Liberal hawk

Past U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have been described as liberal hawks for their roles in bringing about America's status as the world's premier military power.

[2] Another document related to the stance is a letter to President Bush sent by Social Democrats USA in February 2003, which urged the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

[3] In January 2004, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, Fareed Zakaria, and Fred Kaplan participated in a five-day online forum, Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War, in which they discussed whether they had been correct in advocating for military action against Saddam Hussein's regime.

Kaplan by that point had renounced his prior support, but the general consensus among the participants was that, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war had still been justified on humanitarian grounds.

Political scientists argue that liberals tend to be hawkish to counter criticism and accusations by conservatives of being "soft" and having a tendency of appeasing foreign adversaries.