In a new article for SpeakFreely, Ian Golan argues that Europe’s wartime moment should become an opportunity to return youth politics to first principles: fiscal restraint, deregulation, serious national defense, and opposition to compulsory service. The piece warns that the revival of conscription across Europe would sacrifice young men’s liberty while weakening, rather than strengthening, military readiness. The fight against conscription is a return to the roots of the modern liberty movement.

Europe is now embracing a disgraceful arrangement that concentrates the burden of national defence on a fraction of powerless young men. Draft advocates believe that male teenagers should be stripped of their rights, force dressed into uniforms, and reduced to cheap labour. In their eyes, of all the jobs in modern society, military service is the one least deserving of proper pay. Conscription, in that sense, is the greatest insult to all the men serving in uniform.

This is the amateur logic at the heart of Nordic conscription, and it is a liability for Northern Europe. Young men are drafted en masse, but drafted to do what, exactly? Run around boreal forests with a map, rehearsing routines that do little to prepare them for a sensor-saturated, networked battlefield. In practice, the fixation on a huge compulsory apparatus crowds out the unglamorous basics that win wars.

Read the entire piece in SpeakFreely Magazine.