 In domestic affairs, libertarians believe that the sole purpose of government is to advance human liberty. The state should interfere as little as possible with an individual's ability to earn an honest living, and to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor. A prudent and effective government possesses only a few enumerated powers, and it derives those just powers from the consent of the governed. In foreign policy, libertarians believe that people should be free to buy and sell goods and services, study and travel, and otherwise interact with peoples from other lands and places unencumbered by the intrusions of government. We're skeptical of direct foreign assistance from one government to another, but confident the myriad voluntary interactions between individuals that define modern society are conducive to economic prosperity. Most important, it is a basic human right. As such, a libertarian foreign policy is confident and cosmopolitan, whereas others fear what might happen if government were smaller and less intrusive, libertarians are optimistic that, on balance, those governments that govern best govern least. A wise foreign policy, explained Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address, was a modest one, peace, commerce, an honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. This is what libertarians believe. The questions of war and peace, though only one aspect of foreign policy, two sides of the same coin really, are arguably the most important, and the question of when and whether to wage war abroad distinguishes libertarianism from other philosophies. Though few libertarians are doctrinaire pacifists, libertarians have traditionally favored peace over war and have done so more consistently than progressives and conservatives. Inflourishes during peacetime, explains Ronald Hammoy in the encyclopedia of libertarianism, but clashes with the collectivism, regimentation, and herd mentality that war fosters. So for example, libertarians worry that war is impede the free movement of goods, capital, and labor that is essential to economic prosperity. Restrictions on such exchanges constitute an assault on fundamental individual rights. Progressives and conservatives have on occasion found it easier to institute such restrictions during times of war and sometimes have even championed war as a means to privilege the state over the individual. Libertarians are wise to these schemes. We see war as the largest and most far-reaching of all socialistic enterprises, an engine of collectivization that undermines private enterprise, raises taxes, destroys wealth, and subjects all aspects of the economy to the meddling hands of bureaucrats and bean counters. In his magisterial survey, War and the Rise of the State, political scientist Bruce Porter summarizes the problem thusly. A government war is a juggernaut of centralization determined to crush any internal opposition that impedes the mobilization of militarily vital resources. This centralizing tendency of war has made the rise of the state throughout much of history a disaster for human liberty and rights. Fine attitudes towards war and peace flow from the classical liberal tradition. Adam Smith thought that peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice were the essential ingredients of good government. Other classical liberals, from Richard Cobden and John Stuart Mill to Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, excoriated war as inconsistent with prosperity and social progress. And all saw its potential for growing the state at the expense of the individual. About a year before his death, Milton Friedman evoked a familiar warning. War is a friend of the state. In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do. War is the health of the state. So said Randolph Bourne, a writer and social critic active during the early 20th century. But the founders of the American Republic believed much the same thing. Of all the enemies to public liberty, James Madison wrote in 1795, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. The evidence is irrefutable. Government has always grown during wartime or other periods of great anxiety, and it rarely surrenders these powers when the crisis abates. For example, the U.S. government instituted federal income tax withholding during World War II. It remains in effect to this day. New York City rent controls enacted in 1943 out of fear of war-related housing shortages continue to burden both landlords and tenants, despite the fact that the war ended nearly 70 years ago. Or consider the question more holistically. Franklin Roosevelt largely failed in his bid to create a vastly larger federal government in the midst of the Great Depression. He came far closer to achieving his ultimate goal during World War II. Bruce Porter notes the non-military sectors of the federal government actually grew at a faster rate in World War II than under the impetus of the New Deal. In short, all aspects of state power expand during times of war, including those that have nothing to do with actually fighting and winning battles on land or at sea. Jealous to protect individual liberty from the encroachments of the state, libertarians have always looked to scant at war. But there are still other reasons why libertarians are skeptical of an interventionist foreign policy. For one thing, we harbor deep and abiding doubts about government's capacity for affecting particular ends, no matter how well-intentioned. These doubts are informed by F. A. Hayek's observations on the fatal conceit, the erroneous belief that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes. Although Hayek said relatively little about foreign policy in his prolific career, Christopher Coyne and Rachel Mathers applied Hayek's theory to foreign intervention and concluded that these will also tend to fail. Hayek was particularly concerned about the problem of imperfect knowledge. He convincingly argued that government is incapable over the long term of regulating the economy. Planning always falls short of expectations because human beings do not know and cannot reliably predict the course of future events. The knowledge problem also contributes to unintended consequences. These can be quite serious in the domestic context. They're more serious still in foreign policy. This is obvious when one recalls the rather banal point that wars aim to kill people and break things. Even well-intentioned wars, those for example that are designed to remove a tyrant from power and liberate and oppress people, unleash chaos and violence that cannot be limited solely to those deserving of punishment. And repression and the stifling of human rights and individual liberty often occurs in the aftermath of even successful wars. For all of these