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.

Paine on War

"It may with reason be said, that in the manner the English nation is represented, it signifies not where this right resides, whether in the Crown, or in the Parliament. War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a by-stander, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest, would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

—Thomas Paine

Hammers, Nails, and War

The old saying about the guy who only has a hammer and thus sees all problems as nails is a story about psychology. He's let the available tool warp his vision. 

The same goes for people who see war, or more generally the state, as the only real tool. It warps their vision. We need not ascribe bad motives, just bad judgment, to such people. They may not be blood-thirsty, psychopathic warmongers, as some people describe them.

TGIF: Socialism Is War by Other Means

Readers may have wondered about a quote I used from Ludwig von Mises recently. In his book Liberalism Mises distinguished the (classical) liberal case against war from what he called the "humanitarian" case against war. To understand Mises, let's examine a "humanitarian" on the war question: philosopher, psychologist, and eugenicist William James (1842-1910). Is it relevant to the largely illiberal antiwar movement today? Let's see.

Whether Mises was thinking of James when the great economist wrote the "peace" section of Liberalism (1926), I cannot say. He may well have. James had given a lecture titled "The Moral Equivalent of War," which appeared in his book Memories and Studies (1911). It's an instructive lecture, and antiwar thinkers and activists should read it. James said:

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war.

James believed that while no American would wish for another "war for our Union" (that is, war of secession), neither would anyone vote to have it "expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles." In other words, James said, modern Americans have a love-hate relationship with war. War's blood, death, and destruction were not enough to put them off its inherent bravery, heroism,  and discipline—virtues that men have celebrated for millennia. The war ethic is hardwired into us, James thought.

The question James raised was how society could have the glory without the gore.

The Soul of a Socialist

 From the pen of H. G. Wells (1908), socialist:

War is a collective concern; to turn one’s back upon it, to refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit. 

In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little shortsighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now for such superannuated things.

TGIF: Full versus Shrunken Liberalism

Language, like the old common law and other customs, is a decentralized, undesigned, spontaneous institution. It serves humanity well. Nothing is perfect, of course, but no alternative—if one were conceivable—could hold a candle to it.

One of the downsides is that people may change how they use handy expressions; more wordy phrases may be needed to replace a "corrupted" one. Here's one: classical liberal. Liberal, of course, originally related to individual liberty and its conditions and consequences: private property, constraints on government power, and free markets. It still means something like this outside of America. (A few pioneering liberals, such as Gustave de Molinari, thought the free market could produce security better than the state could.)

Then "progressives" hijacked the word liberal in America and England. Perhaps they didn't want to be associated with socialism. Now it meant advocating the welfare state and government intervention in the market for the sake of so-called "social justice." Private property was pushed to the back burner. The commitment to free speech and other civil liberties continued, but "modern liberalism" had little else in common with original liberalism even in the matter of war and peace.

Because of this change, the qualifier classical became necessary to distinguish original liberals from the welfare/warfare-state, or mixed-economy, advocates. Later, classical liberals started using libertarian to ensure no one was confused. That word has the same root as liberty, and even though socialists of various stripes had used it, the word has nothing to do intrinsically with socialism, that is, the abolition of private property in the means of production. Since socialism must extinguish liberty, the word libertarian is supremely inappropriate for that philosophy.

Like free people and free markets, language never stands still. Lately, classical liberalism has come to mean not advocacy of individual liberty across the board; rather, it signifies a "modern liberal" (an opponent of laissez faire) who continues to believe in free speech. Today we have the spectacle of nonclassical classical liberals. Go figure.

Why did this happen? It seems this came about because in this century, many welfare-state liberals, Democrats for the most part, gave up on free speech. Their former heroes, such as Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, stopped being heroes. Just recently Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz have unambiguously opposed free speech and First Amendment protection on the internet and social media. Kerry summed up his side's case well: because all sorts of views and information are easy to come by these days, "it's really hard to govern today." Poor politicians. Meanwhile, Clinton, who favors repealing Section 230—which exempts social media companies from liability for what users post—says that if those companies do not monitor content as the government wishes, "We lose total control." Control of what? Us, you and me. Obama says government oversight is required, and Walz compared freedom of expression to shouting fire in a crowded theater. First Amendment? What's that? Pathetic, all of them.

These alleged liberals were delighted to see the government lay its heavy hand on social media to suppress information they did not like about COVID-19, Hunter Biden's laptop, and other matters. In some quarters, opposition to free speech combined with a rising interest in an anti-Western value system ("woke-ness") and cultural Marxism left over from the 1960s. Criticism of the Enlightenment grew more common.

Fortunately, this was too much for some "modern liberals." So those who remained committed to reason and free speech picked up the label classical liberal to distinguish themselves from their former colleagues.

The new classical liberals, of course, are not original classical liberals. They are modern welfare-state interventionist liberals, not advocates of individual liberty across the board, including the free market. I've heard some of these thinkers, whom I admire and have learned from, insist that they are still on the "left" and so are not "economic liberals." (I would not put original liberalism on the left-right spectrum, which is incoherent.)

