Please Give Us a Non-interventionist Foreign Policy
But not quite yet
Both interventionist and non-interventionist foreign policies involve, for libertarians, the same moral dilemma. Under an interventionist policy we defend ourselves, when it seems necessary, by helping the governments we ally with to oppress their citizens. Under a non-interventionist policy we defend ourselves, when it seems necessary, by killing innocent citizens of the governments we are fighting against. (The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 45 “Is There A Libertarian Foreign Policy?”)
It follows that there is, for a libertarian, no moral basis to choose between an interventionist policy and a non-interventionist policy. Insofar as there is a libertarian foreign policy, one that follows from the non-aggression principle, it is pacifism — and, given the existence of a serious aggressive enemy, defeat. That is not a policy that many libertarians are willing to accept.1
There is a libertarian foreign policy in a different sense. One of the reasons to be a libertarian is the observation that governments are not very good at doing things. A foreign policy of identifying future enemies early enough to support their enemies against them depends on correctly figuring out, well in advance, which countries you should support and which oppose. As I put it thirty-five years ago:
The weak point in the argument is its assumption that the interventionist foreign policy will be done well—that your foreign minister is Machiavelli or Metternich. In order for the policy to work, you must correctly figure out which countries are going to be your enemies and which your allies ten years down the road. If you get it wrong, you find yourself unnecessarily blundering into other people's wars, spending your blood and treasure in their fights instead of theirs in yours. You may, to take an example not entirely at random, get into one war as a result of trying to defend China from Japan, spend the next thirty years trying to defend Japan (and Korea, and Vietnam,. ..) from China, then finally discover that the Chinese are your natural allies against the Soviet Union.
…
The problem with an interventionist foreign policy is that doing it badly is much worse than not doing it at all. Something which must be done well to be worth doing is being done by the same people who run the post office—and about as well.
Since I wrote that I came across another example.2 The first time Hitler attempted to annex Austria he was stopped by Mussolini, who announced that Italy would not tolerate the annexation and emphasized the point by moving Italian divisions into the Brenner pass. What changed that was opposition by France and Great Britain to the Italian annexation of Abyssinia. Mussolini concluded that Italy’s WWI allies were no longer friends and, given the feebleness of their efforts, not very dangerous enemies. The second time Hitler moved to annex Austria it was with Mussolini’s permission.
The incompetent interventionist policy of Hitler’s enemies had given him his first ally.3
I concluded:
We are left only with a problem of transition. Given that the Germans and the Japanese do not currently have the military forces to defend themselves, how do we persuade them to acquire those forces and make sure that they do not get conquered before they do so?
The first step is to make it clear that the U.S. is moving towards a non-interventionist policy, that at some point in the near future we will stop defending the countries that have been our allies.
Which finally brings me to the subject of this essay, U.S. policy towards Ukraine. One of the few things Donald Trump has done that I approve of is to convince our European allies that, in the long run, we cannot be trusted to defend them, hence that they should be able to defend themselves. Their combined GNP is about ten times that of Russia so, given time to make the transition, they should be able to do it pretty easily.
Russia started the Ukraine war with very large resources in weaponry and ammunition inherited from the Soviet Union. The European NATO powers saw no need to match them as long as they could rely on the resources of the U.S. Now that they know that they cannot, it will take them time to build the necessary factories, build or buy the armaments, that Ukraine needs for this war and that other countries near Russia might need for the next.
I am therefor glad that Congress eventually decided to provide Ukraine with more support, would prefer that they had done it a little sooner. But I am also glad that the decision looked sufficiently uncertain to convince the European NATO powers that, in the long run, they must depend on themselves.
Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet. (Saint Augustine)
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The most notable example of a libertarian pacifist was Robert Lefevre, who argued that rights violations could and should be prevented without the use of defensive force.
in the first volume of Winston Churchill’s history of World War II.
Churchill’s view was that England and France should either have used their naval superiority to prevent the invasion, which would have brought down Mussolini’s government, or ignored it in order to keep Italy as an ally.
Any discussion of US foreign policy regarding Ukraine should begin in the 1990s, not in 2022. Consider the incompetent foreign policy demonstrated by the Obama administration in 2014. Without US interference then, it's unlikely that we would see any Russian invasion in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the Ukrainian support is not to the Ukrainian people but the Ukrainian establishment. This distinction is particularly relevant considering that Ukraine is conscripting its people. They do not choose to fight Russia's invasion.
For a more nuanced and thorough discussion of the Ukraine war, I highly John Mearsheimer's substack.
Interventionism is good because it can be very useful to be proactive about threats. The cases where interventionism failed, and turned a small problem into a big problem, e.g. condemning Italy's African imperialism which made them side with the Nazis or in invading Iraq only to realize they weren't actively building large numbers of WMD, are obvious. The cases where interventionism prevent small problems from becoming big problems are harder to see though. How many countries decide not to build nukes because they fear becoming sanctioned like North Korea or invaded like Iraq? How many countries avoid commiting genocide on a minority population because they fear being bombed like Serbia?
Also, in a more cynical sense, while there are large costs in money and lives in going to war, there are also benefits besides whatever the explicit military goal is. It keeps the military sharp and experienced, and will make fighting any future wars easier. It is useful to be seen to come to the aid of our allies too, so they will want to stay our allies and other countries will want to become our allies. While the US today might be the strongest military and might not need allies to win a defensive war, there's no guarantee that China won't be able to overtake the US and allies would be needed to win a war against China, even allies that aren't meeting their spending obligations. Or even if China doesn't overtake the US, maybe they could form their own alliance that is capable of defeating a lone USA.