By: The Editors of The Encyclopedia of Conservatism
WW2
The Second World War ran from Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 to Japan's surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, killed between 70 and 85 million people, and settled the political shape of the following half-century. For conservatives the war is the decisive case against two propositions they reject: that aggression can be managed by negotiation with regimes that reject the premises of negotiation, and that military strength is a provocation rather than a deterrent. Churchill's argument in the 1930s was not that war was desirable but that the choice had already been narrowed by inaction....
