Libertarianism means noninterventionism.

• Author: Richman, Sheldon
• Position: Viewpoint essay

A noninterventionist foreign policy is the natural complement to a noninterventionist domestic policy. Even setting aside the formidable anarchist challenge to the very authority of the state, we can see that government is uniquely threatening to liberty and that this threat warrants keeping the state on as short a leash in the international arena as in the domestic arena--or shorter, because foreign policy will inevitably be conducted covertly.

William Graham Sumner, an anti-imperialist classical liberal of the 19th century, noted that intervention translates to "war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery." He should have included conscription on the list. James Madison, who was nobody's libertarian, nevertheless got this right: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." He goes on: "In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

That constitutes a daunting domestic case against military intervention in the affairs of other countries. But there's more. U.S. government policies and technologies developed to efficiently carry out the occupation of foreign societies eventually "boomerang" on Americans at home, as George Mason University economists Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall convincingly argue in a paper published in the fall 2014 Independent Review. As the late Chalmers Johnson, author of three books on American imperialism, used to say, we either dismantle the empire or live under it.

On the foreign side, wars and occupations immorally threaten noncombatants, vital infrastructure, and social institutions, sowing the seeds of despotism and humanitarian disaster.

The ambivalence that some libertarians feel toward strict noninterventionism stems, I believe, from faulty thinking about "national defense." Intervention is often presented as defensive in order to conceal geopolitical and economic objectives. Yet some...