TGIF: This Is America First

The Trump battle cry is America First. Revealingly, it is not Americans First. The former signifies, implicitly if not explicitly, national collectivism; the latter, individualism. To the extent Trump has a political worldview, it is not individualist. We cannot doubt that.

All of this is abundantly clear in his Iran policy, which is not just about Israel and Iran. This is not new. His seeming antiwar stance was an opportunistic political ploy. The Republican and Democratic wars of the 21st century were palpable fiascos, so of course he had to distance himself from them if he was to become the president. If he is good at anything, it is in finding his opponent's weakness. But what he says bears no necessary relation to what he believes.

Trump did not originally oppose America's wars. In a 2016 debate against his Republican primary opponents, he said George W. Bush had lied the country into war against Iraq, which is true. But the very next day, when confronted by an old army veteran in South Carolina, he slunk away from the charge, presumably so as not to offend the vet. In 2011, when the U.S.-led NATO assault on Libya was pending, Trump told Howard Stern that since "we" have troops in the neighborhood, they might as well take out Col. Qadaffi. Those are not good credentials for an antiwar candidate. I said from the start that he was not to be trusted.

No one should have expected America First to be linked to the freedom of individuals. Trump could have quoted John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." For Trump, after himself, the nation is the only important unit. His foreign policy is of a piece with his mercurial yet steady protectionism and anti-immigrationism.

So we should not be surprised by his use of Israel to destroy Iran, which he has an obvious distaste for. It was clear in what he was saying for months before the immoral attack. The offer to negotiate over Iran's civilian nuclear program was a sham since it was always accompanied by the threat of military force. His cancellation of the solid Iranian nuclear deal during his first term was an unmistakable signal of what was to come when he thought the moment was right. As early as 2011 Trump tweeted that "America should not be pressuring Israel to show restraint against Iran." What more did we need to know?

What about MAGA? We'll have to see what happens, but I will be surprised by a wholesale jumping from the Good Ship Trump. Where would they go? Many will probably defer to Trump's claim that the imaginary Iranian bomb is a threat to America. Will MAGA follow Carlson and Bannon, or will they stick with El Presidente? We'll see.

If you have lingering doubts about Trump's honor, listen to him:

“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along [so wrong], I think I’m the one that decides [what it means]. For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.”

Who did MAGA think would be deciding, Laura Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Greene? (I don't want them to do the deciding either.)

By the way, no one really thinks Iran has or has even wanted nuclear weapons. That includes American and Israeli intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The ayatollah issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam long ago. That's inconvenient for Trump, so he declared that he does not care what his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, thinks.

Yet no one doubts that Israel has such weapons. Unlike Iran, it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thus is not subject to international inspections.

Also by the way, the surest method to encourage Iran to build a nuke is to attack the country. Nothing would be more effective than a nuclear weapon to deter a future attack, as North Korea's Kim Jong Un knows and Col. Qadaffi learned too late.

Finally, you might think someone who threw around the phrase America First would show some respect for constitutional limits on his power. But we're talking about Trump. He recognizes no limits. 

Phony Noninterventionists

Call me naive, but I increasingly suspect that much of today's "left" is not antiwar on principle. Rather, it's anti-American war because, in its view, America (not just the government) is rotten to the core: bourgeois, racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, blah, blah, blah. If left-wingers (Marxists, heavy or light) were in charge, they'd likely support foreign intervention under the right conditions, e.g., fighting apartheid in South Africa (which indeed was bad) or Pinochet (also bad) in Chile, or saving Maduro (bad too) from a middle-class uprising in Venezuela. In the 1960s and 70s the so-called radical left favored the communists in the Vietnam War. It was not just against U.S. intervention, as many libertarians were. In the 1970s Noam Chomsky supported Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia; he also favored leaving some U.S. troops in Syria. I note that Max Blumenthal has lately called for intervention against Israel (bad). (By whom I don't know.)

If the left is interventionist at home, then why wouldn't it also be interventionist abroad? It has no principled objection to government power. It just wants aggressive force put to "good" use, such as managing other people's peaceful market relations.

Libertarians are the only comprehensive noninterventionists. The "left" may want the libertarians to tag along to demonstrate that its opposition to the U.S. empire is broad-based. That would make libertarians its useful idiots. I prefer another role, as antiwar libertarians. But deep down, the "left" likely thinks the libertarians are knowing or misguided shills for what they disdainfully call "corporate America"—which they are not. The goal is freedom.

