The January 2015 issue of Reason Magazine contains an instructive symposium with the tantalizing title, “In search of Libertarian Realism.” My views, as expressed here and here are, to some extent, a foil for the writers who participated in the symposium, so I am taking this opportunity to be an uninvited guest to the debate courtesy of the good offices of Ricochet

The best news about the symposium is that it was brought together in the first place. The title, and the tone of all the papers, reflects a genuine uneasiness about how one should pursue ideal policies in a most imperfect world. The range of response varies widely from a strong presumption for non-intervention, championed by Will Ruger, Sheldon Richman and Christopher Preble, to a position much like my own — that the persistent threat of force from all quarters makes it very difficult to come up with hard and fast rules to government the use of force overseas —defended by Fernando Tesón. How then should we think about this issue?

The first point is to note the relationship between domestic and foreign affairs. One common theme is that the United States should try to follow the same policies of non-intervention abroad as it should follow at home. But that suggestive parallel is overdrawn for at least two reasons. The first is that a policy of nonintervention at home should mean that the government will do nothing to upset the balance of economic forces in a competitive market.  That simple prescription is enough to reject the full range of progressive initiatives, many of which —in zoning, agriculture, labor, and transportation, for starters—seek to displace competitive markets with government-backed monopolies. Rejecting these legislative programs would signal a huge advance in domestic affairs. But it is hardly tantamount to a call of nonintervention in all economic affairs.

Rate regulation for natural monopolies still has to be on the table, as does an antitrust law directed, at the very least, against various horizontal transactions. The security of transactions in a competitive market can often require the use of deeds and other formalities, and the creation of a state-sponsored recordation office to increase the security of title.  Needless to say, the primary government function — the protection against the threat or use of force — remains critical to every commercial and social setting. There is no baseline of nonintervention in domestic affairs. There is rather the happy consequence that the unbridled use of private force is under control, even if the unbridled use of state force—witness the CIA detentions—is a far more difficult matter to control.

Economic Liberty and National Security 

There is, to be sure, one clear way in which the movement toward laissez-faire has clear consequences for foreign policy, and that is a point on which all the symposium participants agree on: Free trade is the appropriate strategy.  The basic point here is that the fastest way to create enemies is to place tariff walls against the importation of their products into the United States, or to impose unfair subsidies for the sale of American goods and services overseas. Knocking out this full range of activities should allow us to improve relations with foreign nations, both rich and poor, which in turn should make it easier for us to cooperate with them, when needed, on military matters.

The program, moreover, offers a powerful substitute for economic sanctions against dangerous world powers, such as Iran and Russia, for these are often evaded as eager nations and individuals continue to trade with the target against the wishes of the United States and its allies. But the great advantage of low prices, such as with oil, is that the sanctions are self-enforcing. The increased supply lowers prices, which makes it more difficult for places like Russia to build up foreign capital. The relaxation of trade barriers comes at no cost and provides much benefit.  The libertarian program here is more or less without peer.

And yet. Unfortunately, even this area is more complex than it first appears. Oftentimes there is an acute conflict between free trade and national security. The  United States does not, and should not, sell advanced military technology to our enemies. In the end, an elaborate system of national security clearances is justified even on narrow libertarian grounds to deal with sales and licenses to foreign nations, given the potential of these technologies to assist our enemies. And the bad news is that comprehensive schemes of this sort are always subject to abuse. But such is the complexity of the world in which we live.

Military Force and Political Liberty 

So we now turn to the military side, and what is so evident from these articles is that even the strong defenders of the non-intervention policy are reluctant to lay down categorical rules that deal with these issues. Will Ruger thus leads off the argument with a case for both realism and restraint, and often finds that the latter has to yield to the former. He thus warns us against permanent alliances. But what may have been good advice from George Washington in 1796 need not be good advice at the end of World War II, where the successful formation of NATO did much to keep the Soviets from continuing their march westward at the close of the second World War. So long as temporary alliances are not ruled out of bounds, there is no reason to place a categorical prohibition on permanent ones.  Everything depends on the terms of trade. We give up more from the permanent alliance, but we may get more as well. We could of course insist that South Korea is able to defend itself, but it would be a fatal geopolitical mistake to withdraw the troops that we have kept in that country since the cease-fire was negotiated in 1953. We dare not send the wrong signals to the North Koreans.

