As my current station in life continues to deny me convenient access to small children, my ability to navigate the intellectual deathtraps of preschooler conversation remains woefully substandard. So when a friend’s nephew recently asked me if, and I quote, “war happen[s] because there aren’t enough police to arrest all the soldiers for murdering each other”, I took the fatal misstep of attempting to address the little rascal through reasoned dialogue. Hours later, once the tinnitus had finally subsided and I could begin to repair my shattered ego, I paused to reflect on the popular paraphrasing of a famous Einstein quote: “If you can’t explain something to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it well enough.” Having soundly failed this litmus test in my attempt to impart a libertarian critique of American foreign policy upon the Playskool crowd, I return to address my regular readership with a valuable lesson learned: kids have enough sense to know that waging war is silly—grown-ups, on the other hand, could use the occasional reminder. In the eyes of this classical liberal, our nation’s policymakers have lost sight of interventionism’s moral perils, choosing to fill that void with misguided conclusions about the economic and security implications brought forth by meddling in the affairs of other peoples. Whether one favors arguments from morality or a pragmatic analysis of the dangers of American interventionism abroad, it is clear that policymakers interested in promoting either domestic security or general welfare amongst the international community must recognize that an invasive foreign policy prevents the United States from achieving either end.
The modern American libertarian draws much inspiration from the original patriot noninterventionists, Washington and Jefferson, whose legacies instilled in their countrymen a healthy aversion toward interfering in the internal affairs of other peoples. Jefferson’s vision, immortalized in his 1801 inaugural address and echoing Washington’s Farewell Address, sought to deliver the young country “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, [and] entangling alliances with none”.[1] By keeping America’s military close to her own shores, American interests could maintain independence from the complex and clouded affairs of foreign statesmen. As these two Founding Fathers foresaw, a non-interventionist foreign policy—in part the natural privilege of a new nation a hemisphere removed from Old World pressures, in part the moral imperative of a people championing the cause of liberty—provided a means to preserving national security that was both morally and pragmatically sound. Without succumbing to the folly of isolationism, which tosses out the values of cosmopolitanism along with the bathwaters of imperialism, Jeffersonian non-interventionism recognizes that American security is best advanced not by tethering her people to the clamors of foreign allies and enemies, but by preserving her citizens’ inalienable right to be free from those affairs in which they have neither representation nor practical familiarity.
Even today, when a globalizing economy and robust information systems infrastructure have elevated Americans to a more intimate international communion, a geopolitical relative to Mises and Hayek’s economic “Knowledge Problem” continues to devalue interventionist foreign policy. This is the same encumbrance that has plagued nation-building and imperial ambitions since the time of Thucydides, and will necessarily exist as long as a particular people have better understanding of their own affairs than do their would-be foreign hegemons. Together, those individual affairs comprise the particular cultural institutions—language, religion, mores, and so on—that define a “nation”. A nation is therefore its collection of cultural forms, not its geography or political institutions; and while the interventionist stubbornly wields the latter as his central planning tools, the former will continue to dictate the local realities that frustrate such plans.
As a product of the spontaneous order coordinated by its individual agents, a nation is not so different from a complex economy in that it remains similarly resistant to the efforts of centralized manipulation. Or, as Hayek reminds us in his writings on economics, planners suffer from the abovementioned Knowledge Problem in that they lack the “very important but unorganized knowledge…of the particular circumstances of time and place”:[2]
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders.[3]
When economist Steven Horwitz applies this Hayekian framework to the geopolitical exercise of nation-building, he concludes:
Just as the intervention of economic planners inevitably produces results that run counter to their stated goals, leading them to intervene again to solve those problems, so will nation-building create resistance and new forms of culture and community that frustrate the designs of the builders. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan are clear evidence for this argument.[4]
Decentralization succeeds by empowering the “man on the spot”, that indigenous agent whose local knowledge and ability to respond cannot hope to be improved upon by a central authority, especially not when that authority is passed down from a distant class of beltway bureaucrats. Our mismanagement of the occupation in Afghanistan, which we have struggled to correct and in so doing entangled neighboring Pakistan, provides a devastating case study on the realities of nation-building.
