Courses

When Should Libertarians Support Foreign Intervention?

Speakers
Steve Davies,

Release Date
January 9, 2017

Topic

Role of Government
Description

Dr. Stephen Davies asked a key question: for any proposed foreign intervention, which course of action maximizes liberty?  He argues that it is rare for the benefits to be  greater than the cost to human rights. He also addresses the question of consequences to both the countries acting and those being acted on.

    1. Foreign Policy Explained (video series): Want to learn more about foreign policy? Watch our Foreign Policy Explained series to learn how foreign policy contributes to domestic problems like police brutality, how to privatize national defense, and how to lift humanity out of poverty. 
    2. Debate: Is War Ever Justified? (video): Professors Bryan Caplan and Jan Ting debate when, if ever, libertarians can justify war. 
    3. The Best of Steve Davies (video playlist): Check out this playlist to hear more from Steve Davies on topics like the war on drugs, the rise of Trump, and how to fight global poverty. 

 

Dave Rubin: You think there is a situation where a Libertarian could be for some intervention basically.
Steve Davies: Yes. For any kind of libertarian/classical liberal, the question with foreign policy is which course of action is going to most maximize liberty, both in the country that is potentially doing the intervening, the U.S. for example, and the part of the world where the intervention might take place. That should be the guiding principle behind what your foreign policy is. What I would say, and I agree with a friend of mine, Randy Barnett, on this is there’s nothing inherent or necessary about Libertarian principles. That means you must be a non-interventionist.
What I would argue and here perhaps I disagree slightly with Randy, is that the number of cases where the benefits of liberty will be so great that you would support intervention. It’s actually very, very slight. I would apply something like a just war principle. You have to show that really the benefit is bound to exceed the cost and this is knowable and the intervention could be done in a way that doesn’t systematically violate the human right. That’s quite a high bar-
Dave Rubin: Wait, let’s pause there for a second. How much does the benefit have to be for you and your society, not just the people that you’re potentially doing good for?
Steve Davies: Well, I think it’s more of the matter of the cost because if you think about intervention in foreign parts of the world, one of the main arguments against that from a Libertarian or classical liberal position is that it is actually bad for liberty back home in the country doing the intervening to the extent that the United States becomes an empire and it is an empire, let’s not pussyfoot about this. That undermines Republican institutions and liberty back home. This is not a new phenomenon.
Many of the things that led to the growth of the state in Great Britain were because of British intervention outside the rest of the world. The India office, which ran the Indian empire, was our first big modern department of states, and then transformed the rest of government by its example. Same thing’s happened in the United States.
Dave Rubin: Basically, you do these things over there, wherever there is, and then you actually need more state power at home-
Steve Davies: Well, not only that, it provides an example, so in order to have for example you need a really large military if you’re going to have a kind of global interventionist role, that inevitably does things like increase the role of military domestically, increases its purchasing power, it’s clout. Builds up the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against, has all kinds of bad effects. It also leads to the growth of the surveillance state, it leads to the growth of the police power of the state which we spoke about earlier which you might say is necessary for certain cases, but it’s certainly not to the degree about it now.
It just also generally gives out rulers ideas above their station, because if you have the mindset of, “Oh, we can go over and be this benevolent despot and transform the lives of these people in other parts of the world,” this tends to actually create a mindset. We think, “These people here in our own society, they could do without benevolent interference as well,” and that’s a very dangerous mindset.
Dave Rubin: Right, and somehow we always have money to do those adventures, but we never have money to deal with what’s happening here.
Steve Davies: Yeah, what a surprise.
Dave Rubin: Yeah, what could be happening there?
Steve Davies: You know, it benefits all kinds of people. The other quite shameful thing is that this typically involves sending young men from often poor backgrounds into harms way, when the children of the people making these decisions are certainly not joining the military and if they are, they’re probably not going to be sent into harms way in that way. Which I think is seriously disreputable. I wouldn’t rule out that there are certain cases where an intervention could be on balance, beneficial for liberty both at home and in the place where the intervention takes place, but I think that’s vanishingly very low probability. There are very few cases like that in my view.

GET CONTENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX