Since we are still apparently stuck in the middle of Trump's illegal, futile, and endless war on Iran, I turned to Jonathan Swift's 1711 anti-war tract, The Conduct of the Allies, in the hope that it might have some wisdom to teach our present generation.
Alas, I found the essay far less ideologically congenial than I had hoped. Swift's pamphlet argues in favor of a treaty over the continuance of war, but it is far from a pacifist tract. Indeed, Swift offers essentially no humanitarian arguments against war. Instead, his arguments rest almost entirely on appeals to gut-level selfishness and the pocket-book. (And I remind you what Mencius had to say about that.)
Indeed, Swift could be described in modern terms as offering a form of isolationism as a foreign policy—what we might call "Britain First."
In this sense, his pamphlet made me think not so much of the arguments that left-wing anti-imperialists might make against the Iran war, so much as the arguments that right-wing MAGA people routinely make against our far more limited and indirect involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Swift was angry above all that Britain appeared to be spending so much "blood and treasure" on a cause that primarily affected other people.
To be sure, he concedes that "a Commonwealth may lie in danger to be over-run by a powerful Neighbour, which, in time, may produce very bad Consequences upon [our] Trade and Liberty." And in such circumstances, "Tis therefore necessary, as well as prudent, to lend them Assistance, and help them to win a strong secure Frontier."
Arguably, this is all the U.S. government has been doing in Ukraine since the start of Putin's invasion. It has risked no "boots on the ground," but has limited itself to supplying money and weapons to the Ukrainian defenders.
And indeed, this is all I think we should be doing—I'd be the first to oppose any commitment of American soldiers to the conflict, which would be perilously escalatory.
"[B]ut," Swift goes on, "as [the ally being invaded] must in course be the first and greatest Sufferer, so, in Justice, they ought to bear the greatest Weight. [... And] if an Ally, who is not so immediately concerned in the good or ill Fortune of the War, be so generous, as to contribute more than the Principal Party [...] he ought at least to have his Share in what is conquered from the Enemy[.]"
This is the point at which Swift starts to sound a great deal like Trump and J.D. Vance circa spring 2025. Trump was constantly asking, of the policy of aiding Ukraine: "What's in it for us?" He wanted to make sure that, if the U.S. continued to help our allies, he would have permission somehow to harvest it all back (and then some!) through claims on Ukraine's mineral rights.
This is what led to the bizarre and appalling spectacle of the U.S. president seemingly trying to extort wartime reparations from the victims of Putin's invasion, rather than the perpetrator.
But Swift has more in the same Trumpish vein: "Or, if his Romantic Disposition transports him so far, as to expect little or nothing of [aiding an ally in distress], he might however hope, that the Principals would make it up in Dignity and Respect; and he would surely think it monstrous to find them intermedling in his Domestick Affairs, prescribing what Servants he should keep or dismiss," etc.
This now sounds like J.D. Vance at that notorious Oval Office meeting in the first year of Trump's second term—when he self-righteously castigated the Ukrainians for not groveling sufficiently. "You should be grateful," he kept telling Zelensky. "You ought to say thank you!"
"No nation was ever so long or so scandalously [...] treated with so much Insolence, Injustice and Ingratitude by its foreign Friends," Swift rails.
No fair-minded person could possibly look at Ukraine's conduct and say that it fits anything like this description. I'm not saying it does. I'm merely saying that this perfectly matches the J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson alternative reality version of Ukraine's behavior, as they see it.
"[W]hat Opinion Foreigners have of our Easiness," Swift sneers, "and how much they reckon themselves Masters of our Mony, whenever they think fit to call for it"...
This, in substance, is the same charge the MAGA isolationist wing—and Trump himself—are always bringing against our NATO allies—namely, that they expect us to do everything for them and foot the bill without repaying the favor.
Never mind that they would be the first to fall in an attack on the alliance, and that their security means our own defense against external threats. That is mere "globalism."
