War lay at the root of Swift's thought about human nature. Indeed, many readers respond primarily to his characteristic, and characteristically negative, view of war. George Orwell finds it disturbingly unpatriotic:

Orwell reads England's eighteenth-century struggle with France in terms of Britain's recent war against a totalitarian and reactionary power, Nazi Germany. His Swift misses the vital nature of the struggle, fails to take an appropriately patriotic view of war. Scarred by his struggle against communists as well as fascists, Orwell also condemns the Houyhnhnms as totalitarian. But it is Swift's attitude to war itself that provokes Orwell's antagonism to a writer he otherwise admires. His Swift is not simply opposing the government of Walpole, he is attacking England itself and thereby collaborating with its worst enemies.

A gifted writer of political fables, Orwell is in many ways an exemplary reader of Gulliver's Travels. He brings profound political commitments to bear on a story over two centuries old. He recognizes that few writers engage as passionately as Swift with what Nadine Gordimer, herself a political writer, calls ‘this other great theme in human existential drives – politics’. But Orwell's passionate response shows us how easy it is to distort Swift's actual political terrain. Under Queen Anne, Swift did serve a Tory government that ended a long war with France on favourable terms.