Maybe we libertarians should be called Compnons.

Let's Not "Run after a Share in the Trouble"

Of course “principles,” phrases, and catch-words are always invented to bolster up any policy which anybody wants to recommend. So in this case. The people who have led us on to shut ourselves in, and who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of “isolation.” Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world. When the others are all over ears in trouble, who would not be isolated in freedom from care? When the others are crushed under the burden of militarism, who would not be isolated in peace and industry? When the others are all struggling under debt and taxes, who would not be isolated in the enjoyment of his own earnings for the benefit of his own family? When the rest are all in a quiver of anxiety, lest at a day's notice they may be involved in a social cataclysm, who would not be isolated out of reach of the disaster? What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.

—William Graham Sumner, "The Conquest of the United States by Spain" (1898)

Who's the Real Foreign-Policy Realist?

The establishment debate over foreign policy isn't between realists and whatever their opponents call themselves. It's a debate over who's more realistic. It reminds me of the debate between the Federalists and Antifederalists. No one wanted to be considered against federalism, but the centralizers had beaten the real federalists to the label Federalist.

TGIF: The Glorious Bourgeois Peace Movement

Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its deadly accouterments from a flawed anti-individualist, anti-Western, and socialist position.

No, we can draw on a proud history of writers and activists who opposed war and intervention not just for the obvious reason --  harm to others -- but also because peace and nonintervention are required for reaping the full benefits of private property, specialization and the division of labor, free global trade, and the unobstructed movement of people in search of better lives. It would be mistaken to regard this as a union of humanitarian and so-called "economic" justifications for peace-mongering. For those classical liberals, freedom to produce, trade, and consume was simply another humanitarian reason to oppose the disruption of war.

Two of the best exemplars of bourgeois pro-market peace activism were the Englishmen Richard Cobden and John Bright, both members of Parliament, manufacturers, orators, and activists. In the mid-19th century, they built a movement that has been in the history books ever since. They are best known for opposing England's tariff on imported grain ("corn"), which raised the price of bread to enrich the land-owing aristocracy. Cobden and Bright successfully fought their battle through the Anti-Corn Law League.

Cobdden and Bright did not compartmentalize but rather explicitly linked free trade to peace and opposition to military spending and intervention. They had a friend and ally on the continent in the French laissez-faire liberal Frédéric Bastiat.

These classical liberals understood that if a social conflict is to be avoided and society is to develop for all, then the industrious members of the population -- entrepreneurs and employees, both of whom produce valuable goods through their labor -- must be free from those who use government-granted privileges to legally steal from the industrious. (Ironically, Marx credited the classical liberals with devising this class analysis, but then screwed it up by putting business creators in the exploiter class.)

Cobden and Bright were not only clear and analytical; they were also passionate. They were great orators inside of Parliament and outside. The liberals' association of peace and free trade can be seen in this example of Cobden's eloquence:

How shall a profession which withdraws from productive industry the ablest of the human race, and teaches them systematically the best modes of destroying mankind, which awards honours only in proportion to the number of victims offered at its sanguinary altar, which overturns cities, ravages farms and vineyards, uproots forests, burns the ripened harvest, which, in a word, exists but in the absence of law, order, and security — how can such a profession be favourable to commerce, which increases only with the increase of human life, whose parent is agriculture, and which perishes or flies at the approach of lawless rapine?

He finishes this passage with a rebuke to those who wanted the English government to compel foreign populations to do business with privileged government-granted monopoly interests:

They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.

Cobden told his fellow members of the House of Commons:

It is only necessary that you should be agreed that war is a great calamity, which it is desirable we should avoid if possible.... My object is to see if we cannot devise some better method than war...; and my plan is, simply and solely, that we should resort to that mode of settling disputes in communities, which individuals resort to in private life. I only want you to go one step farther, to carry out in another instance the principle which you recognize in other cases -- that the intercourse between communities is nothing more than the intercourse of individuals in the aggregate. I want to know why there may not be an agreement between this country and France, or between this country and America, by which the nations should respectively bind themselves, in case of any misunderstanding arising which could not be settled by mutual decision of arbitrators.

He also warned about the government's unlimited spending on armaments: "I wish to know where this system is to end."

On another occasion, he advised, "I say, if you want to benefit nations who are struggling for their freedom, establish as one of the maxims of international law the principle of non-intervention."

These men were called "Little Englanders" for the obvious reason: they opposed the empire. Cobden also said, "I believe the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of Cabinets or Foreign offices."

