Another Round

A little while back, I insinuated myself into a dispute regarding what is and is not an appropriate libertarian foreign policy. This was a bit of an odd thing to do since I'm not a libertarian myself, but here's another round between libertarian dove Justin Logan and libertarian hawk Max Borders. Not being a libertarian, I'm pretty disinclined to wade back into the muck here.

UPDATE: What the hell. Not for nothing was I a student in the last course Robert Nozick taught before his untimely death. Borders' argument seems to me to partake heavily of obscurantism. The metaethical topics he's trying to raise ("what are rights? where do they come from?") are frankly irrelevant. Making war is a massive deployment of the state's coercive force, both against the target population and (in order to acquire the necessary warmaking resources) the warmaking nation's home population. All ideological points-of-view represented in contemporary American society involve some skepticism about the advisability and/or morality of deployments of the state's coercive force. Libertarianism (in all its varieties) is all about taking this skepticism rather further than do other points of view. Since libertarians are skeptics about the use of the state's coercive force and war is a huge use of coercive force, libertarians ought to be skeptics about war.

This isn't to say that one must be a pacifist in order to be a libertarian, just as many libertarians in good standing support a kind of skeletal welfare state for reasons of social stability and so forth. Nevertheless, unless you're pretty damn skeptical about welfare state type initiatives (for one reason or another), you're not a libertarian. Borders' view -- roughly speaking that it's a good idea for the United States to launch wars against countries that have not attacked us and that do not threaten to attack us in the immediate future in order to affect a reconstruction of the prevailing social and political order in those countries -- does not evidence what one would call a great deal of skepticism about the use of the state's coercive force. That isn't to say that Borders' view of foreign policy is necessarily wrong (though I think it is, but that's another story) it's merely to point out that it's not much of a libertarian view. If the sort of thing he wants the US to do for Iraq is moral and feasible, then whatever premises have led him to that conclusion ought to lead him to rethink his skepticism about the morality and feasibility of state coercion at home. Which is to say that he shouldn't be a libertarian.