensive military buildup, the Eisenhower administration was more open to maintaining America’s overseas commitments.

“Peace through strength” during the Truman and Eisenhower years was also frequently employed in ways that echoed the rhetoric of liberal internationalism. Instead of emphasizing domestic security, the concept was frequently paired with moralistic claims about America’s “responsibility for world leadership” and its duty to “achieve global peace for all peoples”—commitments that, in practice, could demand military intervention even when such action conflicted with the nation’s own security interests. So, while Americans sought a limited, security-focused deterrence interpretation of “peace through strength”, the open questions of “peace for whom” and “what kind of strength” created space for foreign policy that went against public sentiment.

This bipartisanship, however, was not politically neutral. Instead, it was a political maneuver to repackage unpopular liberal internationalist policies as a pragmatic middle ground between unrestrained jingoism and unilateral capitulation. This supposed “balance” was reflected in the rhetoric of numerous administration officials, most clearly in the 1957 National Security Council report, which declared that U.S. anti-communist strategy should focus on “deterring further Communist aggression” while “preventing the occurrence of total war so far as compatible with U.S. security.” The logic was simple: that supporting U.S. allies, both economically and militarily, was not only a moral imperative but a manifestation of American strength that would deter the Soviets.

From these early Cold War roots, politicians on both sides of the aisle continued to employ the phrase sparingly, using it more as a descriptive label for the post-World War II liberal internationalist consensus than as a policy platform. This changed, however, during the 1964 election. In it, Barry Goldwater made “peace through strength” a core tenet of his presidential campaign. Goldwater argued, “Peace in Asia depends on our strength, and on our purpose to use that strength to achieve peace. Nowhere in the world today is there a clearer road to ‘peace through strength’ than in Viet Nam.” For the senator from Arizona, the phrase did not mean mere containment, but rather decisive military victory.

While Goldwater adopted the phrase, the liberal internationalist incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, criticized it, stating, “The policy of the United States is not simply ‘peace through strength’, but peace through positive, persistent, active effort.” The difference went beyond semantics: While Johnson justified U.S. involvement in Vietnam on idealistic grounds of freedom and self-determination, Goldwater framed the war effort in realist terms. This was not a blanket hawkishness, but a strategic realignment—one that moved American foreign policy away from the ideological pursuits of foreign assistance and open-ended international commitments toward the direct pursuit of confronting the USSR, which he believed was America’s predominant strategic interest.

Though Goldwater never got the chance to implement his foreign policy, his widespread use of the phrase tied it to both realism and the Republican Party, particularly among young Republicans who entered politics in the aftermath of Vietnam. At a time when many Republicans tried to exploit a new divide between the dovish “McGovern wing” of the Democratic Party and Johnson’s liberal interventionism, this presented the Republicans with a new opportunity. Beginning with Gerald Ford and especially Ronald Reagan, “peace through strength” emerged as a way to signal realism as a third path between these two unpopular alternatives.

However, both Ford and Reagan’s implementation of the phrase was much closer to its liberal internationalist origins than Goldwater’s realism. Whereas Goldwater’s “peace through strength” was limited and focused both fiscally and militarily, Ford and Reagan’s version was significantly less realist in nature. While their emphasis on American exceptionalism over humanitarian burden might have provided an  appearance of realism, these goals were framed as idealistic ends in themselves rather than as means to an end. They reflected a commitment to securing democracy abroad even when such efforts offered no direct, material benefit to American security.

This approach took shape in the political climate that followed the Vietnam War. As Americans grew to view the war unfavorably, widespread anti-military sentiment drove restrictions on presidential powers and a decline in defense spending. Yet Ford, under pressure from conservative hawks who viewed him as soft on foreign policy, submitted the two largest peacetime defense budgets in U.S. history in 1976. Later that year, in his primary campaign against Ronald Reagan, he repeatedly touted this decision as a “peace through strength” policy. He echoed the sentiment in his 1977 State of the Union, declaring, “We can remain first in peace only if we are never second in defense.”

However, it was Reagan who cemented the phrase’s place in the Republican foreign policy zeitgeist and completed its transformation from a syncretic realist position into a decidedly idealistic one. His commitment to “peace through strength” often appeared alongside policy goals such as sustained proxy warfare in Nicaragua, global anti-terrorism campaigns, and an increased peacetime military budget. At the same time, he framed these policies in the same idealistic terms as many of the early Cold War internationalists—this time with an American exceptionalist spin. In a 1980 campaign speech, he paired his pledge to achieve “peace through strength” with a vow: “We have no intention of compromising our principles, our beliefs or our freedom.” He similarly anchored his foreign policy in religious terms, declaring, “Throughout Scripture, we see reference to peace-makers—those who…take the material of this imperfect world and, with hard work and God’s help, fashion from that material peace for the world.” In doing so, Reagan transformed “peace through strength” from a strategic maxim into a moral crusade.

This trend continued into the 1990s, with a conservative movement that found itself out of power and grappling to redefine its foreign policy for a post-Cold War world. While paleoconservative stalwarts such as Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to return to a more restrained foreign policy, the institutions of the conservative movement instead advocated for greater American assertiveness in the “unipolar moment” and did so through the rhetoric of “peace through strength.” Through the Clinton years, these conservative hawks attacked the White House for insufficient defense spending while criticizing humanitarian interventionism and the White House’s alleged indecisiveness vis-à-vis China, Iran, and North Korea. They also sought to reimagine their own history, presenting conservatism as the true progenitor of the American century. 

