Chapter 25 On Relations Between States
Each state has an assumed monopoly of force over a given territorial area, the areas varying in size in accordance with different historical conditions.
Foreign policy, or foreign relations, may be defined as the relationship between any particular state, A, and other states, B, C, D, and the inhabitants living under those states.
In the ideal moral world, no states would exist, and hence, of course, no foreign policy could exist.
Given the existence of states, however, are there any moral principles that libertarianism can direct as criteria for foreign policy?
The answer is broadly the same as in the libertarian moral criteria directed toward the domestic policy of states,
namely to reduce the degree of coercion exercised by states over individual persons as much as possible.
Before considering interstate actions, let us return for a moment to the pure libertarian stateless world where individuals and their hired private protection agencies strictly confine their use of violence to the defense of person and property against violence.
Suppose that, in this world, Jones finds that he or his property is being
aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have seen, for Jones to
repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But now, we must ask, is
it within the right of Jones to commit aggressive violence against innocent
third parties in the course of his legitimate defense against Smith?
Clearly, the answer must be no, for the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or
property of innocent men is absolute.
It holds, regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression, it is wrong and criminal
to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is starving,
or is defending oneself against a third man's attack.
We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations.
We or rather the victim or his heirs may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to
trial for punishment.
But we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act and one
which the victim has every right to repel by violence if necessary.
In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening or aggressing against A. We
may understand C's higher culpability in this whole procedure, but we still label this
aggression by A as a criminal act, which B has every right to repel by violence.
To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has
has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no right to repel him by
bombing a building and murdering innocent people, or to catch him by spraying machine
gun fire into an innocent crowd.
If he does this, he is as much or more a criminal aggressor as Smith is.
The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side.
That is, if war breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards.
If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones and Jones and his bodyguards
pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor, and we and
others in society interested in repelling aggression may contribute financially or personally
to Jones Cause, but Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress
against anyone else in the course of their just war, to steal others' property in order
to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to
kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces.
If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as
Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality.
In fact, if Smith's crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should
kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith.
For such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft.
Suppose that Jones, in the course of his just war against the ravages of Smith, should kill
some innocent people.
And suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting
on the slogan, give me liberty or give me death.
The absurdity of this defense should be evident at once.
For the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive
struggle against Smith.
The issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his legitimate
end.
For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan, give me liberty or give
them death.
Surely a far less noble battle cry.
More than, even a just defensive war is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously
limited to the individual criminals themselves.
We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.
It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of
Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one.
But a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed,
The difference is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one.
But a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed,
if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot.
Here is a crucial difference in kind.
Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also
be pinpointed to use only against aggressors.
Nuclear weapons, even conventional aerial bombs, cannot be.
These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction.
The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were
all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.
We must therefore conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons or the threat thereof
is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.
This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use
them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace.
For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively,
cannot be used in a libertarian manner.
Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to
be pursued for its own sake.
Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political
are all good that can be pursued in the modern world.
For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass
murder, indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival
itself, is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit.
And that crime is now all too possible.
Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price controls or the income tax, and
yet shrug their shoulders at, or even positively advocate, the ultimate crime of mass murder?
If nuclear warfare is totally illegitimate even for individuals defending themselves
against criminal assault, how much more so is nuclear or even conventional warfare between
Let us now bring the state into our discussion.
Since each state arrogates to itself a monopoly of violence over a territorial area, so long
as its depredations and extortions go unresisted, there is said to be peace within the area,
since the only violence is continuing and one way, directed by the state downward against
its people.
Open conflict within the area only breaks out in the case of revolutions, in which
people resist the use of state power against them.
Both the quiet case of the state unresisted and the case of an open revolution may be
termed vertical violence, violence of the state against its public, or vice versa.
In the existing world, each land area is ruled over by a state organization, with a number
The number of states scattered over the earth, each with a monopoly of violence over its own territory.
No super-state exists with a monopoly of violence over the entire world, and so a state of anarchy exists between the several states.
It is curious and inconsistent that conservative advocates of limited government denounce as
has absurd any proposal for eliminating a monopoly of violence over a given territory,
thus leaving private individuals without an overlord, and yet are equally insistent on
leaving nation-states without an overlord to settle disputes between them.
And so, except for revolutions, which occur only sporadically, the open violence and two-sided
Conflict in the world takes place between two or more states, that is, what is called
international war or horizontal violence.
Now there are crucial and vital differences between interstate warfare on the one hand
and revolutions against the state or conflicts between private individuals on the other.
In a revolution, the conflict takes place within the same geographical area.
Both the minions of the state and the revolutionaries inhabit the same territory.
Interstate warfare, on the other hand, takes place between two groups, each having a monopoly
over its own geographical area.
That is, it takes place between inhabitants of different territories.
From this difference flow several important consequences.
1.
