All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Sheldon Richman, he is the Executive Editor at our Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org, he is the author of Coming to Palestine, which you ought to read so that you know about all that stuff that's in it.
And also, he writes a column for us almost every Friday, many Fridays, called TGIF, The Goal is Freedom.
And this one is called The Non-Intervention Principle.
It's at the top of our brand new page at libertarianinstitute.org.
Hope you like that.
Welcome back.
How you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you for having me back.
Yeah, the website looks real good.
Cool.
I'm glad you liked it, too.
Nice job.
Yeah, man.
Okay, so, you know, I think I want to dial back the red in that maroon and make it a little browner maroon.
Yeah, maybe it just depends which screen I'm looking at it on.
Anyway, great article.
The Non-Intervention Principle, where does it begin?
Well, the reason I picked that title is because I actually thought of this afterwards.
It kind of echoes the more familiar phrase, the non-aggression principle that libertarians like to talk about, which simply says, you know, you may not morally initiate force against other people.
You can use force in defense of your life and innocent life, other innocent life, but you know, that's it.
You can't, you can't assault people, kill people, rape people, take their stuff, etc.
So that was the, that was the title.
What prompted the article was just stuff I've seen on social media.
And I don't know if I've seen like full blown articles, but it's more the nature of comments, which is why I didn't have any links to them, because I really couldn't find them.
But I sense there are people who don't fully understand at least the libertarian theory of non-interventionism in foreign policy and military policy.
Maybe there are other takes that would use the word, the term non-interventionism, but I'm talking about what I call, what I think of as the libertarian principle.
And the criticism I see is, well, first of all, people who accept intervention, at least under some circumstances, think that it's enough to simply say that the tyranny, the tyrant du jour, as I call, you know, particular rulers in my piece, if that person is bad enough, then that's all you need to show to make a case for U.S. intervention, regime change, nation building, whatever, war, just going to go into war.
And they think that's enough.
And so I think sometimes libertarians are tempted to take a shortcut to rebut that person by saying, well, the tyrant du jour, you know, isn't really that bad or as bad as you say, because that seems to blunt the, you know, the move toward intervention just by taking the rug out from under that person, right, saying, well, the ruler's not that bad.
So that kills your case for intervention.
And I think that's a very bad move.
First of all, I don't think it's a really honest move.
It implies that if the ruler really were that bad, then you'd be fine with intervention, which is the libertarian, it seems to me, is not, doesn't really want to say that.
But why imply it?
Another reason is, of course, it's, it may not be honest.
I mean, the ruler may be pretty bad, really bad.
So what I wanted to do is reestablish the point that the libertarian case for non-interventionism doesn't depend on the, you know, the moral stature of whoever happens to be the new target for government policy.
There's nothing inconsistent about saying, yeah, that ruler is every bit as bad as you say.
However, that's not enough.
That doesn't make the case for non-intervention.
Non-intervention stands on, on, you know, other grounds altogether, which I then go on to discuss.
Now, another thing, and I can, I can say what those grounds are in a moment, but right now, let me continue with what I think are sort of fallacies.
Instead, you may say, like I said, you could say that the, the tyrant, this ruler in question is just as bad as you say.
So that's one case.
You might all, you might all say, yes, I agree that the ruler is bad, but he's not bad in every respect.
So in other words, you've overstated how bad he is.
And you ought to be able to say that without being accused of being soft, you know, on, on that ruler or, or a puppet of that ruler or a toady or, you know, whatever term you want to use.
So for example, I give, I give an example of Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria.
I don't, I wouldn't want to live under Bashar al-Assad.
He's done some very, obviously very terrible things.
However, there's something good you can say about him, namely that he's protected religious minorities, most, most glaringly Christians.
And he's also a member of a minority in, in Syria.
He's an Alawite, which is a branch of, you know, Shiism, part of Shiism.
And that's a minority in Syria.
And that, from everything I read, that is true.
It doesn't get a lot of attention because the, the mainstream media and politicians don't like to say anything that goes against their narrative, that we have to intervene against, against him or maybe, you know, overthrow him.
But that's true.
Now, if I point out it's true, that's, those are not my grounds for non-intervention.
And it also doesn't mean I'm pro-Assad, the fact that I can find something positive to say about him.
So that, so that's another, that's another point I wanted to make.