Hence, I suggest we distinguish full liberalism from shrunken liberalism.

Shrunken liberalism espouses free speech, free press, abortion rights, and other civil liberties —but that is pretty much it. What's missing? Any direct reference to so-called economic liberty!

As I've explained before, I don't like the term economic liberty because full, original liberalism refused to carve the individual into personal and economic spheres. The a person is an integrated whole. Each pursues a variety of chosen ends, some involving money and some not, and adapts means best suited to his objectives. Economics is necessary for analyzing those pursuits and the social implications, but the ends are neither economic nor non-economic. They simply are personal ends. The marketplace for goods and services is a marketplace of ideas. The price system, which communicates information to us all, should be protected by the First Amendment.

That is why full liberals proudly did and do champion full-spectrum freedom: civil liberties, the free market, and peace, with its complementary opposition to imperialism and what Jefferson called "entangling alliances." It's as important today as it was in the time of Richard Cobden, John Bright, Lord Acton, Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Ludwig von Mises.

It was Sumner who answered the charge of isolationism leveled against the opponents of the empire-building during the Spanish-American War (a charge made today against noninterventionists) with this:

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.

in his book 1927 book, Liberalism, laissez-faire advocate and intellectual destroyer of socialism Mises declared:

The liberal critique of the argument in favor of war is fundamentally different from that of the humanitarians [who sought a bloodless "moral equivalent of war"]. It starts from the premise that not war, but peace, is the father of all things. What alone enables mankind to advance and distinguishes man from the animals is social cooperation. It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man. War only destroys; it cannot create. War, carnage, destruction, and devastation we have in common with the predatory beasts of the jungle; constructive labor is our distinctively human characteristic. The liberal abhors war, not, like the humanitarian, in spite of the fact that it has beneficial consequences, but because it has only harmful ones.

The list of full-liberal positions is not random. As Mises pointed out, war is antithetical to individual freedom, private property, the division of labor, and global free exchange, Altogether this constitutes social cooperation.

So we must point this out to the well-meaning shrunken liberals. Bravo on your continued commitment to free speech, other civil liberties, and reason! But don't stop there. Without full liberalism, we aren't fully free.

History and Peace

 "[E]very person must take his life and every nation must take its history as it comes; nothing is more useless than complaining over errors that can no longer be rectified, nothing more vain than regret. Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations. Whoever approaches history the way a prosecutor approaches the documents of a criminal case—to find material for indictments—had better stay away from it. It is not the task of history to gratify the need of the masses for heroes and scapegoats.

"That is the position a nation should take toward its history. It is not the task of history to project the hatred and disagreements of the present back into the past and to draw from battles fought long ago weapons for the disputes of one’s own time. History should teach us to recognize causes and to understand driving forces; and when we understand everything, we will forgive everything."

--Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, 1919

History and Conflict

"We cannot eradicate the past from our memories. But it is not the task of history to kindle new conflicts by reviving hatreds long since dead and by searching the archives for pretexts for new conflicts. We do not have to revenge crimes committed centuries ago by kings and conquerors; we have to build a new and better world order [i.e., the liberal market economy rooted in private property]."

--Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, 1944

TGIF: Don't Police the World

"We" -- to be precise, U.S. policymakers and their quasi-private-sector, tax-nourished enablers-beneficiaries--  must not police the world, become directly involved in wars, covertly assist belligerents, or act as arms merchants and bankers.

The central government can't be a benign policeman, even if its intentions were as stated (which they may be): international rules-based order and economic stability. But it can wreak havoc by trying. We know this because it already has. Pick your start date, but the last 30 years present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of what U.S.-sponsored "order" really looks like, thanks to an unbroken bipartisan chain of presidents and a bunch of presumptuous bumblers who wear weighty political titles from the executive and legislative branches. (The judiciary isn't off the hook either.)

The U.S. government's inherent ineptness speaks volumes. "Ought" implies "can," and the policy mavens cannot. Wishful thinking is no substitute for real thinking. Each new crisis is not so different from previous ones as to make it unique. We can and must learn from the past, even the past that is so recent it's still the present.

Government "crisis management" is a contradiction in terms. War typically has calamitous results, however optimistic the prognostications and later assessments. Helping a belligerent bloodies the hands of the helper, even if only metaphorically. Fighting proxy wars, which the policymakers might prefer to direct war these days, or engaging in covert operations is no moral shield. The horrendous consequences are foreseeable. Pleading that "We didn't intend the bad stuff" does not wash. Call it "collateral damage," whatever the policymakers call it, they enable the ruin of innocent lives and entire societies. We should have no part of it.

We know what war brings. It brings the death and dismemberment of innocents, always including children. It brings the utter destruction of the things that make life possible, such as food, water, homes, hospitals, and infrastructure. The chance of killing only bad guys is zero. I think the government's own war simulations would agree. Hypothetical rosy scenarios offered in somber tones from secure stateside arms chairs don't count. Even moves intended as defensive may understandably be perceived as aggressive, bringing snowballing countermoves that threaten more innocents and risk turning a local conflict into a big-power confrontation. The danger of nuclear war always looms.