Bright was no less eloquent:

This is war -- every crime which human nature can commit or imagine, every horror it can perpetrate or suffer; and that this is our Christian Government recklessly plunges into, and which so many of our countrymen at this moment think it patriotic to applaud! You must excuse me if I cannot go with you. I will have no part in this terrible crime [the Crimean War against Russia]. My hands shall be unstained with the blood which is being shed.... [B]ut no respect for men who form a Government, no regard I have for "going with the stream," and no fear of being deemed wanting in patriotism, shall influence me in favor of a policy which, in my conscience, I believe to be as criminal before God as it is destructive of the true interest of my country." (83)

This could be said about the United States today: "What are we to say of a nation, which lives under a perpetual delusion that is about to be attacked...?"

As noted, these Manchester men of business (along with their predecessors such as Adam Smith, and successors such as Herbert Spencer) embraced Western classical-liberal values with gusto. They were ready to condemn institutions that did not live up to those values. But despite its flaws, they were not embarrassed to embrace Western modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, understanding that all civilizations had flaws, such as slavery and the glorification of war, which were to be eliminated. But they knew better than to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which many people today do not.

Let's not forget these great figures who were vital to the development of today's high living standards and of the universally applicable philosophy of individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace. This proper foundation for domestic and foreign policy was and today remains explicitly pro-freedom in all spheres and anti-aggression. Thus in the spirit of Cobden and Bright, true liberals are entitled to oppose war and empire while identifying with neither the "left" nor the "right."

TGIF: "America First" Need Not Be Antiwar

Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future.

We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they do. They also typically invoke the security interests of the American people. It's a small world, after all, they say, and what protects others also protects us. How often have you heard interventionists agitate for war solely on behalf of foreigners? Sure, national self-sacrifice might not be good politics, but that doesn't mean that people of the interventionist mindset don't mean what they say.

My point is not that they are right, but only that they, or most of them, are sincere (though misguided). I doubt if George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq was motivated solely by regard for the Iraqis or Israelis.  Not was Barack Obama's bombing and regime change in Libya carried out on behalf of the Libyan people only. In both cases the key policymakers and their supporters believed that these actions were also good for the American people, who had been told for decades that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi threatened them. The same can be said about the people who gave us the war in Vietnam. This is not to dismiss the malign influence of dishonest people who simply enjoy exercising power or who will profit from selling weapons to the government.  But I am suspicious of such single-factor explanations.

If I'm right about this, we must ask what today's America Firsterism is defined in contrast to. Aren't the two main competing approaches to foreign policy in reality both America first, although one may be unilateralist and the other multilateralist? One might respond that a true America Firster considers only the interests of America and no one else. But is that really such a big difference? Perhaps the difference is that American Firsters would want to see immediate benefits for Americans from intervention, while the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists are willing to wait a little longer even if foreigners would benefit sooner. But now we're quibbling about time preferences among the interventionists.

Now let's talk about Donald Trump. (I wish we didn't have to.) Trump is regarded as the architect of today's America First faction, although I don't think he used the phrase (if he's used it at all) until critics smeared him with it. While Trump fans boast that unlike his two immediate predecessors, he started no new wars, I would caution against confidence that Trumpism equals noninterventionism. First, he didn't end any wars either, and he chose to keep American troops in key areas of Syria, namely, where the oil and wheat fields are. (They're still there.) Did he end any of America's covert wars? Or stop helping Saudi Arabia from making war on Yemen? Or refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine as Obama had done? No, he did not.

Moreover, he might have gotten us into new wars, with China and Iran, for example. He put tariffs on  Chinese imports, harming American consumers and intending to harm Chinese businesses. Trade wars can lead to other forms of warfare. Regarding Iran, Trump tore up Obama's so-called nuclear deal (Iran wasn't making a bomb) and reimposed economic sanctions. He ordered the assassination of a major Iranian military/political leader. No doubt he continued the covert and proxy war against Iran that the U.S. and Israeli governments have conducted for years. Finally, he reportedly nearly attacked Iran as his term drew to a close. It looks like we avoided a new war thanks only to contingent circumstances. Why should we be confident about a new Trump term?

Right-wing populists, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to oppose the establishment's foreign policy mostly because it consumes tax money they want the government to spend on domestic projects. That's hardly comforting to anyone who wants the government to do less and thereby consume far fewer scarce resources, which after all are produced privately.