reasons, the expansion of state power, the problem of imperfect knowledge, the law of unintended consequences, libertarians treat war for what it is. Unnecessary evil. We believe that the obviously good end of securing and advancing individual liberty should, whenever possible, be achieved by peaceful means. But while there has been a long-standing tradition of opposition to war within libertarian thought, that intellectual tradition does not tell us what kinds of foreign policies are appropriate in all circumstances. Nor is it necessarily true that the attitudes of the founders of the American Republic, though informed by classical liberalism, should dictate the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the early 21st century, let alone the foreign policies of countless other peoples and countries around the world. David Bowes expressed it well in his seminal book, Libertarianism, a Primer. War cannot be avoided at all cost, but it should be avoided wherever possible, Bowes writes. Proposals to involve the United States or any government in foreign conflict should be treated with great skepticism. With this in mind, consider what a libertarian foreign policy for the United States would look like. As it happens, it resembles the one that we had at the founding of the Republic. George Washington explained this ideal foreign policy in a letter to a friend in France. Separated as we are by a world of water from other nations, if we are wise, we shall surely avoid being drawn into the labyrinth of their politics and involved in their destructive wars. He expanded on this theme in his farewell address. The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. Washington and others in the founding generation harbored a deeply ambivalent view of military power. They believed that standing armies and endangerment of liberty went hand in hand. Washington advised his countrymen to avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. But this philosophy came up against a bitter truth. On the one hand, the founders realized that their ability to prevail militarily against the British during the revolution had been instrumental to securing their independence. On the other hand, the presence of British troops in their midst was among the list of particulars that Thomas Jefferson cited in the Declaration of Independence for wanting to be free of the mother country in the first place. The Constitution resolved this tension between the necessity for a military for self-defense and the fear that a large military would undermine the delicate balance between the citizens and the state by strictly limiting the likelihood that the new nation would choose to become engaged in foreign wars. It did this primarily by limiting the government's ability to wage war and by constraining the one branch most prone to initiate war, the executive. Madison explained the rationale in a letter to Jefferson. The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has, accordingly, with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature. Madison later saw this provision as perhaps the most important one of the entire document. In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which divides the question of war and peace to the legislature and not the executive department. Such sentiments strike many today as unnecessarily unwieldy and perhaps even dangerous. They doubt the wisdom of having foreign policy conducted by 535 de facto secretaries of state. The world is simply too dangerous, they say. The present United States must have the power to initiate wars unencumbered by the doubts of the public who will actually fight them and pay for them. There were no doubts some in the late 18th century who believed much the same thing. Though the Congress was much smaller then, the politics were just as nasty. Gridlock was the rule. Meanwhile, the dangers facing the disunited states were far greater than what we confront today. Spain was lodged in Florida. Great Britain retained garrisons of troops in Canada to the north. The British navy plied the seas, so too did France. And every tiny village along the frontier lived in fear of attack from many Native American tribes who were anxious to halt the encroachments of the Anglos. But by fortunate circumstances, as much as by design, for much of the first 150 or so years of the nation's history, Americans were rather successful at staying out of unnecessary wars and therefore had little need for a large military as the framers of the Constitution had hoped. And when Congress saw fit to declare war, as it did on a few occasions in the period between the war of 1812 and World War II, it made provisions for raising the necessary numbers of men and materials in order to win the war and then sent the men home when the wars were concluded. Nearly every generation in U.S. history had some experience with war. In each case, ambition and optimism about the likelihood of quick success was eventually replaced with humility and pessimism, an appreciation of the costs and of the possibility of failure. Once these lessons sunk in, Americans generally returned to the philosophy espoused by the founders that free nations possess small professional militaries and strive to avoid foreign wars, even as they were happy to profit from foreign trade and to otherwise serve as an example to the world. This model persisted even as the United States became involved in far larger wars in far distant lands in the first half of the 20th century. Attitudes toward a standing military began to change in the years after World War II, however, and a new model took root that has endured to this day. When the Cold War ended, political pressure and bureaucratic inertia kept military spending much higher than necessity dictated, whereas Americans had once armed for war and then returned to peaceful pursuits when the wars ended, they now armed for the sake of farming. Policymakers in Washington, meanwhile, looked around for new places to use US military power. They also subtly changed the meaning of common defense as expressed in the Constitution. During the early days of the Cold War, Europe and East Asia were broken and broke, forward positioning US troops to deter an attack by our common enemy, the Soviet Union and later the People's Republic of China, and working with our allies to defeat a communist advance if deterrence failed was generally consistent with a narrow conception of US national interests and self-defense. Many libertarians supported this policy in principle, though they occasionally quarreled with its implementation in practice. Their skepticism grew as our European and Asian allies grew wealthy but remained dependent upon the US government for their defense. But a truly libertarian foreign policy would have revisited