Before considering joining in a war, assume the worst. Then don't join. It's the safe bet.

On top of that misery, intervening in wars sets the stage for terrible events to follow: revolution, dictatorship, government control of everyday life, atrocious recriminations, and plain chaos. That's the safe bet too.

Intervention also sets the stage for aggrieved foreigners who want revenge against the country that is seen to have enabled their adversaries. If that is not the lesson of at least the last 30 years, what is? Direct and indirect participation in wars can come home to roost traumatically. Policing the world or arming one part against another is no recipe for security. And let's not forget the excuse the U.S. government seizes to spy on and censor Americans in the name of national security.

The likely human cost of an interventionist foreign policy is prohibitive, but that's not the only cost. The money price tag is also gigantic, and the U.S. government doesn't have the money. It has to borrow it -- the debt is larger than the GDP and growing -- and that means Federal Reserve monetary creation and the theft of our purchasing power. It's a subtle form of taxation that politicians use when they believe that the taxpayers don't want a tax increase.

Finally, there is the lack of consent. It would be bad enough if the arrogant policymakers sowed their destruction on their own dime and in their own name. But they don't. They presume to speak for us and to make us pay for their adventures. I never signed that blank check, did you?

But they don't need our consent. The game was rigged long ago. Hypothetical consent is good enough, and most people go along because they're busy living and virtually powerless anyway. They also heard about it in the government's schools.

Helping other governments fight wars is crazy. That's not isolationism because the position embraces free trade with the world (unmanaged by governments) and the free movement of people. The word is nonintervention. When war breaks out, government personnel should be permitted to do only one thing: call for a cease-fire!

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: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes.

U.S. war, of course, threatens the liberty and lives of Americans, not to mention foreigners. That's why Randolph Bourne wrote, "War is the health of the state." When private individuals condemn tyranny abroad and U.S. war against it, they are pursuing the same cause.

That many people who denounce tyranny in Russia, China, and elsewhere are enthusiasts for U.S.-led war (or proxy war) is no reason to assume that every American opponent of foreign tyranny also favors war. Principled noninterventionism must not appear to whitewash despicable regimes for the sake of damping war fever (or any other reason). For one thing, that would imply that war against acknowledged tyrannies would be good -- which it would not. Noninterventionism stands on its own merits, whatever the nature of the state's imagined threat du jour.

So one can oppose the U.S. war party while denouncing, among others, the regimes of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The oppression of their domestic populations, China's threat to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Russia's war on Ukraine should not be played down because the war party also denounces them. That U.S. policymakers have made things worse through economic sanctions and other provocations -- like the expansion of NATO and the instigation of coups -- is no excuse for giving those atrocious regimes a pass. Bad regimes don't become good because American politicians also do wrong. 

What prompts these thoughts is a man named Jimmy Lai, who just won the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Lai, a 75-year-old Hong Kong businessman-turned-pro-liberty-publisher/activist, is in prison and faces more charges, having been oppressed by the Chinese government for his pro-freedom activities. Lai is the most famous example of China's attempt to crush the individual, but he's far from the only one.

His story is inspiring as well as heartbreaking. (See the movie "The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai's Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom.") Born poor in China in 1947, he escaped to Hong Kong before he was a teenager. He worked in a factory and eventually started his own apparel manufacturer and retail chain, Giordano, which has been a huge success.

While until 1997 Hong Kong was been a British colony without democratic institutions, it largely had a free market and other classical liberal features. Milton Friedman celebrated its essentially laissez-faire market system in his television series, Free to Choose. Because of this freedom, which included the rule of law as well as freedom of speech and press, Hong Kong it went from very poor after World War II to very rich in short order. Bear in mind that Hong Kong has no resources: even drinking water has to be imported. But it had enterprising free people, and markets, including free trade with the world.

A better demonstration of the market in action is hard to imagine. But Hong Kong's future had a dark cloud over it: the Chinese communist government.

In 1997 the British relinquished control of Hong Kong to China under the terms of the 99-year lease Great Britain and China had signed. As part of the turnover, the Chinese communist government agreed to respect Hong Kong's autonomy for 50 years, but many doubted that the Chinese government would leave Hong Kong alone before or after 2047. It didn't keep hands off for long.

That government offered an ominous preview of the future on mainland China eight years before the British turned over Hong Kong: the horrific violence against pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. This was a decade after had China significantly liberalized economic, but not political, activity. One-party rule prevailed, and dissent was not tolerated.

As a result of the violence, according to the Cato announcement, "Lai founded Next Media (which became Next Digital in 2015) and launched Next magazine. Next became the top news magazine in Hong Kong for over 30 years." Among other claims to fame, "it was also known for its strong advocacy of free markets, lower regulation, and economic choice in all matters."