Much more could be said against America First, for example,  that the term national interest has long been a cover for collectivism and coercion. America First is no guarantee of nonintervention. What we need is a commitment not to America First but to individual liberty first.

TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn't matter to other people too -- just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They're cut from the same cloth.

This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state," he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.

I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, "No foreign politics." He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water's edge only when policy stops at the water's edge, which he favored.

War naturally repulses individuals because -- obviously -- it kills and disables people, most atrociously, noncombatants. It's so obviously repulsive that many soldiers have to be turned into killers during training. Another count against war is that it encourages a self-destructive, indiscriminate, and collective hatred of foreigners and even local individuals who are invidiously identified with the designated "enemy." (Russian athletes and even long-dead Russian composers are targets of hostility these days.)

But those who understand that full individual liberty is a necessity -- and not a mere luxury -- include another count in the indictment against war. It inevitably fosters the general growth of government power, which then infects all aspects of life and society. That doesn't happen all at once, but it sets in motion a deadly process that menaces everything in its path unless it is stopped. Few things approach war fever in this regard. (A pandemic and a major economic crisis can have similar effects.)

War is a great way to instill the "governmental habit": it powerfully encourages people to think that the state is indispensable for all sorts of problems -- including the control of "disinformation." F. A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serdom in 1944 because World War II had people thinking that if central planning worked in wartime, it ought to work in peacetime too. (The phrase governmental habit is from economic historian Jonathan R. T. Hughes. Hughes wasn't writing about foreign policy; in that regard, see Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan.)

Just think about this century. Without the wars of the last 20 years, it would have been tougher for the government to have gotten away with its frightening surveillance powers, which have no doubt spread to matters other than terrorism. People will say it was a response to the horrific 9-11 attacks, but those must be seen out of context. While the attacks were atrocities, they did not come out of the blue. The U.S. government was hardly minding its own business before 2001. Rather, it had been fighting proxy, covert, and even overt wars in the Middle East killing thousands of people far from home.

Surveillance is not the only consequence of a belligerent foreign policy. Let's not forget the huge monetary price tag, which has to be handled through taxation and, less visibly, borrowing, followed by inflationary monetization, an implicit form of taxation. Other burdens on people's freedom include economic regulation, trade barriers through sanctions and tariffs, the militarization of local police departments, and the corruption of the news media. It's said that the first casualty of war is truth. (Noninterventionist Sen. Hiram Johnson said that in 1917.) War and government lying go hand in hand.

An especially insidious thing about foreign policy is that critics can be silenced by the war party's invoking of state secrets. The classified document is the ace up the sleeve. This doesn't happen in domestic policy. But it happens all the time in foreign policy -- which is why we should be grateful to Daniel Ellsberg (who died the other day, sad to say), Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and other whistle-blowers. Naturally, the government treats them brutally.

War is also useful to politicians in taking people's minds off other government-caused problems. Shakespeare showed that he understood this when, in Henry IV, Part II, he had the king tell his son, "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days."

Foreign intervention, covert war, and open war are poison to a society that aspires to be free. That's another reason to say no to interventionism.

TGIF: Watch the Forest as Well as the Trees

It's always important not to miss the forest for the trees. U.S. government announcements, such as its report of the turnover to the Afghan government of the seventh and last military base in Afghanistan, Bagram, should lead no one to think that U.S. foreign policy has changed worldwide or even in that particular region. Far from it. This is true even if virtually all U.S. troops, except for 600 military personnel, most of them left to guard the U.S. embassy, have left Afghanistan, as reported by Politico. (Who knows what the special operations forces will be up to?)

White House spokesperson Jen Psaki (at 1:03) said, "We have every intention of continuing an ongoing presence in Kabul, which is continuing even after we bring our military who are serving home by the end of August." But will those people come home or be redeployed? Can we expect cuts in the military budget? That may hold a clue.

A month earlier Psaki said, "The United States will remain deeply engaged with the Government of Afghanistan to ensure the country never again becomes a safe haven for terrorist groups who pose a threat to the U.S. homeland." In part I translate this to mean that the military contractors need not lose any sleep.

Note that Psaki invoked the old "safe haven" case for being ready to do something more in Afghanistan--or anywhere else, really. This is the argument that if we aren't careful, certain failing countries could become headquarters for terrorist groups bent on attacking America or Americans. Chief case in point, according to the convention wisdom, is Afghanistan after the Russians left and the U.S. government turned its attention elsewhere. Then came al Qaeda, supposedly given safe harbor by the Taliban.

