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Liberty & Power: Group Blog

David T. Beito

Volokh/Liberty and Power: The Great Foreign Policy Debate

Randy Barnett has kindly interceded to put us on the Volokh Conspiracy blog roll. This will be of great help to us. Randy has also reopened our foreign policy debate of several months ago. Aeon Skoble has already commented.

Randy argues that "the time may be ripe for a full fledged debate on the relationship between libertarianism and foreign policy. It appears that there is an assumption on the part of many libertarian intellectuals that libertarian principles entail a very specific version of 'noninterventionism' in foreign policy."

While I can only make a few prelimary comments right now, I completely agree that a debate is long overdue.

At the outset, let me correct a possible misperception. I do not consider myself to be a noninterventionist in foreign policy. A better word to describe my views (to mangle an insight from Doug Rasmussen) would be "defenseist." For this reason, I fully supported the Afghan War as a necessary response to a direct attack on the United States on 9-11.....though I recognized that it would probably not go as planned. As Randy notes, however, I have consistently opposed the Iraq war both as manifested in the initial invasion and the current occupation. Here were my main reasons (but there are many others):

First, I opposed it becaue I did not believe it would be a defense-based war. Not even those who waged this war claimed that Saddam directly attacked us, nor that he was planning to attack, nor that he was involved in 9-11. I am not against preemptive war per se as long as as an imminent threat can be demonstrated (such as massing of troops on a border, etc) but there is no evidence that Saddam was planning that either. The claim that he possessed WMD, even if it was true, did not qualify as a sufficient reason in my view. Certainly, it has not seemed sufficient reason for George W. Bush to attack Pakistan, North Korea, or India. Having said this, I always thought that libertarian defenders of the war were far too ready to take the the administration's claims on WMD, not to mention other issues, at face value.

Second, I opposed the war for Hayekian/consequentialist reasons. Certainly, a key insight of libertarianism is that when the end goal of intervention becomes more complicated....so too does the likelihood of unintended consequences. As I feared, contrary to the claims of the war's architects, it has spread our forces thin (thus leading to the current "stop/loss" quasi draft) and has served to make us more vulnerable to a true threat to our national defense.

Randy's somewhat tongue in cheek comments yesterday about a satirical article in The Onion indicates (he can correct me) that we agree that most voters are badly uniformed about public policy. They are likely to be even more ignorant of when the U.S. attempts the Herculean job of policing and nation-building throughout the world. Voter ignorance, of course, opens the door to rent seeking and other abuses of power by informed and organized minorities. This is no less true of our occupation of Iraq!

Third, I opposed the war because I believe that those who carried it out were *primarily* motivated by non-defense goals such as creating a "Democratic model for the Middle East." Such an enterprise is not only an improper use of the American military but a chimera. As I have said many times, the goal of creating a unified, democratic, nation state in a Bosnia-writ large like Iraq is an exercise in futility.

I could go on....put perhaps some other L and P bloggers would also like to weigh in.

Posted on Thursday, July 1, 2004 at 10:31 AM | Comments (25) | Return

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