– Aaron Sobczak
Several schools of thought dominate geopolitical discourse in the chaotic world of international relations. In the status quo, Interventionists of all labels wish for the United States to police the world to some extent, while warning of the perils of “isolationism.” While American statists are attempting to create a world government through a “rules-based order,” they witness the United States shirk the authority of international governing organizations. The libertarian should have a healthy skepticism of global authorities and recognize attempts to further expand their jurisdiction as an assault on liberty. A healthy understanding of human nature, public choice, and power incentives should inform the libertarian position on foreign policy, leading libertarians to support a vision of restrained realism rather than aggressive interventionism.
Interventionists consistently point to conflicts with Russia, Iran, and China as a failure of the United States to act aggressively enough. This sentiment ignores history and places world actors into fairy-tale categories of “good” and “bad”. While there are of course bad actors throughout history, the libertarian should recognize that those in power in any government almost always act out of self-interest, with ideological preferences acting as tools to justify said actions.
Supporters of geopolitical primacy and international liberalism completely miss this point. The American primacist firmly places the United States in the category of “good actor,” and therefore usually believes that Washington is justified in placing its preferences above those of other actors, while often labeling other nations as “bad actors”. This perpetuates the fairy tale that the United States is always on the right side of history and simply wants to uphold global peace and democracy.
International liberalism tends to view humanity in general through a more charitable lens. The Wilsonians who supported the failed League of Nations believed that international cooperation through a complex system of governance and accountability could solve world problems. The primary issue with this boils down to public choice. As Wilson rhetorically supported self-determination, he wielded American power in America’s sphere of influence with little regard for the agency of other nations. “I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914,” said Wilson’s former Marine Corps General, Smedly Butler. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the internal banking house of Brown Brothers… I brought light to the D.R. for American sugar interests in 1916.” Additionally, the Western powers who ascribed to the rules set by the League of Nations were still firmly imperialist and were slow to curb each other’s imperialist tendencies. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 put this on display, as Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the league for assistance, but none wanted to oppose fellow league member Benito Mussolini. President Obama, another internationalist, famously destroyed Libya and contributed to the rise of ISIS in Syria through his support of rebel groups during the civil war there.
Both the primacist and liberal internationalists fall into utopian fallacies concerning human nature. The unconstrained vision for humanity as described by Thomas Sowell supposes that humanity is perfectable, and should be governed as such. American primacy views the United States as naturally good, while the rest of the world needs to be dominated and controlled. Liberal internationalism views the world as perfectible if only the correct rules can be instituted to curb bad actors.
The glaring problem with both of these theories is that fundamentally flawed humans are the ones creating these institutions and systems of governance, and therefore these institutions will naturally reflect those imperfections. The restrained-realist views international systems as potentially helpful, but dangerous if coercive. This is not because moral standards aren’t important, but because larger powers can ignore these standards as it suits them, with selective enforcement only serving to increase power imbalances. Under realism, Thomas Sowell’s constrained vision of human nature finds its home, with it the understanding that humans typically act out of self-interest rather than altruism.
Historical examples of the United States and its allies ignoring international law abound, as American foreign policy has existed to serve its political class under almost every presidency. Rather than assuming that political actors of any country will make choices to enrich their nation, realists should expect these actors to act in service of their interests or legacy.
This realization forces the realist to no longer view nations through a good-bad paradigm. Rather than Russia, Iran, and China being objectively immoral and the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom being consistently just, all nations make good and bad decisions as they seek to maintain or grow their sphere of influence without concern for morality.
The libertarian who studies international relations should view international conflicts through a praxeological lens. Economist Ludwig von Mises coined the term Praxeology – or the study of human action. He writes in his work “Human Action”, “goods, commodities, and wealth and all the other notions of conduct are not elements of nature; they are elements of human meaning and conduct. He who wants to deal with them must not look at the external world; he must search for them in the meaning of acting men.” Applying this logic to the study of international relations, we must question why individuals in positions of power make certain decisions, in addition to examining the decisions themselves.
Political leaders want to leave a political legacy, whether that legacy is fictional or not. It is completely reasonable to assume that President Bill Clinton, for example, wanted NATO expansion to be his legacy, and used the Partnership for Peace as a temporary measure, and later forced Boris Yeltsin to sign the Nato-Russia Founding Act while simultaneously ignoring Secretary of State James Baker’s handshake deal to not to move NATO Eastward which, while not a legally binding promise, injured Russian pride. The realist should view these occurrences through a lens of strategic empathy. Russia, itself seeking to maintain control of its satellite states, did not want an adversarial weapons build-up on its doorstep, and Bill Clinton likely wanted an international legacy, even as then-acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, William Burns warned the Clinton administration of such actions.
The Bush Jr. administration continued down the path of NATO enlargement, with Burns (then promoted to ambassador) writing the leaked memo for the Secretary of State, titled “Nyet Means Nyet” in 2008. “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” wrote Burns. Legacy was a concern for Bush, and a reason for existence after Bosnia was a concern for NATO leadership, as Scott Horton explains in his book, “Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine”.
Legacy building can also be said for President Bush’s War on Terror. There were never any WMDs in Iraq, Iraq most likely did not assist the 9-11 attackers. Saddam was a serviceable ally for Washington during the Iran-Iraq War. Still, Bush needed a smoking gun to ensure that he had the necessary political will to invade and occupy Iraq. This war facilitated the erosion of American civil liberties through the Patriot Act. Libertarian realism must also account for blowback. The Bush administration planned to attack seven countries in five years after the events of 9/11, asserting claims of state-sponsored terror in those nations. Ironically, the states that were part of this plan; Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan were not the primary sponsors of terror at the time, and some would become hotspots for terror groups following American destabilization.
This ambitious plan was not fulfilled in five years but is still largely Washington’s policy today. Iraq is neutered as a regional power, Syria was recently taken over by an Al Qaeda splinter group, initially supported by the United States, Libya, and Somalia are in shambles following American intervention, Lebanon’s government and society is fractured after Israel’s invasions, also prompting the creation of Hezbollah, and Sudan is in a constant state of civil war, even after the United States supported the South’s secession. The last country on this list is Iran and hawks in both parties consistently support increased levels of aggression towards Iran, even as Iran has sought peace and de-escalation.
Murray Rothbard laid out the libertarian position on war as almost unequivocally pro-peace, as nations that participate in war naturally participate in further aggression towards their citizens through further taxation, conscription, industrial nationalization, asset forfeiture, etc. “The libertarian objective, then, should be, regardless of the specific causes of any conflict, to pressure States not to launch wars against other States,” wrote Rothbard in “The Ethics of Liberty”. “And, should a war break out, to pressure them (States) to sue for peace and negotiate a cease-fire and a peace treaty as quickly as physically possible.” This was the goal under what Rothbard labeled “old-fashioned international laws of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Rather than pursuing a peaceful coexistence with nations who are culturally different, primacists in the West see the United States (and its proxies) as being uniquely worthy of having regional influence, and other nations must submit, or else witness the wrath of the American military-industrial complex. The libertarian realist can seek to uphold Rothbard’s standard of peace by embracing strategic empathy and removing nationalist blindfolds that restrict their historical perspective and paint their country as always justified in its actions, and its enemies as the unjustified aggressors.