Two weeks ago at The Free Press (TFP), Rebeccah L. Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute wrote a 3,000-word article critiquing conservative disapproval of President Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran last month. Heinrichs linked this conservative denunciation of Trump’s recent military escapade to more comprehensive criticism on the right of America’s post-World War II foreign policy, generally, and America’s involvement in World War II, specifically.

Within the last year, podcasters Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, and Dave Smith—all with at least tangential ties to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement—have questioned the conventional narrative surrounding America’s entrance and participation in World War II and the eighty year postwar international order which ensued.

In her TFP essay, Heinrichs labels this recent conservative questioning of America’s role in World War II as the 1939 Project, comparing it to the 1619 Project of The New York Times, which places slavery at the center of America’s Founding.

In defining the 1939 Project, Heinrichs notes that “the year 1939 is meant to replace the national identity marked by 1945, the year the United States, with its allies, liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny, dropped the atomic bombs to end Japanese imperialism, ended the war, stopped the genocide of the Jewish people, and saved the free world.”

Heinrichs contrasts the views of Carlson, Cooper, and Smith—who she labels adherents of the 1939 Project—to scholars such as herself who believe that American and British participation in World War II is beyond reproach. These academics—who have the overwhelming majority opinion among today’s international relations higher education programs—can be categorized as advocates of the 1945 Project. These 1945 Project intellectuals also defend, in varying degrees, the postwar international order.

Contrary to what the 1945 Project holds, Carlson, Cooper, and Smith are morally correct to question both American involvement in World War II as well as the highly interventionist U.S. foreign policy that the war engendered. Although the United States is the most existentially secure nation in world history, it spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined. …

The 1945 Project’s defense of the U.S. and Britain’s entry and involvement in World War II is based on six primary assumptions:

• World War II was a war of necessity—not a war of choice—for the United States and Great Britain.
• The United States and Great Britain, not the Soviet Union, contributed the most to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
• The United States and Great Britain, not the Nationalist Chinese and the Chinese Communists, contributed the most to the defeat of Imperial Japan.
• In World War II, the “Free World” defeated German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese Imperialism.
• The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States in early August 1945 led Japan to surrender.
• The United States and Great Britain entered the war in part to end the Nazi Holocaust of Europe’s Jews.

All six of these premises are false. …

The historical evidence suggests that 1945 Project scholars like Heinrichs are wrong about each of their assumptions concerning the participation of Britain and the U.S. in World War II.

And there were enormous costs of the war to both countries in blood and treasure and in loss of freedoms. These costs are catalogued in part both in Ludwig von Mises’ Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War and in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Both books were published in 1944, toward the end of the war.

To finance the war effort, Britain borrowed heavily, mostly from the United States, and ended World War II with a national debt that exceeded 200% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They didn’t pay off their last war loan to the U.S. until December 2006.

The United States ended World War II with a national debt of 106% of its GDP. Also, the war saw the domesitc imposition of wage-and-price controls in the United States, third-party pay for health care, and the first peacetime draft in American history, which began in early 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, ten million American males were drafted.

Consequently, Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper, and Dave Smith are on solid ground in questioning the morality of the current U.S.-led, international order and in recognizing the role that American and British participation in World War II had in creating it. It is 1945 Project scholars like Heinrichs who should be forced to morally defend the largest war in history and the last eighty years of U.S. foreign policy.