How about reintroducing conscription?

The American academic and foreign policy realist Stephen Walt has put an interesting idea on his blog: would re-introducing the draft make America less interventionist? Perhaps it would, and perhaps there’s a good case to be made for doing the same in Britain. Calling for a return to conscription might sound like a silly right-wing trope, but it makes sense from an anti-war perspective: we might be less eager to send our soldiers to fight and die in distant conflicts if there were the slightest possibility that we might have to go, too.

I’m not sure I agree, though. It’s not as if national service prevented war in the past. We happily shipped off young men to Korea in the 1950s, for instance. Maybe compulsory military training only encourages bellicosity. Still, worth thinking about – what do Coffee Housers reckon?