"If, after all our Success, we have not made use of it," opines Swift, "which in Reason we ought to have done: If we have made weak and foolish Bargains with our Allies [...] and allowed them to treat us with Insolence and Contempt, at the very Instant when We were gaining Towns, and Provinces for them, and without any Prospect of Interest for ourselves, [...] If all this, I say, be our Case, it is a very obvious Question to ask, by what Motives, or what Management, we are thus become the Dupes [...] of Europe?"
Well, that just sounds like it could be a Truth Social post—and I don't just mean because of Trump's own weird preference for the eighteenth century–style capitalization of nouns. Trump is always going on about how we made a "bad deal" with Europe and they're playing us for suckers; and Hegseth echoes many of the same tropes every time he addresses (dresses down?) our allies.
In contrast to a policy of internationalism, which shows some sense of responsibility to one's allies and treaty commitments, Swift applauds the days when "our Victories were then of some Use as well as Glory; for we were so prudent to Fight, and so happy to Conquer, only for our selves."
Of the war with France in his day, by contrast, Swift wrote: "when all this brings no real solid Advantage to us, when it hath no other End than to enlarge the Territories of the Dutch [...] I conclude, however it comes about, that Things are not as they should be; and that surely our Forces and Money might be better employed [...] working out some Benefit to our selves."
Here you see what I mean about Swift being no more a pacifist than Trump is—but rather someone who shares Trump's transactional and zero-sum view of the world that often (but not always) leads to an "isolationist" policy outcome.
Writing in 2026, I can't help but see Swift's references to the embattled Dutch republics in the light of Ukraine facing annihilation at the hands of a bullying neighbor and pleading for our aid. Likewise, I tend to cast Russia here in the role of absolutist France.
Likewise, writing about Swift in the '40s, George Orwell couldn't help but see Swift's isolationism and "Little Englandism" as a distant echo of the appeasement policies that gave the world the cowardly betrayal at Munich, as well as the antiwar intellectuals he was always sparring with in the early '40s, whom he saw (not unreasonably) as undermining the effort to defeat Hitler.
Orwell does not come out and say as much, but it's obvious that this is what he has in mind when he treats Swift's attitude to "the war with France, which" Orwell reminds us, "—however bad the motives of the Allies may have been—did save Europe from being tyrannized over by a single reactionary power."
He goes on to add that Swift did not deserve the label of Jacobite with which he was smeared (although he was uncomfortably close to many people who actually did conspire in favor of the Pretender). "Nevertheless there is a tinge of quislingism in his attitude," Orwell concludes, and his treatment of the Dutch is "wanton," in Orwell's phrase.
I have to side with Orwell here. Defending the Dutch Republics from being swallowed up by an absolutist superstate that could well have exterminated them seems like an admirable cause, even at the expense of government funds that Swift denounces at such length.
Today's zero-sum isolationists, of course, might ask, in Swiftian fashion, what's in it for the United States to help Ukraine or Taiwan resist incorporation into the mammoth authoritarian states on their borders. Indeed, they are constantly asking this question. And to them we can only reply with the question the former Australian prime minister recently posed on the Ezra Klein show:
If you guys still see yourselves as the light on the hill, are you indifferent to places which have, of their own volition, evolved into democracies and to open societies and open economies around the world, like the 23 million people in Taiwan? And if you’re indifferent to that, what does it say about your indifference to freedom worldwide?
Isolationists and "America Firsters" and MAGA-heads today might indeed say: Yes, we are indifferent; and proudly so.
"What is it to Us that Bouchain is taken, about which the Warlike Politicians of the Coffe-House make such a Clutter?" Jonathan Swift wanted to know. J.D. Vance has said similar things about Ukraine's eastern provinces. As he notoriously put it in a 2022 interview: "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other."
To this we reply, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti: the "refusal of aid between nations" portends catastrophe.
By this we know
That the earth falls asunder, being old.
But suppose we shift our gaze from Ukraine for a second to Trump's disastrous attack on Iran.