And then the third point I make is, I've heard non-interventionists, libertarian non-interventionists be accused of the following.
Oh, so you say it's wrong for governments, especially the U.S. government, to, to cross the border of another state and intervene.
Obviously, if you're going to intervene, you've got to cross the border, I mean, especially if it's some sort of military, either your planes or troop, ground troops or, or your missiles are going to cross the national boundary of whatever the state is we're talking about.
And so I've heard libertarians accused of being nationalists, secret closet nationalists, because you, you have reverence for boundaries.
You say the government should not cross another nation's borders.
And I mean, I've heard this for actually a long time.
And I wanted to put on the record that that's wrong, too.
That's not the reason libertarians should oppose interventionism, certainly not the reason I oppose it.
And the reason has nothing to do with any kind of sacredness of boundaries.
I mean, we want to see boundaries reduced to, you know, nothing, or virtually nothing, because that's what open borders would do.
So I have no reverence for national boundaries.
My reason for non-interventionism is not that the nation state, you know, is somehow sacred.
But, and this was a reason given by Albert J. Knock and then later on Murray Rothbard, we don't want states clashing and colliding.
Because when that happens, conflicts get larger, they get aggravated, and the potential for death and maiming of noncombatants gets greater.
So as we have seen in the 21st century, if not, and we should have seen it before that, when the U.S. intervenes in a foreign quarrel, whether it's some kind of civil war or interstate conflict, if the U.S. government piles on and intervenes, it's going to be worse.
More people are going to get killed, more innocents especially are going to get killed, and all other bad things will follow from it.
So it has nothing to do with respect for national boundaries.
It has to do with keeping your own state, to use Knock's term, on a short leash or as short a leash as possible.
So those are basically the three points I wanted to make in this relatively brief article for me.
Well now, along the last lines there, there's something about the nation beyond just the monopoly on force of any given state within its borders where, you know, it seems that the American people, through our government so to speak, owe a decent respect to their national independence.
So I don't know if that means slavish devotion to the Treaty of Westphalia or something, but say for example in Venezuela, they want to have commie control over their oil resources.
That's just not our business.
For example, if somehow our government could change that without growing in power and without adverse consequences in a hypothetical, it's still, they have no right to tell these people somewhere else within their nation how their resources are to be divvied up.
Or not.
What?
Well, I don't think the state, yeah, the state doesn't have rights.
No state has rights.
So the U.S. government can't have the right to tell Venezuelans or the Venezuelan power elite, because I don't believe for a moment that the Venezuelan people govern Venezuela.
No, but I bet they want a publicly owned oil company, as inefficient as I'm sure it is.
Right.
But any decision is going to be made independent of that, even if that's true.
So it ends up looking like I'm saying, yeah, if they want to nationalize, you know, resources or otherwise, you know, collectivize their economy, they, quote, have the right to do that.
I just don't think the U.S. government has a right or, you know, anyone else has a right to interfere.
Certainly any other government has a right to interfere.
I just think governments don't have rights and it should not have the power for all kinds of reasons, sort of pragmatic as well as moral.
The government should not have the power to do that because it'll, first of all, it won't only stick to the, you know, the, you may come up with some, not you, but I mean a person come up, some libertarian come up with some very narrow criteria for when it would be okay for the government, U.S. government to intervene.
And they may come up with very strict, and that doesn't mean I'd buy their case, but at least I'd give them credit for kind of trying to come up with some very strict circumstances.
The problem is in the real world, real world politicians and bureaucrats are not going to stick to your narrow set of criteria.
There's going to be mission creep.
They're going to, you know, it's the public choice problem.
They're going to work to expand their power.
So even if you began with very strict criteria, it wouldn't, those wouldn't last long.
Those would be expanded very quickly.
You know, there's a great piece of advice from the philosopher David Hume.
He said you should, you know, you should devise policies as if knaves are going to be the ones implementing them.
That's a very good rule of thumb that I would, that I would advise.
So you can come up with what sounds like a really good policy that's only going to have very narrow application.
But what happens if it's in the hand of a knave?
You're giving power to someone who's not going to respect your criteria and will find a way to expand those or to justify and say, oh, no, I'm really satisfying them.
Even though you say, you, the author of the criteria said, no, that doesn't satisfy them.