Lai's promotion of freedom, which he says was inspired by F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, started to get him in trouble. "Following a column in the magazine in 1994, in which Lai told then Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng to 'drop dead,' China began to force the closures of branches of Giordano on the mainland. Lai sold his share of that company and in 1995 launched Apple Daily, which was a combination of tabloid journalism, democracy advocacy, and a loud and clear free-market message."

That newspaper became a much-read paper, which the Chinese government would eventually shut down as it tightened the screws on Lai.

In 2014 Lai's participation in pro-democracy demonstrations got him arrested. He further irritated China's rulers five years later when on a  visit to the United States he met with high-profile government officials. Perhaps he should have skipped that part of the trip. Past U.S. government meddling in many countries has made it too easy for repressive governments to smear dissidents as foreign agents.

Cato continues:

His clashes with authorities intensified sharply in 2019, especially after the July 2020 enactment of a sweeping Chinese national security law that is now expanding mainland China’s suppression of the Hong Kong people.

Lai was arrested on February 28, 2020, and again on April 18 for alleged participation in unlawful demonstrations the previous year. Police arrested him again on August 10, 2020, for alleged collusion with foreign powers. He was arrested again and denied bail on December 3 after being charged with fraud. He was formally charged under China’s national security law on December 11.

Libertarians know how so-called national security laws can empower any government to get away with all manner of repression.

Lai was granted bail on highly restrictive terms on December 23, only to have bail revoked on December 31. Subsequent applications for bail under the national security law were denied on the grounds that he might commit further offenses. Lai was arrested again on February 17, 2021, while already in prison for allegedly helping 12 fugitives in their failed attempt to escape Hong Kong for Taiwan.

The Chinese government threw nearly everything it had at him, but all reports say that it has not broken his spirit.

On April 16, 2021, Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison for the alleged organization of, and participation in, two unauthorized marches in 2019. In December 2022, Lai was sentenced to five years in prison for a lease violation that was then elevated to a fraud charge and subsequently investigated by China’s national security police, prosecuted by a national security prosecutor, and tried by a national security judge. A conviction in the ongoing national security case, scheduled for trial in September 2023, could result in a sentence of life in prison. [Emphasis added.]

Lai could have left Hong Kong when his troubles began, as some of his associates had done. He chose to stay and fight for the freedom of Hong Kong. That takes courage few people have.

TGIF: When History Begins - Russia, Ukraine & the US

Contrary to what hypocritical U.S. rulers and their loyal mass media suggest, two propositions can both be -- and indeed are -- true:

1. that Russia has grossly, brutally, and criminally mishandled the situation it has faced with respect to Ukraine, and
2. that the U.S. government since the late 1990s has been entirely responsible for imposing that situation on Russia.

If you want the fine details, you can do no better than to watch my Libertarian Institute colleague Scott Horton's excellent cataloging of the irresponsible misdeeds of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joseph Biden in this recent lecture. If, after absorbing this shocking record of indisputable facts, you are seething at what the U.S. government has done to squander a historic chance for good relations with Russia, you will be fully justified -- and then some. (See also this 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer, the respected "realist" foreign policy analyst at the University of Chicago.)

To appreciate what bipartisan U.S. foreign policy has wrought, think about 1989 when the undreamt-of virtually bloodless dismantling of the Soviet empire began. At that point humanity was on the verge of a new chapter in which the world's largest nuclear superpowers would no longer confront each other, holding everyone hostage. Think about that, and then learn how the U.S. government blew it deliberately, despite all the warnings that the consequences would be dire. (Over-optimism about what might have been is always a danger. In 1990, when President George H. W. Bush ordered Iraq's Saddam Hussein to remove his army from Kuwait, Bush declared a "New World Order," admonishing, "What we say goes." The Russians no doubt noticed.)

How so? By kicking the Russian people in the teeth repeatedly in all kinds of ways when they were reeling from seven decades of communism. If the U.S. government's intent had been to destroy the chance for this historic turn, it couldn't have done a better job.

Americans have a funny way of thinking that history began the day of the latest crisis. The politicians and media feed this bad habit. So if Russia invades Ukraine, the only explanation is that he's power-mad, if not just plain mad. The idea that the U.S. might have set the stage isn't allowed to be entertained. With social-media magnates sucking up to the power elite, this is serious stuff.

Do Americans want to know why Russia went to war? They might not like to hear that "their" government must shoulder a good deal of blame, but it's undeniable that since World War II the power that occupies Middle North America has had its heavy hand in virtually every part of the world. The rules of international law that all nations are supposed to observe simply don't apply to the United States. Just look at the invasions and regime changes that have gone on since 2001, not to mention back to the early 1950s. That's what it means to be the exceptional nation. The rules apply to everyone except America's rulers. (See Robert Wright's "In Defense of Whataboutism.")

This history forms the larger context in which the unconscionable Russian war on Ukraine -- with all the terror it's inflicting on innocents -- is taking place. It is unseemly for an American president to piously admonish the Russian government about its breaches of national sovereignty in light of the shameful U.S. record.