There, suddenly, Swift's anti-war arguments start to make a lot more sense.
As so often before—one starts to wonder whether the MAGA right has not yet again managed to get the worst of both worlds. They misapplied Swiftian antiwar arguments to oppose the United States's quite modest support for Ukraine, as it fights for its life; but meanwhile, they are now neglecting all of these arguments in order to pursue their own illegal war of aggression that promises to be far more costly.
"[A] Prince ought maturely to consider the Condition he is in, when he enters" a war, Swift advises: "Whether his Coffers be full, his Revenues clear of Debts, his People numerous and rich by a long Peace."
Instead, the United States was already grossly in debt at the time Trump launched his Iran invasion. His own second term has added trillions to the deficit. He is currently seeking $1.5 trillion in additional Pentagon spending, in part as a result of this war.
And we are coming to it not after a period of prolonged peace—but rather only a handful of years after exiting two quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It was pretended," Swift writes, "That the War could not possibly last above one or two Campaigns"—just as Trump assured us that his Iran attack would last no longer than a few weeks.
"[W]ithout taking time to consider the Consequences, or to reflect on our own Condition, we hastily engaged in a War which hath cost us sixty Millions"—well, now, that is sounding a lot more like Trump's Iran debacle, rather than Biden's modest support for Ukraine, which effectively forestalled Putin's advance and seems to have worked out well both for our allies and for us.
"Just come out of the most tedious, expensive and unsuccessful War that ever England had been engaged in; sinking under heavy Debts [...] the Bulk of the Gentry and People heartily tired of War, and glad of a Peace"—that now sounds very much like our country in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"That these very People, without giving themselves time to breath[e], should again enter into a more dangerous, chargeable, and extensive War, for the same, or perhaps a greater Period of Time, and without any apparent Necessity"... Swift laments—and that now sounds very much like Trump and the neoconservative warmongers like Lindsey Graham who got us into yet another disastrous war in Iran, so swiftly on their heels!
"Now at last," Swift mordantly observes, "like the sick Man, we are just expiring with all sorts of good Symptoms." We are "dizzy with success" as Stalin would put it. We are soon going to be "tired of winning," to quote Trump's famous phrase.
Many neoconservative intellectuals and Fox News pundits were quick to attack the short-lived ceasefire deal with Iran—which they correctly diagnosed as a pathetic capitulation and a desperately flailing effort to restore the status quo that had prevailed before Trump started his war.
But the neocons were kidding themselves if they thought the United States could get better terms than the ones under that now-defunct deal, after Iran had proved itself able to control the Strait of Hormuz.
"Some of the Preliminary Articles were so very Extravagant," Swift writes of those who opposed any peace treaty in the war with France—"that in all Human Probability we could not have obtained them by a successful War of forty years."
The same could be said of the neocons and Fox News hosts who think Trump ought to "finish the job" and keep attacking until Iran submits to an "unconditional surrender"—or whatever it was we were supposedly originally fighting for.
"But the Advocates on the other side cry out, that we might have had a better Peace, than is now in Agitation, above two Years ago," Swift writes. "Supposing this to be true, I do assert, that by parity of Reason we must expect one just so much worse, about two Years hence."
So too, if Trump continues his war, the only likely outcome is an even more disadvantageous deal to the U.S. later on. Iran's regional power, as you may have noticed, has only grown since the start of the war, thanks to Trump's decision to haul off and murder their leadership and bomb their country without cause, thereby giving them every reason to gamble on shutting down an international waterway—since the only apparent alternative he had left them was annihilation.
Swift concludes, quite reasonably, that we should "think it infinitely better, to accept such Terms as will secure our Trade [...] and restore the Tranquility [...] Rather than go on in a languishing war, upon the vain Expectation of some improbable turn [...] and at last be forced to a worse Peace [...] by our utter Inability to continue the war."
On that much, at least, Swift and I are in perfect agreement!
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