Murray Rothbard's isolationist pleas are nationalist, just as today's isolationist pleas are nationalist
American libertarians have a foreign policy problem
Lew Rockwell has posted portions of an old Murray Rothbard essay at the Mises Institute’s website:
I think the concept of collective security is (1) a disaster and (2) anti-libertarian. Vietnam again brings this thing to the fore, in the sense of masking imperial interventionist policy on the part of the American government in the rhetoric of the cloak of righteousness and moralistic pieties.
I’m going to stop Rothbard right there. I’m stopping right here to show you why isolationism (Rothbard’s term), or noninterventionism (contemporary American libertarian’s term), is not a libertarian position at all. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of a libertarian position. It’s nationalist to its core.
Rothbard’s mistake is making the US the center of the world. He mentions Vietnam while denouncing imperialism and collective security, but isn’t collective security what helped Vietnam repeal America’s invasion of Vietnam?
Collective security helps keep small states free from the clutches of big states. How is this anti-libertarian? It’s not. The mistake that noninterventionists make is thinking that the United States is the only polity that matters in international affairs. They’re thinking like nationalists. Rothbard continues:
Let’s take two hypothetical states—this is the technique von Mises used to use, I think, with good effect—take the hypothetical states of Ruritania and Waldavia, somewhere off in the Balkans or whatever. The Ruritanian state invades the Waldavian state. The collective-security view is that this constitutes aggression, it’s evil per se—an evil state attacking a victim state, the Ruritanian state being the aggressor in this case, and then it becomes the duty of every other state in the whole wide world—the United states being somehow the divinely appointed chief and almost sole pourer out of resources in this effort—to step in to defend the so-called victim, and crush the aggressor.
This is not “the collective-security view,” as Rothbard claims. A collective security view would be that Waldavia is smaller/weaker than Ruritania and therefore looks to bolster its security by finding allies or even a protector. The only “duty” that would arise if Waldavia is attacked is the one that Waldavia’s allies or protector state agreed upon before an attack by Ruritania. You can tell that Rothbard is fudging his logic by paying attention to his adjectives in the last sentence of this highlight: “evil state,” “divinely appointed,” “so-called victim,” etc.
Cold War-era libertarians could never come up with a sober assessment of foreign affairs because they were too fixated on domestic policy. The growth of the state was proceeding at an unhealthy pace. To them, America’s presence in the world was an outgrowth of domestic policies, and since the growth of the state in domestic affairs was bad, the growth of American presence abroad must also be bad. Therefore, America’s role in the world needed to be condemned just as harshly and vociferously as its federal government’s role in domestic life.
It’s easy for me to point this out in hindsight. If I had been around during the Cold War, I probably would have been an ardent Rothbardian isolationist. I was a noninterventionist during the Iraq fiasco earlier this century, after all. Yet it’s hard for me to argue that nonintervention is anything other than a nationalist doctrine. It doesn’t take into account the motives of any state but an author’s own. If small states are willing to trade something in exchange for an alliance or protection, the libertarian needs to be able to at least hear its proposal. A nationalist would reject any such proposal outright.
When North Vietnam appealed to China for help in its fight against South Vietnam, it was being libertarian. When South Vietnam appealed to the US for help in its fight against North Vietnam, it was being libertarian. Both small states were searching for collective security. That both big states said “yes” to helping out the small states says nothing about imperialism, either; the US and China were merely caught up in a regional struggle for a balance of power. Because of this, lots of people died.
It’s okay for libertarians to get involved in the domestic politics of other countries. There is no difference between domestic and international politics, after all. But in order to go about this in a libertarian manner, libertarians need to think about ways that will achieve their stated policy preferences in international affairs. Joining alliances and taking on client states are not necessarily anti-libertarian (and they are definitely anti-nationalist), especially from the point of view of the small states, but neither allies nor clients will achieve a more libertarian world. In order for that to happen, borders must be domesticated, and this can only be done via federal union.
In the case of the Vietnam War, the US didn’t commit imperial sins because it said “yes” to cooperating with South Vietnam; it committed imperial sins because it didn’t push for federation with South Vietnam, thus condemning American troops to the role of foreign invaders. Asking the question of whether or not federation with a potential ally or client would be a great way to begin negotiations with potential partners, too. If federation is unthinkable, as it would be in the case of Ukraine today, then policymakers and the public both have a much clearer idea of what it would mean to get involved in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Libertarians in the United States need to shake off the Cold War-era logic that has defined their foreign policy preferences over the past few decades. Rothbard’s isolationist pleas were misplaced. They were focused on the growth of government in the US, not on international relations. In today’s increasingly multipolar order, libertarians in the US need to re-think the meaning of collective security, and how their republic can utilize the security needs of allies and clients in a way that brings people in the former and the latter more liberty. They need to be more like Hayek and Mises, two economists with plenty of experience living through multipolar orders, who both called for federal union to stamp out foreign and domestic violence.
"Joining alliances and taking on client states are not necessarily anti-libertarian (and they are definitely anti-nationalist)...”
This appears to explicitly state that nationalism, in whatever form, rejects all alliances. Is this true? Is this what you mean?