I generally avoid publishing essays on the current issue dominating the headlines, partly because emotions are running high, and with so much discussion going on in both mainstream and libertarian circles there are few original thoughts I could contribute. Moreover, by the time I actually get around to completing something, the issue has often subsided.
In the current US/Israel vs. Iran war, however, there is room for a brief restatement of the correct libertarian approach to foreign relations – not so much a non-interventionist creed as a series of methodological points that libertarians should bear in mind when assessing international affairs:
First, states are not natural persons. They are institutional actors that impose their jurisdiction over territory and populations. They have inherent rights to precisely nothing – not to their existence, to self-defence, to any territorial claim, or to make agreements between themselves that bind their citizens. Concepts such as state sovereignty and states’ rights are supposed to function as limiting principles that minimise conflict and power, not as moral axioms equivalent to the rights of individuals to their person and property. Trying to analyse the behaviour of states, without qualification, as if it were analogous to that of private actors is therefore a conceptual confusion.
Second, with power being a zero-sum game, states are ultimately antagonistic and eliminative entities. Conflicts between them emerge from long chains of rivalry over territory, possessions, governance, influence, and strategic advantage. It is therefore rarely possible to divide international conflicts neatly into clear “victim” and “aggressor” categories, with the outbreak of actual fighting usually serving only as the spark on the bonfire. Simply identifying who fired the first shot neither captures the deeper causes of the conflict nor provides a sufficient basis for allocating blame. I have explained the complications involved in this kind of analysis in more detail here.
Third, the people who do have rights are individual persons. Libertarian analysis of international affairs should therefore focus not on the moral standing of regimes or on acts as they affect states, but on whether they violate the rights of individuals. Or, in a broader sense, whether a given course of action is likely to improve or diminish the liberty of people in the long run. With conflicts and intervention, that includes both within the states directly involved and within the states that intervene.
Fourth, in the same way that we may champion national statism as a bulwark against the greater threat of global statism, it can be permissible for libertarians to discuss interstate relations in a collectivist sense insofar as it serves as shorthand for what is best for the people. Ultimately, however, states are not proxies for their populations. Governments assess threats primarily in terms of risks to their own power, influence, and strategic position, not according to the welfare of the individuals they rule. The fact that your government regards another government as a geopolitical threat does not mean that the latter is a threat to you. It certainly does not mean that the citizens of the two states are threats to each other. In fact, the greatest threat to any individual is likely to be his own government. Conversely, the fact that your government regards another as an ally does not mean that the alliance benefits you.
Fifth, states do not determine their allies and enemies according to the moral worthiness of regimes. A government may be odious, destabilising, and threatening to regional order, yet so long as its behaviour is either inert or useful to third-party states, the latter may support it. Governments described one year as trusted partners may the next be depicted as dangerous threats requiring containment or removal – not because of any fundamental change in their character, but because of shifting strategic interests. A clear example is the transformation of the Soviet Union from tactical German partner, to Western wartime ally, to permanent post-war enemy in less than a decade. The changing status of Iraq before and after its invasion of Kuwait provides another.
Sixth, interventionist action must be judged in comparison with alternatives, not against absolutist standards of evaluation. As terrible as any particular regime may be, displacing it immediately raises the question: what will come next? Such outcomes are rarely controllable or foreseeable, and are not necessarily an improvement for the people who must live under them – and the more significant the conflict the less containable the result. Eliminating Nazi domination of Eastern Europe, for instance, paved the way for Soviet domination, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War.
Seventh, outcomes are magnified when “collective security” arrangements and military alliances transform local conflicts into global conflagrations. The 1914 assassination in Sarajevo, for instance, was fundamentally a crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. It dragged everyone into a world war only because the alliance system resulted in a cascade of great-power mobilisations. Alternatively, regional skirmishes that might otherwise be resolved relatively quickly can be prolonged when larger powers intervene – often turning them into proxy conflicts between competing states.
Eighth, the measures states adopt in confronting perceived threats frequently impose heavy burdens on their own populations. States do not fund wars from their own resources but through taxation, borrowing, and monetary expansion. War therefore diverts vast resources away from voluntary uses toward armaments and military spending. It may also lead to conscription, censorship, and expanded government control over economic and social life, not to mention refugee crises and blowback in the form of terrorism that prompt further expansions of state power. As Robert Higgs documented in Crisis and Leviathan, such expansions often persist long after the immediate conflict has ended. In the case of the United States, they helped transform a republic into a permanent security state.
Ninth, the fact that a state appears more liberal or culturally congenial to an observer does not necessarily mean that its behaviour on the world stage will be more restrained, prudent or stabilising. Conversely, an evil or culturally alien regime is not necessarily reckless or irrational. Indeed, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out[1], the opposite may be true: internally liberal societies can extract greater economic resources and productive capacity from their populations, enabling extensive foreign intervention and ultimately contributing to a more unstable international order. Regimes without access to such resources must choose their battles more carefully.
Finally, libertarian non-interventionism is not a general theory about refusing to intervene in cases of aggression. It is a doctrine concerning the specific case of the behaviour of states in the international arena. It therefore has no bearing on whether a private individual may intervene to stop an act of violence between two people. Opposition to state intervention abroad does not, therefore, imply indifference to injustice in other countries. Individuals remain free to support causes they regard as just by volunteering their own time, resources or assistance. What libertarian non-interventionism questions is the assumption that the only – or even the most appropriate – response to foreign conflicts is for one’s own government to intervene through coercive political means. To oppose state action is not to oppose action altogether.
Taken together, these considerations suggest that libertarian analysis of international relations must proceed with far greater caution than the simple narratives often presented in public debate. The central question is not which government is more virtuous, but how the actions of states affect the liberty and welfare of the individuals who ultimately bear the costs of their decisions.
Notes
[1] See here. The key passage is as follows:
Victory or defeat in interstate warfare depends […] on the relative amount of economic resources at a state’s disposal […] States which tax and regulate their economies comparatively little – that is, liberal states in the European sense – tend to defeat and expand their territories at the expense of less liberal states. This explains why Western Europe came to dominate the rest of the world […] and why it was first the Dutch, then the British, and finally the United States which became the dominant imperial power […] the United States, internally one of the most liberal states, has conducted the most aggressive foreign policy.
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