Nine years after the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan is still an impoverished, corrupt, and violent country that gives anarchy a bad name. 2,412 civilians were killed in 2009 alone, making just last year the “most lethal [year] for Afghan civilians” and “a jump of 14 percent over the previous year.” Meanwhile, “American and NATO combat deaths jumped to 520…from 295” the year before, and Taliban activity increased beyond what had been seen since 2001.[5] Earlier this August, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari famously declared his belief that the U.S. and her international allies are “in the process of losing the war against the Taliban”, having already “lost the battle for hearts and minds.”[6] To salvage the mission, the U.S. has deemed it necessary to widen its scope of intervention—by engaging “militants” in Zardari’s Pakistan. On October 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened to withhold flood aid for Pakistani citizens unless their government again raised taxes so as to better share in the burden of waging war against Taliban supporters and Afghan insurgents within Pakistan’s borders. Since July, Pakistan has followed U.S. dictates and “launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai, and Khyber.”[7] While the puppet government continues hunting its own citizens, the U.S. military maintains its defense of its “right” to cross Pakistani borders in service of the Afghan occupation, whose spillover effects have already killed hordes of Pakistani residents and left millions homeless. Worse, Zardari has been reported as “believ[ing] that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”[8] The more nation-building responsibilities the U.S. takes on, the more things fall apart in the region, which necessitates ever-greater involvement and micromanagement of the affected states. If nation-building and interventionism can be said to establish any sort of order, it is clear that such order is neither autonomously sustainable nor mindful of the fundamental civil liberties of the Afghan or Pakistani “man on the spot”. It is time to chalk up the last decade of interventionism as another painful lesson for those Wilsonian thinkers who would seek to “preserve the United States’ global hegemony and engage in armed proselytizing for democracy”.[9]
So if nation-building bankrupts, endangers, and dehumanizes the people in whose name the U.S. purports to act, what of the effects levied upon her citizens at home? Do interventionist policies make us freer, richer, or, at the very least, safer as a nation? Or ought we instead fear the civil consequences of an enlarged and more centralized State; the economic consequences of maintaining a globetrotting military; and the violent blowback inflicted upon Americans by the recipients of our so-called solicitude? Let us examine each of these concerns.
When turn-of-the-century public intellectual Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State”, he was suggesting that the State commands its greatest allegiance during those periods where it has deemed necessary—in the interests of national security and prosperity—the imposition of coercive force against an outside threat.[10] This notion is especially true of a republican society, which by the nature of its particular composition can boast none of the enchantments afforded to more autocratic regimes; a republic’s rulers, if such a term can be applied, are necessarily ephemeral and unsanctified, tainted always by the stain of partisan politics and civil commonness. For such a State to transcend partisan disunity and capture the energies of a singular patriotism, its only recourse is through the display of military might against a common foe. As such, it is during wartime that the State asserts itself in the hearts and minds of its people, and begins the insidious process of widening its authority. Such authority is achieved in increments, with the State committing a series of civil transgressions on its own people that begins with its original declaration of interventionist intent.
As has been borne out by the history of our republican State, beginning with Jefferson’s First Barbary War and continuing through two centuries of violence (including a handful of false flag instigations of the most pernicious design) there is simply no instance in which the people were consulted regarding the decision to pursue military action. Foreign policy is the de facto domain of the Executive Branch, however much involved the Congress may be in matters of domestic policy. In international relations, the body politic as represented by Congress serves only as a mechanical extension of the Executive through the formality practice of ratification. By the time this point in the legislative process is reached, the nation will already have been teetering on the brink of military obligation thanks to the unilateral machinations of the Executive and his agents abroad. This is especially true today, in a world where the American hegemon does so much of its work through shadowy alphabet agencies beyond the censure of the people. Without any opportunities for mediation by the people or their representatives, the State commits the lives of its citizens to the violent and unsure consequences of military conflict in a foreign land. This is hardly the hallmark of a free republic, in which “agreements which are to affect the lives of whole peoples must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or at least by their representatives in the full glare of publicity and criticism.”[11]
Of course, all this is forgotten once the declaration has been secured by the State. At this point, the already-diminished civil liberties of the people are curtailed even further when conscription properly begins, and the individual is made a subject of military regimentation. As the conscripted soldier is coerced into becoming himself an agent of coercion, both his own rights and the rights of his eventual enemy are discarded entirely. Whomsoever the State deems unworthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the citizen—now truly an agent of the State—sets off to harm. He does this by internalizing the desires of the State in place of his own desires. He gives up his freedom and manhood for the insane and indefensible trappings of an unseen controlling interest. And on an aggregate scale, it is equally true that any nation believing in its own dubious right to extend military power beyond the borders of other nations necessarily elects to ignore the rights of other peoples to be free from foreign interference in the first place. The interventionist nation gives up its moral standing in order to aggress.
Meanwhile, the situation at home continues to deteriorate. In order to continue its expansion into foreign lands, the State tightens the tendrils of centralized power in domestic affairs as well. By taking on the broad responsibilities of its patriotic crusade, the State convinces its constituents to grant it ever-greater powers. The constitution upon which the republic was founded becomes a “living document” capable of bestowing all manners of “implied powers” to the agents of the State, the actions of whom Randolph Bourne describes as follows:
Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes, with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties.[12]
War encourages uniformity to a conscienceless majority while marginalizing—even criminalizing—minority voices. The essence of a free society, in which minorities are valued as diverse contributors to a pluralistic system, is sacrificed in the name of national security. Liberty as a human value gives way to loyalty. Creative types, intellectuals, and students of the humane disciplines, if they may escape the delayed suicide of warfare, are made to commit spiritual suicide in service of the State. Worst of all, ordinary citizens are corrupted into transgressing the negative rights of their fellows in the effort to ensure all available energies are being directed toward the core patriotic mission. Just as the soldier gives himself up to the State only to become a purveyor of aggression upon his fellow man, the private citizen allows the State to supplant his lifelong pursuit of liberty with the perverted desire to box in his neighbor as he himself has been boxed in. Ultimately, the evils of interventionism are laid not upon the doorstep of the State—which remains an abstract political unit—but at the feet of the soldiers and citizens who allow themselves to become agents of immorality in the name of national security.
And of course, all this meddling overseas requires a steady source of funding. Wide-scale economic extortion of the American people is thus the second great domestic evil of an interventionist foreign policy. Currently, the U.S. military operates and controls between 700 and 800 military bases worldwide, while stationing military personnel in 156 countries. We have bases in 63 countries, and have built new bases in seven countries since September 11, 2001. Finally, the total land area occupied by U.S. military bases domestically within the U.S. and internationally is of the order of 5,443,077 acres, making the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide.[13] It is no wonder that the U.S.’ total military spending in fiscal year 2010 fell between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion.[14] Meanwhile, recent trends in military expenditures as a percentage of GDP have indeed fallen, but only due to economic growth and not to diminishing military outlays; as such, though military spending as percentage GDP fell from a recent peak at 6.2 percent (1986) to 4.4 percent (2010), GDP itself has nearly doubled since 1986. The U.S. outspends most other nations on military upkeep by multiple orders of magnitude, with the Cato Institute estimating that outlays per capita are five times those of Germans and over 27 times those of Chinese.[15]
