One dude’s foreign policy views vis à vis his libertarian moral code

Like many contributors to this site, I find that I align closest with the general co-occurrence of values known to the world as “libertarianism.” But surely many libertarians would disagree with some of the arguments I make, so I’ll just say that I agree with libertarians on many — possibly most — political issues. What follows is my best attempt at establishing a philosophical basis for my political views. This post was partially inspired by Mike McGowan ^[1]‘s great series of posts entitled “one guy’s thoughts on libertarianism.” ^[2]

If I had to summarize my perspective on the proper role of government in one [hyphenated] word it would be “anti-interventionism.” I don’t believe governments have the right to intervene in any individual’s free actions, ever. I believe every individual ought to be free to act; I believe the law ought to codify as crimes actions freely committed by individuals which deny other individuals’ freedom; I believe the government ought to enforce the law by restricting the freedom of guilty individuals, but only to the extent absolutely necessary to preserve the freedom of other individuals (thus I am against the death penalty and other forms of excessive punishment). Implicit in this belief system is that one of the freedoms guaranteed to individuals is the freedom to commit crimes. If and when they are committed, the individual faces punishment by the government. (This will be important later.)

My interest and passion is for foreign policy more than domestic because I believe it is in the former area that our government more repugnantly denies individuals their freedom. We also tend to be more ignorant and silent about it because of our physical distance from it. I absolutely think our government’s local actions, such as its “stimulative” domestic spending, is idiotic and destructive and wrong; if I could totally redesign domestic policy it would consist of little more than law enforcement as mentioned above (with far less laws on the books — in particular I’d abolish laws which punish victimless crimes) and basic social services. A public option for healthcare is far less sickening to me than a stimulus package; I do believe we have some obligation as a society to help poorer individuals who cannot help themselves, but I believe government “projects” tend to hurt the economy and support entrenched interests in government at the expense of individuals.

But like I said, I am more concerned about the state of American foreign policy. I think it’s morally imperative that we apply the same principles of freedom to foreign individuals that we apply to ourselves, but our politicians seem to rarely seriously consider that. My argument is that if we do apply those principles, we can immediately see the problem with war in general and preemptive war in particular.

War is an action which implicitly takes away freedom from individuals —  by killing them as a group. So based on the principles I’ve established above, war is illegal. This applies to all government actors, anywhere in the world. Based on this, we can see that terrorist attacks are absolutely crimes (no shit). But as a response to such crimes, war, unlike a democratically appointed justice system, is itself illegal. For me there is little room for debate on this. Granted, realpolitik guarantees that some wars (thinking mainly of the two World Wars here) are simply inevitable, but even so, large-scale murder is always illegal.

What I believe we need for handling these kinds of criminal interactions between states is a transparent, democratically elected international court with jurisdiction in all states. The entity I propose would have the right to punish in response to all acts of war, using the same set of laws I described above (based, again, on principles of individual rights) to identify criminal actions. This entity would be acceptable in all the ways that the American war machine is unacceptable as a world police officer for the simple fact that war, even advanced, strategic, precisely targeted war ^[3], is incapable of punishing discriminately. (Also, as I mentioned above, I am against the death penalty, and a warring army has typically not been elected by its victims.) In the absence of some entity like the one I’m advocating, it is always morally preferable to do nothing in response to acts of war than to respond with an act of war.

But this critique so far has not even taken into account preemptive war, like Operation Iraqi Freedom, which is wrong for an additional, painfully obvious reason: it not only punishes indiscriminately, it punishes prior to the crime. We felt that Iraq was a threat, so we punished the Iraqis — denied them freedom. Waging war with the Taliban in Afghanistan even though we were attacked by Al-Qaeda falls into the same category. It shows an utter disregard for individual rights.  It is for similar reasons that I find the struggle of the Palestinians so compelling.

The Palestinians have very little freedom of action — a logical consequence of their lacking citizenship. One of the main reasons that many are against granting Palestinians citizenship (and the accompanying freedom of action) is they feel it is a threat to their security — they believe that some sub-set of the population is likely to use their freedom to commit crimes. Leaving aside that this is collective punishment (punishing an entire population for the crimes, or possible crimes, of a sub-set of that population), from a moral point-of-view, grounded in principles of individual freedom, this should never be a concern. Every individual is entitled to autonomy until they are proven guilty of denying the autonomy of others. Regardless of the possible consequences. This is how we treat Americans (for the most part ^[4]), so why should we not offer the same rights to other peoples? If and when such consequences result, the jurisdictional justice system has the right to punish the responsible actor(s).

For me, these wars are absolutely crucial because they rest so heavily on preemptive punishment (particularly in Iraq and Gaza). Preemptive punishment goes on all over the world, no doubt; I condemn it wherever it occurs; but we simply cannot use that as an excuse to commit it ourselves. And it must be reiterated that preemptive punishment is absolutely contrary to individual freedom. In this way the US and Israel, two democracies — certainly much freer internally than many other nations — are actively committing tyranny abroad. And as a taxpayer I am morally culpable, even if the death and destruction I’ve bought is all the way on the other side of the world.

Thus I think it’s increasingly important that we keep an anti-war strain of libertarianism alive. It’s clear that those in power — aside from the lonely and faraway voices of outspoken anti-war Congress members like Dennis Kucinich ^[5] and Ron Paul ^[6] — have no moral problems with the War on Terror. We’ll know a real foreign policy alternative has arrived when a candidate for election declares that individual freedom is a human right, not just an American right.