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. presidents have taken a series of actions that seemed designed to make the Russians distrust the West in the new era. This is not hindsight. As noted, many respected establishment foreign-policy figures warned against such measures.

The measures included the bombing of Russia's ally Serbia in the late 1990s; the repeated expansion of NATO, the postwar alliance founded to counter the Soviet Union, to include former Soviet allies and republics; the public talk of including the former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia in the Western alliance; the trashing of long-standing anti-nuclear-weapons treaties with Russia; the placing of defensive missile launchers (which could be converted to offensive launchers) in Poland and Romania: the attempts to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline deal; instigating the 2014 regime change in Ukraine (following earlier regime-changes operations in Ukraine and Georgia); the arming of Ukraine since 2017; the conducting of NATO war exercises, with U.S. personnel, near the Russian border; the years-long evidence-free effort to persuade Americans that Russia manipulated the 2016 presidential election to elect Donald Trump; and much, much, much more. Trump -- recall his goading of NATO members into spending more on their militaries -- was among the offenders: his anti-Russia moves, including NATO expansion like all of his 21st-century predecessors, would fill a list as long as Wilt Chamberlain's arm. If he was a Russian puppet, as the Democrats, intelligence apparatus, and mainstream media want us to believe, then the Russians have a great deal to learn about puppeteering.

Take one of the biggest spurs to war: the eastward expansion of NATO, which the U.S. government and Western Europe promised would not happen after Germany was reunited while the Soviet Union was heading toward termination. It happened anyway, but not because Russia had behaved badly toward the West. It hadn't. In fact, after 9/11 Russian ruler Vladimir Putin was the first to call Bush II to offer his support. Later Putin even suggested that Russia be invited to join NATO, something President George H. W. Bush had once mentioned. One wonders why NATO was even necessary with the Soviet Union gone, but if Russia could join -- really, what was the point?

The expansion of NATO by 1,200 miles toward Russia demonstrates how myopic American rulers can be. American critics repeatedly pointed out that no president would not have tolerated Russia's inviting Mexico and Canada into its now-defunct Warsaw Pact. Yet NATO now includes the Baltic states -- those former Soviet republics on the Russian border, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia --and Eastern European states that were once in the Warsaw Pact.

Indeed, we already know how the U.S. government reacts when its security concerns are flouted. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy was ready to launch a nuclear war against the Soviet Union when it placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. For days the world sat on the edge of its seat wondering if the end was near. (I remember it!) Finally, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev withdrew the missiles, but only when Kennedy secretly agreed to remove American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.

Later American presidents forgot about that crisis. Clinton added Warsaw Pact states late in his second term. Then it was Bush II's turn. At its April 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declared that it "welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." This was a fateful move. As noted, pillars of the foreign policy establishment from George Kennan to Paul Nitze to Robert McNamara had already forcefully spoken out against the first rounds of NATO expansion, which included the Baltic states. No less a figure than Willian Burns, Bush II's ambassador to Russia and now Biden's CIA chief, said in 2008,

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

Putin responded to the summit declaration, saying he deemed it a "direct threat" to Russia. A few months later, the emboldened president of Georgia, on Russia's southern border, attacked EU-authorized Russian peacekeepers in the Republic of South Ossetia, which had earlier broken away from Georgia. Russia responded by invading and occupying Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili thought -- no doubt lead on by the U.S. government -- that the West would back him up, but it did not. Washington, London, Paris, and the rest of NATO were not willing to go to risk a nuclear war with Russia over South Ossetia. (Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be imitating Shaakashvili.)

This is all too similar to what's going on today, but with something more. After talking about bringing Ukraine into NATO, the U.S. and EU in February 2014 instigated a coup in Kyiv, in which opponents of the government, including neo-Nazis, drove a democratically elected and Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, from office. A leaked recording of a phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (now a Biden official) and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that the coup and the new leadership of the country were orchestrated by the U.S. State Department. This followed billions of dollars in U.S. aid to "pro-democracy," that is, anti-Yanukovych, organizations.

Yanukovych had been willing to deal with the European Union, but when he balked at the terms of the proposed loan, Russia offered Ukraine $15 billion under more favorable terms. This the EU and U.S. government could not tolerate. Yanukovych had to go.

Keep in mind that eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which is filled with Russian-speaking people, had voted heavily for Yanukovych, with the western part going for his opponent. So driving out the elected president was a direct slap at the ethnic Russians. When the new government came to power, it downgraded Russians from official-language status and tried to cut back on the autonomy of the far-eastern provinces, the Donbas region, which borders Russia. Violence erupted and has continued. Meanwhile, Russia annexed Crimea, which has been a Russian security concern and the home of its only year-round warm-water naval base since the 18th century. Russia could not take the risk that Crimea would become a base for NATO forces. The predominantly ethnic Russians in Crimea approved of the annexation. But one thing Russia refused to do was to accept an annexation invitation from the people in the Donbas.

