I was watching a Pajamas video about the future of Libertarianism and it got me to thinking about Libertarian foreign policy (broadly – non-interventionism). And that got me thinking deeper.
As I see it Libertarians are a huge failure when it comes to Foreign Policy. I think it is because they are uncomfortable with power politics. Fine. The way to end power politics is to make the rest of the world libertarian. And they seem to have no interest in that either.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Power Politics
by
Tags:
Comments
3 responses to “Power Politics”
All ideologies seem to hit a stumbling block when it comes to foreign policy: it doesn’t fit nicely into ideologies focused on domestic policy.
So among libertarians you have non-interventionists and expansionist libertarians (people who want to topple every tyrant in the world; neoconservatives, according to some meanings of the word). Among conservatives there’re realists and neoconservatives and isolationists. Progressives run the full gauntlet of realist to neocon to non-interventionist to protectionist to pacifist.
It’s particularly notable with libertarians though, probably because there’s such a wide gap between non-interventionism and expansionist libertarianism.
I dunno, I’m a “smash everything” libertarian. As I see it, virtually every government in the world is illegitimate as a serial rights violator. Therefore, we can do what we want in regards to them, as long as we are doing it to the government more than their people.
Unfortunately, foreign policy is Libertarianism’s Third Rail. I’m not afraid of it, but that makes me a small-l libertarian.