A prime example of these intellectual moves was a paper entitled “Geo-conservatism” by the Heritage Foundation scholar Kim R. Holmes. Holmes characterized the Clinton administration’s foreign policy as one of “failed liberalism.” Instead, Holmes advocated for a “strategy of peace through strength” via “toughminded realism” that put American interests at the core of American geostrategy. Central to Holmes’s critique was to highlight what he saw as the futility of liberal intervention. Characterizing liberal foreign policy thinkers as “strategic doves and humanitarian hawks,” Holmes argued that liberal interventions from Vietnam through Bosnia were “fruitless exercises” that wasted American resources to pursue fanciful dreams of global democracy promotion.

Yet, this is where Holmes’s critiques of the liberal world order would end. Rather than seeing these dubious interventions as the inevitable fruit of the postwar order, Holmes argued they were deviations from a tough-nosed conservative foreign policy that had learned the lessons of appeasement and won the Cold War. To make his case, Holmes rebranded President Harry Truman as a conservative and the lessons of “appeasement” as central assumptions of a conservative worldview. In his telling, liberal foreign policy since the 1960s was designed to subordinate American power to international institutions, vacillating “between appeasement and reckless confrontation.”

Holmes’s arguments, through their narrative framing and reimagining of conservative political history, conserved rather than challenged the core assumptions of the postwar liberal order. While lambasting said order, Holmes advocated for its preservation under the auspices of “peace through strength”. While he criticized past liberal presidents for their interventionism, he nevertheless advocated for a geostrategic posture aimed at maintaining American hegemony in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.

Despite his hard-nosed posture and “peace through strength” label, Holmes embraced the core assumptions of the postwar order. To pursue regional goals and global leadership, Holmes stressed that conservatives understood “the need for strong and reliable allies who share our basic values.” Strength for Holmes was not merely America going it alone, but instead required it to assert itself as a first among equals. He similarly equivocated on the liberal goals of the postwar order by arguing that conservatives, not liberals, were more equipped to promote democracy and human rights abroad by taking a “longer view.” This supposedly conservative view embraced “the growth of institutions and structures in foreign countries that could alleviate suffering.” Rather than challenge the liberal presumption that it was America’s duty to promote democracy abroad, Holmes asserted that only conservatives could do so effectively, and apparently, without military commitment. Finally, despite critiquing liberal interventionism, Holmes grants that there might be times when a conservative foreign policy could “envision using force in a limited way for purely humanitarian reasons.”

On the issues of alliances and the promotion of human rights abroad, or in casting the liberal origins of the Cold War state as conservative, Holmes’s “peace through strength” served as little more than a conservative tautology of liberal internationalism.

The Trump era has once again seen the return of this dynamic, with Republican leaders promising radical change while conserving a postwar liberal foreign policy under the auspices of “peace through strength.” While candidate Trump signaled significant departures from Washington’s orthodoxy—particularly on America’s security relationship with Europe and direct involvement in protracted wars in the Middle East—on other issue areas, President Trump has shown little daylight between himself and the foreign policy establishment he ran against.

As to the former, the president at times has made earnest efforts to secure a ceasefire in the Russia–Ukraine war and renegotiate America’s military footprint in Europe. However, such efforts remain unrealized, often slowed by bureaucratic inertia, divisions within the administration, and inconsistencies within the president himself. On the other side of the ledger, the president remains committed to the status quo vis-à-vis U.S.–Israeli relations and, while sometimes criticizing Israeli conduct in Gaza and Iran, remains committed to keeping the flow of weapons and aid going to “America’s greatest ally.” As a testament to the malleability of the phrase, the Trump White House has categorized both attempts at peace in Europe and the continuation of war in the Middle East as elements of its “peace through strength” foreign policy.                    

For a candidate who ran on the rhetoric of America First, the president’s policies still conceive of the United States as a global leader. In summarizing its “peace through strength” record in 2018, the White House quoted the president as saying, “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.” During the second Trump term, the president has upheld this vision for America in the world. Therefore, the White House continues to walk a fine conceptual line between a promise to “put the American people first” while also “making good on his commitment to restore safety and security around the world.” Lost in the bifurcated rhetoric is the acknowledgement that those goals are inherently at odds with each other.

Ensuring such universalist goals comes with a steep price tag—U.S. defense budgets will likely hit the trillion-dollars-a-year mark for the foreseeable future. The president is demonstrating the same tendency as his Republican forebearers, espousing a need for retrenchment, particularly on “endless wars,” while embracing the security architecture and core precepts that brought them about. Trump risks conserving the very foreign policy he ran against.    

On the edges of the Trump White House, neoconservative holdouts and other Republican hawks continue to champion interventionist orthodoxy by cloaking it in the rhetoric of “peace through strength”. The most apparent departure between these thinkers and the White House is on the issue of Ukraine. The Hudson Institute, a hawkish conservative think tank, argues that to reestablish “peace through strength” in Europe, the Trump White House ought to double down on the full suite of policies favored by Trump’s Democratic predecessor. Among those repackaged policy proposals are further sanctions, increasing lethal aid to Ukraine, greenlighting Ukrainian strikes in Russia, and deepening its security ties with Europe. If “peace through strength” can mean seeking to end a war through negotiation or its continuation through lethal aid, then the phrase has little intrinsic meaning at all.    

Over the last seven decades, “peace through strength” has proven less a coherent doctrine than a vessel into which successive Republican leaders pour their own priorities while preserving the same global posture and geopolitical assumptions as their Democratic predecessors. While feigning change, postwar conservative Republicans have used the label to justify retrenchment and expansion, containment and rollback, war and peace. Unless its users confront the elasticity and define its ends with clarity, the next generation of Americans will inherit the same foreign policy under a fresh coat of old paint—and call it something new.