the rationales put forward for collective defense in the post-Cold War period. Following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States adopted an expanded version of the common defense. The US government pledged to defend not merely the vital economic and population centers of Western Europe and East Asia, but also a host of emerging countries and regions, including in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Southwest Asia, the Persian Gulf. The object was to discourage countries from taking steps to defend themselves, in part because such steps might lead to destabilizing arms races, and in part because some fear the creation of independent centers of power that might someday challenge US dominance and ultimately threaten US security. This was a mistake, but it is one that we can and should correct. Strategic independence, what I and others today call restraint, is good for the United States and good for the cause of limited government and individual liberty. Americans should not cast aside our skepticism of warfare in the modern era. We enjoy a measure of safety that our ancestors would envy. Indeed, our too frequent use of the military has often undermined our security. And it has been ruinously expensive. Americans today spend nearly as much on national security as the rest of the planet combined. Limiting the US government's propensity to intervene, in part by limiting its ability to intervene, what I call solving the power problem, may be essential to preserving liberty in the future. If the US military's budget were to shrink, this would compel Washington to prioritize and to better align its strategic ends with its available means. Such a shift might also induce a greater sense of self-reliance and empowerment among US allies who have sheltered for decades under the American security umbrella. For the most part, libertarians believe that a greater reluctance to go to war would serve us well in the 21st century. Terrorism is an ongoing concern, but it pales in comparison to the wars fought in the first half of the 20th century. More to the point, military intervention is usually irrelevant when dealing with non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, and in many cases it's actually worse than irrelevant. It's counterproductive. Although there may be occasions when military force is required to eliminate an urgent threat to national security, and we must therefore maintain a strong military to deal with such threats, our capacity for waging war far exceeds that which is required for such contingencies. Libertarians argue that we do not need a hyperactive interventionist foreign policy in order to preserve US security. Attempting to be the world's policemen is costly and counterproductive. It's also inconsistent with basic ideas about the proper role of government. We should adopt a foreign policy for the United States that better aligns with our national interest and our political culture, and we should strive for a more equitable distribution of responsibility among all nations to maintain global security. Because the preservation of both our physical security and way of life depend on the United States participation in the international system, we must remain engaged in the world. But it's wrong to assume that we can only do so from a position of global military dominance. We do not need to send the US military to fight other people's civil wars or to rebuild other people's countries. The international system exists in spite of, not because of, the power of any one state, and it's the height of arrogance and folly to presume that the world will descend into chaos if the United States shapes its military to advance its vital national interest and adopts a more discriminating approach toward the use of force when those interests are not engaged. Today, many people not living in the United States, as well as some people here, especially here in Washington, D.C., where I'm recording this talk, believe that the US government should not confine itself to its enumerated powers under the Constitution. Rather than focus on providing for the common defense of merely some 310 million or so Americans, some argue that the US government should be responsible for the security of the whole world. More broadly, they argue that the cause of individual liberty and human rights needs a champion and that the United States is and should be that champion. People living under a tyrant's heel deserve to be liberated. The power of the US military might convince petty despots to step down. Failing that, the sharp end of American military power might deliver them to a prison or the gallows. But liberty has many champions. They include institutions like the Cato Institute, the Atlas Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies, as well as countless other libertarian and classical liberal organizations who promote limited government, individual liberty, and free markets on a daily basis. There are actually millions and tens of millions of people who advance the cause of liberty every day. And that is as it should be. Just as libertarians don't want a single entity to deliver the mail, send electrical power to our houses, and provide internet connections for our computers, it's better that liberty has many champions. They do not perform their work at the behest of the US government and they do not operate under the covering fire of American armaments. These champions do their work voluntarily and they promote their ideas peacefully. That is the essence of libertarianism and of a libertarian foreign policy. A world that was less dependent upon the use of military power would be a safer one, but also a more liberal one. George Washington and his farewell address and Thomas Jefferson and his first inaugural both admonished their countrymen to steer clear of the internal affairs of foreign powers and were anxious for the United States to avoid unnecessary wars. Such comments did not apply a disregard for human rights, far from it, but these men focused on maintaining their new nation as a shining example of freedom for the world. These sentiments were perhaps best expressed not by a founder, but rather by a founder's son. On July 4th, 1821, John Quincy Adams declared, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. Though the petulant few called for the United States to embark on a global crusade to destroy distant monsters, scorned Adams's vision as synonymous with cowardice and dishonor, we can see, given that their strategy has sapped our strength and undermined our security, what a wise standard it was. We would be richer, freer, and safer if we recall the traditional libertarian skepticism of collectivism and war, and if we embraced instead a foreign policy committed to liberty and to peace.