But the "safe haven argument is a myth—a false but widely believed tale used to justify continuing a policy of perpetual failure," Scott Horton has repeatedly pointed out. (See also Horton's invaluable Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan.) As Horton summarized in The American Conservative in 2017, apart from the particular case of Afghanistan, from which the tiny remnant of al Qaeda has long departed, "terrorists don’t need safe havens from which to strike. As we’ve seen in recent attacks in the United States and Europe, one or two men with rifles or a truck can do plenty of damage with no more preparation space than a rented apartment."

Moreover, he adds, "The few dozen core al Qaeda members who survived the initial Air Force bombing campaign in Afghanistan fled the country by the end of 2001 [largely to Pakistan]. They were a non-factor in the war against the Taliban regime, and at no point did they have major influence in the insurgency against the occupation that grew up in later years. If any did come back they would be irrelevant. Afghanistan is exile, as far as anyone can get from anywhere. It provides no special access to any Western target." (Emphasis added.)

Just to drive the point home, Horton goes on: "The September 11 hijackers, none of whom were Afghans, gained entry to the United States under regular tourist and student visas. The terrorists launched the attacks from Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. They had planned them in Malaysia, Germany, Spain, California, Florida, and Maryland." (See the article and the book for details on how distant the Taliban was from Osama bin Laden, despite U.S. government efforts to conflate the two.)

Needless to say, the safe-have myth has cost many lives, Afghan and American. And the myth seems not to have outlived its usefulness. The case for the United States as guardian of the globe echoes the myth, even when it is not invoked outright. Never forgetting 9/11 apparently means that the U.S. military and CIA need to be ready to pounce anywhere and everywhere. Nothing that goes on the world can be allowed to escape the attention of our best and brightest, lest we are caught asleep again.

But as Horton points out in the case of Afghanistan and the Middle East, the allegedly vigilant policies are actually counterproductive: rather than avert threats, they produce threats that then are used to justify U.S. intervention. It's been well-documented that 9/11 grew out of long years' of American intervention in the Middle East, especially the close ties with Israel and the Saudi monarchy and the 1990s child-killing sanctions against the Iraqis. (For details, in addition to Fool's Errand, also see Horton's encyclopedic Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.)

Provoking threats in order to respond to them is a very old game of state. Whenever U.S. troops suffer casualties in some remote place, I can almost hear a U.S. official saying, "That's why we need U.S. troops there. Without them, who would defend the U.S. troops there?"

In our efforts to keep track of the details of particular interventions, we must not lose sight of the big picture: the U.S. government's lethal and costly self-appointed mission to police the world and its rationalizations for that role. If liberty matters, it's a "little America" policy that we must promote.

TGIF: Imperial America, Which Never Left, Is Back

In a cliche-ridden foreign-policy speech delivered at the State Department on Thursday, President Joe Biden declared that "America is back"--on the global stage, presumably, as policeman of the world, but certainly not a disinterested policeman. The problem is that it never left.

Despite some uncouth rhetoric and regular New York Times headlines regarding "American isolationism," Donald Trump never withdrew the U.S. government from its meddling role in the world. He baited Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, and ended no war or U.S. assistance to other wars. Far from leaving NATO or punishing its members for not paying more for their military forces, he oversaw its expansion--which had only one purpose: to aggravate Russia. Yes, Trump apparently removed some troops from Germany--does anyone have a good reason why they are still there?--but Biden promised to change that. He also wants to add Georgia and Ukraine to NATO, which of course--*wink*--would never make Russia nervous.

If that's what he means by "America is back," let's us shout in unison: Thanks, but no thanks!

Not that we should be surprised by Biden's position, considering that his foreign-policy team consists of Obama administration retreads who act as though there's a world of difference between intervention and humanitarian intervention.

Biden put Russia and China on notice: "The days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions—interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens—are over."

Hang on. We've never been given evidence that Russia, which has a weak economy and limited military, interfered with an election--quite the contrary--or engaged in cyberattacks. By the way, we know the U.S. government does that sort of thing routinely, even with respect to Russia and its allies. Moreover, if Vladimir Putin's government poisons its citizens--obviously something to be condemned by all decent people--how is that an aggressive action against against the United States or any other country? By that curious standard, U.S. persecution of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, et al. could be construed as aggression against others.

I will give Biden credit for agreeing with Russia to extend the New START Treaty on nuclear weapons. (Putin's so-called puppet, Trump, pulled out of such treaties.)

And on China:

And we’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.

