The reality and propaganda of war: an honest conversation about foreign policy requires us to confront the brutality and imagery of violence.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Column

THE THREATENING-LOOKING man on the cover of this magazine is an Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist with a British accent who took the lead role in propaganda videos showing the beheading of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, acts of horrifying brutality that helped propel the United States into war.

Considerably more graphic versions of that image, including a visibly terrified Foley, were run the day after his murder under the headline "SAVAGES" by both of New York's major tabloids--the Post and the Daily News. The papers received a smattering of criticism in the press and across social media for sensationalism, for insensitivity to Foley's parents, and for amplifying the terrorists' publicity.

So why did we put this image on the cover of reason?

This special issue of the magazine is dedicated to the project of applying the clean philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of libertarianism to the messy world we live in. That real world includes several complicating factors that are best illustrated by the cover image.

The first is ISIS itself and what it represents. Since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the inviolability of the nation-state has been the bedrock of international relations theory and action. No matter how awful the government of said state might be to its own residents, other countries maintained a default setting of not interfering with its internal affairs unless and until they spilled over the border in the form of state-on-state aggression. The bulk of international conflict, therefore, was government-to-government.

ISIS--like Al Qaeda, from which it sprang-- has complicated that narrative by being a transnational aggressor organization carrying out campaigns of murder, including against Americans, from the murky corners of failed states. Neoconservatives on the right and liberal internationalists on the left have been treating national sovereignty as an archaic obstacle to overcome for most of the post-Cold War era, with a mixed track record at best. But even someone as committed to nonintervention as Ron Paul (see "Dr. Never," page 42) will admit that having the Taliban help plot the 9/11 attacks from the safe haven of a dysfunctional Afghanistan necessitated American military action. So any plausible foreign policy, let alone a libertarian one, needs to grapple with the reality of non-state actors.

ISIS is also the latest excrescence of a militant and expansionist wing of Islam that seeks to impose a...