Re: Improving Upon History (#48632)
by Matthew Humphreys on December 12, 2004 at 11:53 AM

Hi Andre and Chris,

The great majority of Objectivist and libertarian commentators on foreign policy seem to fall in to one of two camps - interventionish/hawkish and non-interventionist/doveish. At one extreme the ARI tends to be insanely hawkish, while many (though not all) of the paleo crowd at LewRockwell.com tend toward the other extreme. As I see it, the "Objective" appraoch is in fact a contextual one, supporting varying degrees of intervention where necessary and cautioning long and hard against it where it is unnecessary. This is of course exemplified by Chris' stances regarding Afghanistan and Iraq respectively ;-)

As for the connection between foreign policy and domestic, it seems to me that the strength of the connection depends at least in part on the extent of the intervention - a full scale invasion and occupation by a mixed economy nation tend to result in the exportation of the domestic policy (as is now happening in Iraq, and as I fear would occur in the above scenario of invading Cuba). This wouldn't be a problem with more limited surgical strikes.

Of course that doesn't mean Objectivists ought to oppose any full scale invasion of an outright dictatorship by a mixed economy western nation, but I do think we should be willing to consider alternatives before rushing into a major war.

MH