Note the words: "Our most serious competitor." One way to reduce tensions among states is to stop seeing them as competing economic entities. America doesn't compete with China in the global marketplace because America is not a homogeneous entity with a single scale of preferences. An American consumer and a Chinese merchant may have a harmony of interest; likewise an American manufacturer and a Chinese consumer or producer. (Concerns about intellectual property can be taken care of by repealing the relevant laws. Ideas cannot legitimately be owned.) But Biden. like Trump, is locked into the mercantilist worldview in which nations compete against each other. That's why Biden promises to reinforce the "Buy American" policy, costing taxpayers more for stuff that the U.S. government could buy for less from foreign manufacturers. "Buy American" also distorts the international division of labor, making everyone less prosperous.

Regarding Biden's other charges against China, one need not approve of the oppressive Chinese government to understand that something is wrong when no government but the U.S. government is allowed to have a sphere of influence ("backyard"), which thereby extends to the whole world. In a world of states, that sort of policy is asking for trouble.

So Biden's speech wholeheartedly embraced America's role as the global overseer, self-appointed to keep everyone on good behavior, strangely alternating between invocations of altruism and "naked [national] self-interest." We know where that took us in the past.

Biden promised to end assistance to Saudi Arabia's "offensive" actions in Yemen. Fine. But how will he define "offensive"? We might have a clue in what Biden said right after this promise:

At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV strikes, and other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries.  We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.

Bear in mind that the Saudi regime is one of the most repressive in the world.

So nothing will really change. If Biden wanted to make a constructive difference to that region, he would end the long-standing multi-front covert/overt war against Iran, including all the sanctions Trump imposed. Biden didn't otherwise mention Iran in the speech, yet he says he wants to reenter the nuclear deal, which Trump stormed out of. The way to do that is end the sanctions, which harm and even kill innocent people.

While we're talking about the Middle East, let us note that Biden said nothing about Israel and Palestine, despite all the damage Trump did there on behalf of the Israeli state and against the long-suffering Palestinians. We already know from his Senate confirmation hearing that Secretary of State Tony Blinken has no problem with what Trump did: from moving the embassy to Jerusalem to declaring the settlements in the de facto annexed West Bank just fine and dandy. Massive annual military aid to Israel--without any conditions whatever--of course will continue. That policy of course gives propaganda opportunities to other regimes that the U.S. government can then condemn as destabilizing. But which party is the real destabilizer?

Also among the no-mentions was Afghanistan. How can Biden give his first speech on foreign policy without discussing the country's longest war? That is really remarkable. The names Iraq and Syria also do not appear in the speech. Amazing.

As long as government exists, the proper foreign policy is nonintervention. Policing the world inevitably invites defensive and deterrent responses, which are then used as pretenses to counter so-called "aggressive" actions. It also makes fortunes for military contractors. The result is perpetual war in which liberty and prosperity must suffer.

TGIF--The Goal Is Freedom--appears occasionally on Friday.

TGIF: The Nonintervention Principle

Anyone old enough to think about "America's" role in the world ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. For example, one ought to be able to argue firmly against U.S. intervention in other countries without feeling obliged to downplay or deny the real crimes that the tyrant du jour has committed. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

I can see the temptation here. Many people believe that all one needs to do to establish a case for intervention is to portray the target as egregiously bad. Consequently, a noninterventionist may think that the easiest way to rebut the interventionist is to deny the claim that the target is as bad as "they say." But this is a lousy, shortsighted, and ultimately self-defeating move. For one thing, it implies that intervention would be acceptable if the target were that bad. Unsurprisingly, it's better to stick to principle.

The principle of foreign nonintervention has nothing to do with the record of the foreign government in question. It is perfectly coherent to identify Ruler X as a brutal dictator and to oppose a U.S. government action aimed at regime-change and nation-building. Thus the noninterventionist has no need to blunt the move toward intervention by misstating or obscuring facts to make the targeted ruler appear less bad than he really is. If someone is puzzled by the statement "The ruler is as horrible as you say, but that is no justification for intervention," it's the noninterventionist's job to straighten that person out because he clearly misunderstands the nature of noninterventionism.

The world is full of egregiously bad rulers -- as distinguished from merely garden-variety bad ones -- but when the matter turns to U.S. foreign and military policy, the appropriate question is, "So what?" As I say, the case for nonintervention doesn't rest on the target's record. So noninterventionists should have no trouble identifying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (among many others) as egregiously bad guys while also opposing U.S. government action against them.