As a result, the U.S. government sent large amounts of aid to Ukraine, but Obama refused to send weapons because he did not want to escalate the conflict or risk direct war with Russia. He noted, properly, that Ukraine was a core security interest of Russia but not of the United States and that in a conflict over nearby Ukraine, Russia would have a large advantage over the United States, despite America's much larger military. Trump, however, reversed Obama's policy and sent massive arms shipments to Ukraine, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

As Russia increased pressure on Ukraine over the last year, with a buildup of troops near the border, it made clear its demands: no NATO membership for Ukraine and no missile launchers in Eastern Europe. Since taking office, Biden has talked tough, proclaiming that the United States would support Ukrainian sovereignty, while also saying, first, that U.S. troops would not be committed, second, that Ukraine would not be joining NATO anytime soon, and third, that offensive nuclear missiles would not be placed in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, he scoffed at Russia's demands, insisting that no one but NATO would decide who became a member. This sounded like schoolyard pettiness, with Biden refusing to formalize for Russia his disavowal of things that Biden had already said he would not do.

Would Russia have shelved plans for the invasion had Biden not been so wrongheaded? Who can say? But what was there to lose?

So here we are. The situation is dangerous in a global sense because, in the fog of war, shit happens. (Sorry.) It doesn't help that some prominent Americans, still in the minority, want the U.S. government to do more than impose sanctions, send even more troops to neighboring NATO countries, and further arm Ukraine, all of which Biden is doing -- some, like President Zelensky, are calling for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would bring America into direct military conflict with Russia. Some are even calling for regime change in Russia. Need we be reminded that, like the U.S. government, Russia has thousands of hydrogen bombs ready to launch. Are these people nuts?

No, history did not begin on February 24, 2022, or even March 18, 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

What now? It's ridiculous to think that Russia -- given its $1.5 trillion GDP (smaller than Italy's and Texas's) and $60 billion military budget (6 percent of the total U.S. military budget) -- is out to re-establish the Russian empire of old or the Soviet Union. To put things in perspective, the U.S. government has had recent annual increases in military spending that exceeded Russia's entire military budget.

The goal must be a ceasefire. Biden can facilitate that by doing what he should have done long ago: put in writing that Ukraine and Georgia will not join NATO, that the missile launchers will be removed from Eastern Europe, and that the war exercises on Russia's border will end. Ukraine could help by accepting the status of neutrality with Finland-like assurances that it will not let its territory be used offensively against Russia. Biden should also propose that the arms-control treaties trashed by Bush II and Trump will be reinstated in talks with Russia.

Russia, of course, should pledge to leave Ukraine and offer compensation, while the heavily ethnic Russian areas in the east are given the freedom to join Russia.

We need not be at war -- even if it's a new cold war -- with Russia.

TGIF: Joe Biden, Let's Not Go to War with Russia

Here's a good idea: let's not go to war against Russia. Let's not even rattle a saber at Russia (or China, for that matter) because even wars that no one really wants can be blundered into. Many losers would be left in the aftermath, even if nuclear weapons were kept out of sight, but no one would win. So as that smart Defense Department computer says in the 1983 movie WarGames, "The only winning move is not to play."

The crisis du jour is Ukraine; before that, it was Georgia, both former Soviet republics. For some inexplicable reason, Russia's rulers get nervous when the U.S. foreign policy elite treats Russian historical security concerns as of no consequence. Could it have something to do with the several invasions of Russia through Eastern Europe in the past? Jeez, from the way the irrational Russians behave, you'd think their American counterparts never invoked U.S. security concerns (usually bogus) as a reason for military action. As if...

But maybe it is time for America's rulers to take Russian worries into consideration. Even for those of us who are no fans of Vladimir Putin and the government he runs, this seems like good advice – if for no other reason than narrow American self-interest. At least, that's how it looks from the view of regular Americans, who might appreciate for a change what Adam Smith described as "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice."

Anyone who has paid attention to U.S. foreign policy since the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance, 1989-91, would realize that America's bipartisan foreign-policy elite has taken precisely the wrong tack by baiting nervous Russian nationalists at every turn. Despite promises to the contrary, that elite has led the charge to add members to the NATO alliance, taking the anti-Soviet military and political organization right up to the Russian border and staging military exercises uncomfortably close. The U.S. has also sold weapons systems to NATO-member Poland, formerly a member of the Warsaw Pact.

Putin insists that NATO not expand any further, but Biden told him to shut up. The U.S. position is that NATO's inclusion of former Soviet possessions is purely an alliance affair. Meanwhile, Biden threatens more harsh economic sanctions and even more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe if Putin doesn't acquiesce by, among other things, moving his troops away from the Russia-Ukraine border

Let's also recall that in 2014 the U.S. stood behind a neo-Nazi-supported coup against an elected, Russian-friendly president in Ukraine, knowing full well how the Russians would react. Fearing U.S./NATO encroachment, Putin's government annexed Crimea with its strategic warm-water Black Sea naval base, which has been part of the Russian security system for over 200 years. Nevertheless, and most relevant to today's heightened tensions, Putin declined an opportunity to annex eastern Ukraine (the Donbass region full of ethnic Russians ) when a majority there voted for independence from Kiev.