In interstate war, the scope for the use of modern weapons of mass destruction is far
greater.
For if the escalation of weaponry in an intra-territorial conflict becomes too great, each side will
blow itself up with the weapons directed against the other.
Neither a revolutionary group nor a state combating revolution, for example, can use nuclear weapons against the other.
But on the other hand, when the warring parties inhabit different territorial areas,
the scope for modern weaponry becomes enormous, and the entire arsenal of mass devastation can come into play.
A second corollary consequence, two, is that while it is possible for revolutionaries to pinpoint their targets and confine them to their state enemies, and thus avoid aggressing against innocent people, pinpointing is far less possible in an interstate war.
This is true even with older weapons, and of course with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever.
Furthermore, three, since each state can mobilize all the people and resources in its territory,
the other state comes to regard all the citizens of the opposing country as at least temporarily
its enemies, and to treat them accordingly by extending the war to them.
Thus all of the consequences of interterritorial war make it almost inevitable that interstate
Interstate war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians,
the private individuals of the other.
This inevitability becomes absolute with modern weapons of mass destruction.
If one distinct attribute of interstate war is interterritoriality, another unique attribute
stems from the fact that each state lives by taxation over its subjects.
Any war against another state, therefore, involves the increase and extension of taxation
aggression against its own people.
Conflicts between private individuals can be and usually are voluntarily waged and financed
by the parties concerned.
Revolutions can be and often are financed and fought by voluntary contributions of the
public.
But state wars can only be waged through aggression against the taxpayer.
All state wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the state's own taxpayers.
And almost all state wars, all in modern warfare, involve the maximum aggression, murder, against
the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy state.
On the other hand, revolutions are often financed voluntarily and may pinpoint their violence
to the state rulers, and private conflicts may confine their violence to the actual criminals.
We must therefore conclude that while some revolutions and some private conflicts may
be legitimate, state wars are always to be condemned.
Some libertarians might object as follows.
While we too deplore the use of taxation for warfare and the state's monopoly of defense
service, we have to recognize that these conditions exist, and while they do, we must support
the state in just wars of defense.
In the light of our discussion above, the reply would go as follows.
Yes, states exist, and as long as they do, the libertarian attitude toward the state
should be to say to it in effect, all right, you exist, but so long as you do, at least
confine your activities to the area which you monopolize.
In short, the libertarian is interested in reducing as much as possible the area of state
aggression against all private individuals, foreign and domestic.
The only way to do this in international affairs is for the people of each country to pressure
They pressure their own state to confine its activities to the area which it monopolizes, and not to aggress against other state monopolists, particularly the people ruled by other states.
In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing state to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible.
And this means the total avoidance of war.
The people under each state should pressure their respective states not to attack one another,
and if a conflict should break out, to negotiate a peace or declare a ceasefire as quickly as physically possible.
Suppose further that we have that rarity, an unusually clear-cut case in which the state is actually trying to defend the property of one of its citizens.
A citizen of country A travels or invests in country B, and then state B aggresses against his person or confiscates his property.
Surely, our libertarian critic might argue, here is a clear-cut case where State A should threaten or commit war against State B in order to defend the property of its citizen.
Since the argument runs, the State has taken upon itself the monopoly of defense of its citizens.
It then has the obligation to go to war on behalf of any citizen, and libertarians must support such a war as a just one.
But the point again is that each state has a monopoly of violence and therefore of defense only over its territorial area.
It has no such monopoly. In fact, it has no power at all over any other geographical area.
Therefore, if an inhabitant of country A should move to or invest in country B, the libertarian must argue that he thereby takes his chances with the state monopolist of country B, and that it would be immoral and criminal for state A to tax people in country A and to kill numerous innocents in country B in order to defend the property of the traveler or investor.
There is another consideration which applies rather to domestic defense within a state's
territory.
The less the state can successfully defend the inhabitants of its area against attack
by non-state criminals, the more these inhabitants may come to learn the inefficiency of state
operations and the more they will turn to non-state methods of defense.
by the State to defend, therefore, may have educative value for the public.
It should also be pointed out that there is no defense against nuclear weapons, the only
current defense being the threat of mutually assured destruction, and therefore that the
State cannot fulfill any sort of international defense function so long as these weapons exist.
The libertarian objective, then, should be, regardless of the specific causes of any conflict,
to pressure states not to launch wars against other states, and, should a war break out,
to pressure them to sue for peace and negotiate a ceasefire and a peace treaty as quickly
as physically possible.
This objective, incidentally, was enshrined in the old-fashioned international law of
in the 18th and 19th centuries, that is, the ideal that no state aggress against the territory
of another, which is now called the peaceful coexistence of states.
Suppose however that despite libertarian opposition, war has begun and the warring states are not
negotiating a peace.
What then should be the libertarian position?
Clearly, to reduce the scope of assault against innocent civilians as much as possible.
Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices for this purpose, the laws of war
and the laws of neutrality, or neutrals rights.
The laws of neutrality were designed to keep any war that breaks out strictly confined
to the warring states themselves without aggression against the states or particularly the peoples
of the other nations.
Hence the importance of such ancient and now forgotten American principles as freedom of
the seas or severe limitations upon the rights of warring states to repress neutral trade
with the enemy country.
In short, the libertarian position is to induce the warring states to observe fully the
and the Rights of Neutral Citizens.
For their part, the laws of war were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion
by warring states of the rights of the civilians of the respective warring countries.
As the British jurist F. J. P. Veale put it, the fundamental principle of this code was
that hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces actually
It drew a distinction between combatants and non-combatants by laying down that the sole business of the combatants is to fight each other, and consequently that non-combatants must be excluded from the scope of military operations.
In condemning all wars regardless of motive, the libertarian knows that there may well be varying degrees of guilt among states for any specific war.
But his overriding consideration is the condemnation of any state participation in war.
Hence his policy is that of exerting pressure on all states not to start or engage in a war,
to stop one that has begun, and to reduce the scope of any persisting war in injuring
civilians of either side or no side.
One corollary of the libertarian policy of peaceful coexistence and non-intervention
between states is the rigorous abstention from any foreign aid, aid from one state to
another.
For any aid given by State A to State B, 1. increases the tax aggression against the people
of Country A, and 2. aggravates the suppression by State B of its own people.
Let us see how libertarian theory applies to the problem of imperialism, which may be
defined as the aggression of State A over the people of Country B, and the subsequent
and Maintenance of this Foreign Rule. This rule could either be directly over Country B or indirectly through a subsidiary client State B.
Revolution by the people of B against the imperial rule of A, either directly or against client State B, is certainly legitimate,
provided again that the revolutionary fire be directed only against the rulers.
It has often been maintained by conservatives, and even by some libertarians, that Western imperialism over undeveloped countries should be supported as more watchful of property rights than any successor native government might be.
But first, judging what might follow the status quo is purely speculative, whereas the oppression of existing imperial rule over the people of country B is all too real and culpable.
And secondly, this analysis neglects the injuries of imperialism suffered by the Western taxpayer, who is molted and burdened to pay for the wars of conquest and then for the maintenance of the imperial bureaucracy.
On this latter ground alone, the libertarian must condemn imperialism.
Two further empirical points may be made about Western imperialism.
First, the property rights respected were largely those of the Europeans.
The native population often found their best lands stolen from them by the imperialists,
and their labor coerced by violence into working mines or landed estates acquired by this theft.
Second, another myth holds that the gunboat diplomacy of the turn of the 20th century
was, after all, a defense of the property rights of Western investors in backward countries.
But apart from our above strictures against going beyond any given state's monopolized land area,
it is generally overlooked that the bulk of gunboat actions were in defense not of private investments,
but of Western holders of native government bonds.
The western powers coerced the native governments into increasing tax aggression upon their own
people in order to pay off foreign bondholders. This was no action on behalf of private property,
quite the contrary.
Does opposition to all interstate war mean that the libertarian can never countenance change of
of Geographical Boundaries? That he is consigning the world to a freezing of unjust territorial
regimes? Certainly not. Suppose, for example, that the hypothetical state of Walldavia has
attacked Ruritania and annexed the western part of the country. The western Ruritanians
now long to be reunited with their Ruritanian brethren, perhaps because they wish to use
Is there Ruritanian language undisturbed?
How is this to be achieved?
There is, of course, the root of peaceful negotiations between the two powers.
But suppose that the Waldavian imperialists prove adamant.
Or libertarian Waldavians can put pressure on their state to abandon its conquest in
the name of justice.
But suppose that this too does not work.
What then?
We must still maintain the illegitimacy of the Ruritanian states mounting a war against
Valdavia.
The legitimate routes to geographical change are, one, revolutionary uprisings by the oppressed
Western Ruritanian people, and, two, aid by private Ruritanian groups, or, for that matter,
by friends of the Ruritanian cause in other countries, to the Western rebels, either in
Finally, we must allude to the domestic tyranny that is the inevitable accompaniment of interstate
war, a tyranny that usually lingers long after the war is over.
Randolph Bourne realized that war is the health of the state.
It is in war that the state really comes into its own, swelling in power, in number, in
in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
The root myth that enables the state to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the state of its subjects.
The facts are precisely the reverse.
For if war is the health of the state, it is also its greatest danger.
A state can only die by defeat in war or by revolution.
In war, therefore, the state frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another state,
under the pretext that it is fighting for them.
Society becomes militarized and statized.
It becomes a herd seeking to kill its alleged enemies,
Society becomes an armed camp with the values and the morale, as Albert J. Nock once phrased
of an Army on the March.