Noninterventionists should also be able to state, assuming of course it is true, that a particular bad ruler is not as bad in every respect as the interventionists say without being smeared as an apologist for that ruler. For example, we can note that Assad, although a brutal dictator, has protected religious minorities, such as Christians, from the fanatical Sunni Muslims, such as al Qaeda and the late Islamic State. (Assad himself is a member of a religious minority, the Alawites, which is in the Shia branch of Islam.) Acknowledging Assad's record of protecting minorities does not make one a fan, much less a tool, of the Syrian ruler. Similarly, one ought to be able to point out that U.S. sanctions are partly responsible for Venezuela's problems without being accused of defending or overlooking Maduro's authoritarian state socialism, which by nature will always harm the very people it is perhaps intended to benefit.

Thus the case for nonintervention is independent of Assad's policy toward minorities and the consequences of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. (Those sanctions should end.) Nonintervention stands on its own merits.

I find it necessary to discuss what ought to be obvious because recently I've seen people committing these fallacies: a few noninterventionists have appeared to suggest that a potential target of U.S. intervention, Maduro, isn't really so bad, while some interventionists have accused noninterventionists of being soft on some demonstrably horrible rulers.

Another fallacy I've encountered is the equation of noninterventionism with nationalism, specifically with a belief that national borders are sacrosanct. The fallacy here is in thinking that the libertarian case for nonintervention rests on a reverence for national boundaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Noninterventionism and open (i.e., essentially abolished) borders go hand in hand.
So why the iron rule against nonintervention if borders are not sacrosanct? Albert Jay Nock and Murray Rothbard both answered this question: as long as we live in a world of states, to minimize the harm, we are obliged to keep the state we labor under on, as Nock put it, as short a leash as possible. This is true in domestic policy, but it is even more urgent in foreign affairs since presidents have frightening and acutely lethal autonomy in that realm. We should need no reminder that when the U.S. government intervenes in a foreign conflict, it makes things worse -- much worse -- especially for noncombatants. So nonintervention is motivated not only by a wish to keep the state as small as possible, but also to minimize bloodshed by abstaining from exacerbating other people's conflicts. Bluntly put, we must keep states from clashing. It's got nothing to do with a reverence for borders.

In the harsh light of 21st-century American foreign policy, we can see that the cause of nonintervention has never been more urgent. Let's not burden it with irrelevant considerations.

(For a statement of libertarian noninterventionism, see my "Libertarianism Means Noninterventionism.")

TGIF --The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays.

TGIF: America's War Culture

For most of the opinion-making class in America today, war is the default position. Representatives of establishment newspapers and TV news operations are not likely to grill someone who favors U.S. military intervention somewhere -- anywhere. He or she will have no burden of proof to sustain. But persons who oppose a new war or call for an end to an existing one are sure to be treated like oddballs if not traitors. They’d better have an extraordinarily strong defense of their position because the burden of proof will be squarely on them, but even a strong defense won’t get the heat turned down.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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TGIF: War Over Ukraine?

Who wants to go to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine over the Kerch Strait, which lies between the Black and Azov seas and between Russia’s Taman Peninsula and Russian-annexed Crimea? 

A show of hands, please.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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TGIF: "Peace Through Strength" Is a Racket

Donald Trump has embraced the popular "peace through strength" doctrine (PTSD) with his characteristic panache: 

"I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody — absolutely nobody — is gonna to mess with us," Trump says. On other occasions he's said similar things: "We want to defer, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military strength" and, a year ago, "Nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history."

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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TGIF: The Bogosity of Trump's "America First"

It says something about the complexity of language (and me perhaps) that I took so long to realize that Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, which I found off-putting from the start, consists of the same words as the name of the pre-World War II organization I’ve respected for decades.

The same phrase coming from Trump and John T. Flynn, author of the must-read anti-fascist work As We Go Marching, has two different meanings for me, as though the very words were different.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Trump Never Was a Noninterventionist

Can Donald Trump’s foreign policy “doctrine” and presidential actions accurately be described as noninterventionist? Strangely, Glenn Greenwald thinks so. In “Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised,” Greenwald writes, “Trump explicitly ran as a ‘non-interventionist’ — denouncing, for instance, U.S. regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (even though he at some points expressed support for the first two). Many commentators confused ‘non-interventionism’ with ‘pacifism,’ leading many of them — to this very day — to ignorantly claim that Trump’s escalated war on terror bombing is in conflict with his advocacy of non-interventionism. It is not.”

I’m a big fan of Greenwald’s work, but I believe he is among the confused here.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: "Isolationist" Trump Rattles His Saber

A few libertarians and other principled opponents of the warfare state assured us we likely would sleep easier with Donald Trump, rather than any neoconservative or humanitarian interventionist, in the White House. How's that working out? Not so well. I'm hoarding melatonin and buying stock in Lunesta.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Donald Trump, Hawk

Donald Trump is no peacenik. Leave aside Trump's proclamation that he "love[s] war" and unpredictability, and that he is more "militaristic" than anyone. Forget that he wants to enlarge the military and that he refuses to forswear first use of nuclear weapons. Ignore his bellicosity toward Iran and China or his promise to support Israel unconditionally. Pay no attention to Trump's 2002 endorsement of the invasion of Iraq and his imploring Obama to invade Libya and overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.

All we have to do to see the real Trump is examine his allegedly dovish statements.

Trump takes heat every time he expresses a wish to get along with Russia. This in itself would be good: the United States and Russia could destroy the world with their nuclear weapons. But the ruling elite disagrees. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance, U.S. rulers have provoked Russia by incorporating its former allies and republics into NATO and enabling a coup against an elected Russia-friendly president of Ukraine, jeopardizing Russia's naval base in Crimea.

But would Trump really pursue peaceful relations with Russia? It's not so clear. When asked about his views on Russia at the recent joint appearance with Hillary Clinton, he noted that Russia is "fighting ISIS," which he implied puts the United States on the same side. "I believe we have to get ISIS," he said. "We have to worry about ISIS before we can get too much more involved."

Note the words before we can get too much more involved. Trump's statement indicates that working with Russia is merely a matter of priorities. First  ISIS, then ... what? More intervention, presumably against Syria's ruler, Bashar al-Assad.

After all, Assad is an ally of Iran, which Trump demonizes daily. We have no reason to think that if he presided over the defeat of ISIS, Trump would continue to cooperate on Syria with Russia, which like Iran would still have influence in the Middle East. Thin-skinned nationalist Trump is unlikely to suffer what he regards as impertinences from these nations, which resent having an American president define their places in the world.

Let's dig a little deeper. Trump's wish to cooperate with Russia against ISIS raises the question: why is defeating ISIS a proper function of the U.S. government? Trump would say ISIS is a threat to Americans at home. But this only shows that he has learned nothing from the catastrophic neoconservative foreign policy he claims to repudiate. Terrorist acts against noncombatant Americans, including the 9/11 attacks, have been provoked by U.S. intervention in the Muslim world: support for tyrants, invasions and occupations, bombings of seven countries, and the underwriting of Israel's wars on the Palestinians and Lebanese. This indicates that the best way to eliminate or minimize the (grossly exaggerated) threat of terrorism in America is to replace the bipartisan interventionism that Trump pretends to oppose with the noninterventionism and free trade that Gary Johnson advocates.

Instead Trump wants to "bomb the shit" out of ISIS. He wants to torture suspected terrorists. He wants to kill the relatives of those suspects. That would only inspire more terrorism. Trump has obviously learned nothing from the wars he once supported and now falsely claims to have opposed.

Revealingly, although Trump says the U.S. government should not overthrow Assad (now), he faults President Obama for not attacking Assad's regime in 2013 when it allegedly crossed Obama's red line by using chemical weapons in the war raging in Syria. (Significant doubts exist over the claim that it was Assad who used those weapons.) Obama wisely refused to attack Syria, despite the urging of Secretary of State John Kerry and the war party. But what did he do instead? He took up Russia's offer to work together to destroy Assad's chemical weapons. Shouldn't that have pleased Trump? It might have -- if Trump was a person who engaged in coherent thought rather than anything-goes talking-point opportunism.

How revealing, incidentally, that the war party despises Obama for working with Vladimir Putin to remove the chemical weapons peacefully. The hawks apparently hate to lose any chance to unleash American military power against the people of the Middle East.

Contrary to popular misconception, Trump is a conventional interventionist who merely tries to differentiate himself from the others. With doves like that, who needs hawks?

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

15 Years

Today is the 15th anniversary of the day that thousands of American noncombatants paid the domestic butcher's bill for US foreign policy. Shame on every interventionist.

Gary Johnson: The Cost of War

Obama's War

If the death of the Navy SEAL in Iraq prompts the US government to withdraw from the Middle East, he will have not died in vain.