It is equally important not to overlearn the lessons from Iraq. Matt Welch opens with an account of the misplaced optimism of George W. Bush when he announced “mission accomplished” in May 2003 from the deck of an aircraft carrier parked near San Diego. That level of hubris is just asking for trouble, which came in droves in the years that followed. But it is a mistake to conclude that the decision to enter the war accounted for the debacle that followed in its wake. The narrative is surely more complex. It is surely possible to take the position that the ham-handed occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of the successful invasion was the source of the major difficulties. The decision to disband the Baathist army — and the inability to spur the Iraqi government down the path to a strong market economy — also had a lot to do with the situation. It is instructive that the surge of 2006, not mentioned in the symposium, restored much order to Iraq by the end of W’s term. It should be treated as a counterexample to the proposition that all foreign interventions end in disaster.

There was a fragile peace when Barack Obama became President in 2009. His own unwillingness to use force — and his eagerness to forge an exit on virtually any terms — made it a lot easier for our enemies to plan their strategy, and far more difficult for our friends to stand without our support. In my view, the President’s decision to let Iraq’s warring factions work out their own peace was a dangerous error in judgment. Far better, I think, would have been to arrive early at the table with a strong force so that we were not faced with the question of how to get back into the game now that ISIS has become a potential threat to sow mischief in the Middle East and to export occasional acts of terrorism to peaceful western nations.  oo little force can be as dangerous as too much.

The upshot of this discussion is that it is hard to formulate a distinctive libertarian policy toward foreign affairs. The progressives in our midst may believe that the state has lots of functions—income redistribution, eradication of discrimination, workplace justice—that libertarians believe will backfire. But I am not aware of any progressive who champions the unbridled use of force at home or abroad. They too have to formulate policy to respond to that threat, and they have the same tools that libertarians have, no more and no less. What set of strategies deals with the excessive or insufficient use of force?

In commenting on my Hoover piece, David Henderson (with whom I agree on most domestic issues) agrees that there is great uncertainty in foreign affairs. But this shared truth does not imply that “this uncertainty should, in general, cause us to pressure our government to stay out of other countries’ affairs.” Henderson’s answer is too pat. Any maxim is only a weak guide as to when we should intervene. I quite agree that, “in general”,  we should not intervene in other countries’ business when they do not intervene in ours.  But Henderson’s use of the phrase of “other countries’ affairs” stacks the deck. As Fernando Tesón (whose views closely tack my own) points out, the general rule need not apply to the American decision to stay out of Rwanda, at the cost of about 800,000 innocent lives.  And it certainly does not tell us what we should do with respect to other nations that don’t mind their own affairs, but insist on meddling in the affairs of their neighbors.

At this point, it is back in the soup of uncertainty. There is a delicate calculation as to whether the United States should take the lead or leave it to local nations to do so. Christopher Preble is trivially correct to state that it would be unwise for the world to become “overly reliant” on the military power of a single nation, that is, the United States.  But again, the use of the word “overly” clouds the judgment in particular cases.

And so it goes. The lesson that one takes away from this symposium is that the libertarian instinct for nonintervention dies hard. But nonetheless it is (thankfully) weakening, as is evident in the pragmatic shifts of Senator Rand Paul, whose new views calls for Congressional participation in war-making decisions, not a strong presumption against all intervention overseas.

Ironically, once it is apparent that there are no clear rules to govern our responses when other nations break the rules of nonintervention, we can then have a candid, if particularistic debate as to what interventions are justified and when. That debate will be messy, not because we have weak intellects or defective principles,  but because the world is a messy place in which strong presumptions in favor of nonintervention often (though by no means always) have to yield to realism in foreign affairs.