You didn't have to know too much about European history to see how provocative the U.S.-sponsored regime change in Ukraine would be. To make matters worse, Ukraine and Georgia have become de facto NATO members, but only because the U.S. elite has not yet convinced its European counterparts to give those two former Soviet republics official membership. That, however, hasn't stopped Washington from extending a security guarantee to Ukraine that is all too much like the one that NATO members extend to one another. Biden has just reinforced that guarantee.

Which Americans are ready to die for Kiev?

For some reason it's easy for Americans, who can be as nationalistically self-centered as anyone, to assume that any ratcheting up of tensions with Russia must be the Russians' fault. The establishment media have no problem presenting this as an indisputable fact. But how do they know it's true? They never furnish evidence. Foreign-policy expert Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute has a much more evidence-bound take:

Moscow’s behavior has been more a reaction to aggressive moves that the United States and its Ukrainian client have already taken than it is evidence of offensive intent. Russian leaders have viewed the steady expansion of NATO’s membership and military presence eastward toward Russia’s border since the late 1990s suspiciously and they have considered Washington’s growing strategic love affair with Kiev as especially provocative.

Moreover, Carpenter adds,

Ukraine’s own policies have become dangerously bellicose. The government’s official security doctrine adopted earlier this year, for example, focuses on retaking Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014 following the West’s campaign that helped demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president. Statements by President Volodymyr Zelensky and other leaders have been disturbingly bellicose, and Ukraine’s own military deployments have further destabilized an already fragile situation.

Carpenter points out that while the United States is far more powerful than Russia in conventional terms, "unless the United States and its allies are willing to wage an all-out war against Russia, an armed conflict confined to Ukraine (and perhaps some adjacent territories), would diminish much of that advantage. Russian forces would be operating close to home, with relatively short supply and communications lines. US forces would be operating far from home with extremely stressed lines. In other words, there is no certainty that the US would prevail in such a conflict."

Would the Biden administration then back down or go nuclear? Who is eager to find out?

Those considerations aside, the U.S. government should simply stop fanning the Russophobic flames simply because a war would be incredibly stupid.

TGIF: U(nspeakably) S(adistic) Foreign Policy

If you had set out to construct a foreign policy designed to impose indescribable suffering on millions of innocent people around the world, you'd have a tough time coming up with anything more systematic and effective than U.S. foreign policy. An inventory of U.S. direct military and covert operations, aid to savage governments and murderous "rebels," and economic sanctions would easily lead one to think that the architects of this constellation of policies aimed to inflict death and maximum pain on innocent bystanders. It has been one series of crimes against humanity.

That would be an oversimplification of course. Clearly, the makers and executors of those policies have not merely aimed to inflict such suffering on innocents. Larger geopolitical goals have always been in play. But that by no means mitigated the results, which have been foreseeable and avoidable. Besides, the geopolitical goals are themselves to be condemned, seeing as how they flow from U.S. rulers' "exceptional nation" zeal to shape the world according to their idea of what's good.

Nor does it help to point out that the foreign regimes and other targets of U.S. policy have often perpetrated unfathomable brutality against innocents. The fact is that U.S. intervention predictably enlarges local and regional violence by orders of magnitude. So other people's crimes are no excuse for U.S. piling on.

Over many years, from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and throughout Asia, U.S. policymakers have imposed great hardship in a variety of forms: open combat through invasion and occupation, covert activities, and aid to allied repressive governments and insurgent groups aiming at regime change.

And then there are the economic sanctions. The U.S. government seems ready to impose sanctions on a population at the drop of a hat. (Thomas Jefferson called sanctions "peaceful coercion" presumably because shots need not be fired.) News of sanctions gets good play in the media. They may even bring sighs of relief if the public sees them as a substitute for sending American troops into yet another endless war. But detailed media follow-up is rare, and the real story of suffering is rarely told. On their own, most people won't give the sanctions on any given country a moment's thought, much less use their common sense to trace out the lethal implications. They certainly won't read sources that specialize in meticulous description of the ugly consequences.

Sanctions of course cut the target population off from global trade/finance and humanitarian assistance. The policy is meant to keep building materials, food, medicines, medical equipment, and other critical goods from reaching the victims of the policy. These are not unavoidable and unfortunate secondary consequences or collateral damage. They are the prime objective. That is nothing less than policy sadism, crimes against humanity.

Often sanctions are defended on the grounds that they will cause the stricken people to rise up and overthrow their bad rulers. But does that ever happen? It appears not. (The U.S. government has had sanctions on Cuba and Iran for a very long time, to name just two stark examples.)

Instead, people rally around "their" existing government in opposition to the cruel foreign government that is making their lives miserable. That's the most likely reaction, and it's unreasonable to expect otherwise. (Not that the policy would be justified under other circumstances.)

As has been pointed out so often, sanctions also give the government of the target country a plausible excuse for its own home-grown economic disasters. A government that tries to centralize economic activity according to a top-down plan will always fail miserably, creating terrible hardship including starvation  and disease for the public. In the absence of foreign intervention, the target public might figure out that the hardship is the government planners' fault, and that could lead to some kind of movement for change, possibly toward a free or at least freer market-based society.

But if the country is the target of sanctions, especially imposed by the powerful U.S. government (which has the clout to force other governments to comply), the local rulers can blame their own shortcomings on the outside intervention--blockades, boycotts, and the like--and survive. The self-serving rulers may even be able to throw in credible allegations about CIA-sponsored "liberal" insurgents because this sort of thing has happened often before. Most people in the population won't have the information necessary to understand their rulers' crimes and so will continue to look to those rulers for assistance in hard times. Savvy governments will score points by providing some relief to at least part of the population. Meanwhile, the rulers will demonize America, perhaps even creating conditions in which terrorism takes place.

In other words, sanctions may be counterproductive even from the point of view of the U.S. government. This, however, may not be the case if it wants to sow chaos in the target country and use terrorism as an excuse to violate civil liberties at home. That, too, of course would be sadism in action.

While I've focused on the harm U.S. sanctions inflict on the target populations, we should also mention that they have bad consequences for Americans who are not part of the policy elite. Sanctions obviously forbid them from trading with the target populations, harming firms and their employees and shareholders. This should not be overlooked, though the primary victims are the people of the target countries.

The upshot is that in the name of the American people but without their real consent, the political elite casually imposes unimaginable cruelties on foreign populations in pursuit of objectives that are not in the interest of Americans. The ordinary people of the target countries simply do not count in the policymakers' global gamesmanship. They are expendable. This is intolerable. Somehow the mass of the American people must be made aware of this long-standing cruelty so that they may be enlisted in a campaign to finally end the unspeakable sadism.

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

A Defense of the Peaceful Transfer of War-Making Power

Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausevitz famously said that "war is a continuation of politics by other means." I think we can reverse this: politics is war by other means. The ultimate aim of politics (in the narrow sense of the word; there's a more elevated philosophical sense) is what Frederic Bastiat called "legal plunder."

Other thinkers have elaborated this idea. Franz Oppenheimer's book The State comes to mind. Oppenheimer influenced Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and through them the modern libertarian movement. Oppenheimer distinguished work -- which he called the "economic means" -- from robbery -- the "political means."

A gang can raid a group of productive people, steal their stuff, and ride off to the next community to plunder anew. Or it can stay around and keep looting the same people. Now people tend not to like this and won't be terribly productive. So to pull this off, the gang will need to convince the people that the arrangement is for their own good. The gang will promise to protect them from other gangs (which it will surely want to do) and provide other services that will tend to keep the people quiescent. The booty they will be deprived of will be relabeled taxes.

To sell this set-up to the people, the gang will need intellectuals or priests to formulate a religion, ideology, or what-have-you to persuade the people that this is all for their benefit. Why? Because rebellion is costly to rulers. For one thing, people who are busy resisting tyranny won't be producing stuff, which would undercut the point of politics: legal plunder. Better for the rulers, therefore, that the people (at least tacitly) consent to or acquiesce in the arrangement after being encouraged to believe that they are net beneficiaries, despite the palpable costs. Controlling education is useful in this regard.

So we might well look on politics as war on productive people by other means.

This has implications for the revered idea of the peaceful transfer of power, which is much in the news these days. The power that is to be peacefully transferred is the power to make war both domestically and internationally.

Does this mean that we ought to denigrate the peaceful transfer of power? No, of course not. Political power is properly and always an object of suspicion and (one hopes) diminution, but that is no justification for violent transfer. Violence embodies its own intrinsic evils and cannot be controlled or finely targeted. Collateral damage is the rule, not the exception. Moreover, violence will usually result in far worse state abuses -- with the support of most people, who will abhor civil disorder.

When President Woodrow Wilson and his Progressive supporters pushed for U.S. entry into the Great War, Randolph Bourne broke with his former allies and eloquently opposed their crusade. What especially irked Bourne was the Progressives' argument that entering the war would advance their reform agenda.

Bourne disagreed: "He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes." Of course, Bourne is also the one who wrote that "war is the health of the state." Both quotations argue against violence as a means of social change. Even in the face of tyranny, we should favor a presumption of nonviolence, or what Bryan Caplan calls "pragmatic pacifism." (Also see this.)

The methods of nonviolent resistance have long been fleshed out by Gene Sharp. (See Carl Watner's "Without Firing A Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense.") 

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.

Drop Everything and Read this Article!

"How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda" by Nathan J. Robinson is an extraordinarily important article. I cannot recommend it too highly. Read it now!

Interview: America's Bipartisan War Culture

I recently talked to Scott Horton about America's war culture. Listen here.

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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