Luckily for her present citizens, these outlandish expenditures have been made possible not through tax hikes, but with the aid of massive foreign borrowing. Of course, this accelerates our unsustainable debt burden while placing us in a massive trade imbalance; we can be sure that America’s debt holders will not continue lending indefinitely, and that someday Americans will be called on to repay this massive debt—with interest. When this happens, there will be no way for our progeny to afford the programs and infrastructure maintenance necessary for the continuation of our current lifestyles, meaning our actions today condemn future generations to a life we wish not upon ourselves. Such horrid circumstances carry unsettling ethical implications, as in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “[T]he earth belongs exclusively to the living… [O]ne generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.”[16]
The final argument to be made against interventionism is as tragic in its simplicity. As it turns out, imperialistic foreign policies, ostensibly pursued in the name of greater national security, in fact threaten the security of both our citizens and our soldiers by increasing the likelihood of foreign assault. When the American military intervenes abroad as either an occupier or a war-maker, a certain degree of blowback is inevitable. By bombing, raiding, policing, and directing policy on another nation’s soil, our troops become daily reminders to the local population that America finds it in her right to disrupt local life. This fuels anti-American sentiments that, when manipulated effectively by groups like al-Qaeda, threaten the security of all Americans. In the case of the War on Terror and the attacks that led up to it, we can trace terrorists’ motivations back to grievances seeded by American foreign policy; our decades-long troop presence, interventionist sanctions, and regime-puppeteering in the region were what first filled al-Qaeda’s ranks, and the ongoing conflicts continue to provide such groups with a powerful recruiting platform. Writes Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman:
As long as the U.S. government pursues its imperial program of invasion, regime change, occupation, and sponsorship of corrupt governments in the Muslim world, Americans will be targets for avengers…. It’s either foreign intervention and retaliatory terrorism or nonintervention and security. There’s no third way…. Every empire has reaped a terrorist whirlwind. “Terror” is the tactic that the weak use against the strong.[17]
Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, further substantiated this conclusion in an interview last week regarding a just-released study on the nature and causes of suicide terrorism, “We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, … and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100% of the terrorist campaign”.[18] Blowback, as a phenomenon, is as real as it is transparent. The solution is simple: end the empire.
When the facts are lain out and the realities exposed, our nation’s situation is cast in a new light. The political reality remains that Americans rarely see the choice between terrorism and security for what it is: a choice between imperial ambition and noninterventionism. The American empire need not persist. The American soldier need not fight enemies of our own making, and the American citizen need not struggle to explain to his children why our country fights abroad. The answer should be simple: we don’t, because we oughtn’t.
It is time our republic awakes from its conditioned acceptance of terrorism as a constant specter and militarism as our international legacy. Let the image of America again be one of revolution, freedom, and democracy. Let the revolution of nonviolence begin.
[6] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7924238/Pakistan-president-coalition-forces-losing-war-against-Taliban-in-Afghanistan.html
[18] http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/12/terrorism/index.html
Works Cited
“Can a Nation Be Built?” The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. <http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/can-a-nation-be-built/>.
Greenwald, By Glenn. “They Hate Us for Our Occupations – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.” Salon.com – Salon.com. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/12/terrorism/index.html>.
Hough, By Andrew. “Pakistan President: Coalition Forces ‘losing War against Taliban in Afghanistan’ – Telegraph.” Telegraph.co.uk – Telegraph Online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph – Telegraph. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7924238/Pakistan-president-coalition-forces-losing-war-against-Taliban-in-Afghanistan.html>.
“National Security: The Big Fraud by Sheldon Richman.” Welcome to The Future of Freedom Foundation. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. <http://www.fff.org/comment/com1001d.asp>.
“Overspent and Overextended.” Reason Magazine. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. <http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/07/military-spending-so-what>.
“Quote by Thomas Jefferson: “I Am Increasingly Persuaded That the Earth Belongs…”” Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/148657>.
Reprint, Selected Essay. “Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Library of Economics and Liberty. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html>.
Roberts, Paul C. “The War On Terror.” LewRockwell.com. Web. 16 Oct. 2010. <http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts284.html>.
“Thomas Jefferson: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989.” Bartleby.com: Great Books Online — Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. <http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html>.
“US Demands North Waziristan Offensive — News from Antiwar.com.” News From Antiwar.com. Web. 16 Oct. 2010. <http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/06/us-demands-north-waziristan-offensive/>.
“War Is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne.” Pierre J. Proudhon Memorial Computer. Web. 16 Oct. 2010. <http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/warhealthstate1918.html>.
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