A great many libertarian leaders, loyal to every other aspect of the creed, lose their footing the moment the subject turns to war. They can recite the non-aggression principle in their sleep and then abandon it just when it matters most.
Start with Antiwar.com. Asked to explain itself, the site declares: “Our politics are libertarian: our opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne’s concept that ‘War is the health of the State.’ With every war, America has made a ‘great leap’ into statism, and as Bourne emphasized, ‘it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State].’ At its core, that nature includes an ever-increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power.”
Bourne was a gifted writer and, on much else, a sound libertarian. Look at the load-bearing word in the site’s creed: its opposition to war is “rooted” in the claim that war fattens the state. The claim is true, and worth shouting from the rooftops. But a reliable tendency cannot by itself condemn a whole category of acts. Hospitals spread infection, but a man still has his broken leg set there. That war usually grows the state is reason to watch it warily, but not to fault the man fighting off an invader. From a genuine aspect of what war tends to do, Antiwar.com has rendered a blanket verdict on what war always is. A tendency has been mistaken for a principle.
Hand the microphone to Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who drew the line his admirers at the site have erased: “My own view of war can be put simply: A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.”
Defense on one side of the ledger, aggression on the other. A libertarian foreign policy fits within that single sentence.
Next, there is LewRockwell.com, whose masthead announces three commitments: “Anti-State, Anti-War, Pro-Market.” The first and third are beyond reproach. The middle one trips over its own author. Lew Rockwell has defended two American wars as just: the War of Independence in 1776 and the South’s part in the Civil War of 1861-1865, due to what he claims is the legitimacy of Southern secession. A masthead that forbids what its proprietor endorses is a masthead in want of editing.
Third, there is the Future of Freedom Foundation, which offers as a kind of catechism these lines from Frank Chodorov’s 1938 essay “When War Comes”: “Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty.”
The Foundation salutes Chodorov as “arguably ... the most effective voice of isolationism.” Effective he was, and on most questions a genuine sage. But that one line, “no war is justified,” reads beautifully and ends in disaster. It throws over the right of self-defense, which is the bedrock upon which the whole libertarian structure rests. Tell a man he may not lift a hand against the aggressor at his door, and you have not made him peaceful. You have made him prey.
Fourth, there is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Prosperity, by all means, but “peace” as the headline virtue is where the trouble starts. “Justice and Prosperity” would be far more honest, since justice every so often calls for a defensive war that no candid person would describe as peaceful. Ron Paul himself knows this, whatever his institute’s letterhead says. The Congressional Record reveals that, on Dec. 4, 2001, Paul called for legislation authorizing, in his words, “the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal to appropriate parties to seize the person and property of Osama bin Laden and any other individuals responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.”
Letters of marque, the seizure of persons and property, and the hunting of bin Laden across the globe are many things, but peaceful is not among them.
Four organizations, one mistake repeated four times. The truth is that libertarianism stands against aggressive war, the war of the initiator, the war waged to conquer or to keep an unjust grip on a subject people. It has never objected to defensive war and never will. It objects just as fiercely to the deliberate killing of innocents, on any side and under any flag, because repelling an aggressor never licenses the murder of his civilians.
Erase that distinction and “anti-war” quietly becomes pacifism in libertarian dress; pacifism blown up to the scale of a nation. A libertarian may, of course, be a pacifist, should his conscience demand it, but their philosophy requires nothing of the kind.
None of this is a matter of slogans for us. We have argued the case at length in a study of what we call Rothbard’s “foreign-policy paradox,” in which the very universalism that forbids the killing of a foreign innocent in wartime ought, carried through honestly, to permit the rescue of that same innocent from slaughter at the hands of his own government. Rothbard balked at that second step, and the four organizations above balk at the first. The libertarian principle they all profess to serve is steadier than any of them.
Picture the thing at its simplest: Country A attacks Country B without cause. B fights back. Both are now “at war,” and the antiwar purist, counting only the noun “war,” drops them in the same file. The libertarian, however, reads the verbs: A initiated, B defended.
Suppose Canada or Mexico were to invade the United States tomorrow morning. The president could repel the attack immediately, the Constitution squarely behind him, and Congress could argue later about the wider war. No one calls that aggression.
Anyone can condemn Washington’s adventures, but the libertarian principle only holds when one can still name aggression for what it is, even when the victim is politically unfashionable.
Here, the mask slips. The antiwar passion of these libertarians is directed, time and again, at Israel, and seldom at the parties that attacked Israel. A man who opposes war as such, all of it, in every instance, would have no earthly reason to keep training his guns on one side of a Middle Eastern fight while waving the other through. One might expect even-handedness from so principled a pacifism, but one would be expecting too much.
This selectivity is no abstraction to the authors of these lines.
After Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, one of us, Walter E. Block, said plainly that Israel had the right to ward off the assault, which is to say, to fight a just war by Rothbard’s own definition, with the obvious proviso that the innocents of Gaza not be deliberately harmed. For saying so, Block was stripped of the unpaid senior fellowship he had held at the Mises Institute for the better part of a lifetime. LewRockwell.com, whose masthead we analyzed a few paragraphs ago, walled him off from more than a hundred articles he had written for it. The self-styled heirs of Rothbard had excommunicated a man for taking Rothbard at his word.
The episode has been set down in full in an essay on what the affair laid bare about the libertarian movement’s fragility. We will not reiterate it here. The point for present purposes is narrower and sharper: An “antiwar” libertarianism that too often excuses the aggressor, reserves its moral fury for the defender and at last turns that fury on its own founders has inverted the very doctrine it professes to inherit from Rothbard.