You're not going to be the one making the decisions.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of my favorite Jefferson quotes, not that he respected this when it was his turn or anything, but he says, let us hear no more of confidence in men, but let them be bound by the chains of the constitution, which, you know, I know that you're a market anarchist.
And so am I.
But we do live in the USA and we do, at least in theory, have this constitution.
And article one, pardon me, article four, section four, of course, says that the US, that is the national government, shall guarantee to every state in the union a Republican form of government.
And, you know, the war power depends on how you interpret it.
People interpret it pretty broadly to say that they have the right to launch aggressive wars.
But this would certainly seem to indicate that their power to go changing regimes in order to make sure that they abide by the rule of law and so forth would end at the borders of the United States.
That any state that ratifies this constitution, whether back then or joining the union later, that they are acceding to that contract.
That they have to keep an independent judiciary and I don't know if they have to have a bicameral legislature, but certainly a separate legislature from the executive branch and a bill of rights delineating a set of ideas largely along the lines of those in the US Bill of Rights and that kind of thing.
Or else, the US government reserves the right to change your regime in your state.
But it seems like, you know, I'm not exactly, it's the other Scott Horton that's the international lawyer and all this stuff, but it seems like the fact that they are expressly delegated that power when it comes to states in the union would certainly imply that they lack that power when it comes to all the other hundred and ninety two states in the world.
Well, and I'm sorry it took me so long to figure out how to say that.
I mean, you know, I'm not a fan of the Constitution.
I wrote a book about the Constitution, which I called America's Counter-Revolution.
I wasn't the first to use that term in connection with the revolution.
But even with my skepticism about the Constitution, I can see where it would be very hard to use the Constitution to make a case that it's within the powers of the national government to change regimes, to judge and change regimes of other countries.
I don't know where, you know, Jefferson or Madison said, you know, I can't lay my finger on the text, the provision in the Constitution that, you know, would permit that.
That seems clearly outside of any kind of scope you could come up with from the U.S. Constitution.
Jefferson also said in, I think, the Kentucky Resolution that the proper attitude of a free people is not confidence in government, but jealousy toward that government.
In other words, constantly eyeing it, that it, you know, it wants what you have, namely your freedom, and it's going to grab it if it can.
So yeah, he said some good, definitely said some good things in those regard, even if he didn't always live up to them.
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I'm sure with you and I think it's, you know, it's funny because a lot of the times, well, let's say virtually always when our government is targeting a foreign country, they're lying about it and there's always kernels of truth and plenty of reality to it.
For example, Bashar al-Assad's government was in the middle of a war, but at the same time, hey, look at these three giant fake sarin attacks.
One of them that was clearly a false flag.
One of them that seems more like a improvised type of a false flag.
And then another one that was clearly a false flag again.
And you know, so here we got to debunk these most horrid accusations against the evil fascist dictator just because the truth is the truth.
Also, the lie lends toward the narrative of government intervention.
And of course, you know, Obama backed down in 2013, but in 2017 and 18, Trump fell for this twice and launched, thankfully, limited strikes against the Syrian government based on those lies.
And so, you know, as you say, our argument doesn't necessarily hinge on that, but it's also understandable why people think that, geez, Sheldon, all you do is defend dictators.
So, yeah, but that's only because my government is falsely accusing them all day.
They want to accuse somebody else, I'll defend them too.
But you can see why people say, geez, you sure do take Noriega's side a lot.
What's your beef anyway?
Why would you, you know what I mean?
Well, we shouldn't be afraid of the facts and, you know, reality is complicated and a given ruler can do some really bad things, terrible, terrible things, but that doesn't mean he's guilty of everything that someone can think up to say about him.
And so if somebody does make a, you know, a baseless accusation and we have good evidence, you know, we know there's no evidence that it's true, let's say, we shouldn't be afraid to point that out.
And then we need to be ready to, first of all, look, we don't want to imply that if Assad actually did launch those chemical attacks, the ones that have been, you know, undermined by the people involved in the UN's, you know, chemical weapons commission and other people, if he actually had launched those attacks, that wouldn't make intervention then, regime change in Syria, okay, according to a libertarian theory of non-intervention.
That's what I want to say.
It's an independent point and we should, it's an empirical question.
We can't know a priori that Assad launched chemical, those chemical attacks, the ones that you named.
We can't know that.
We need to look for the evidence and, and, and look to reliable, reputable people like, you know, what's his name, Ted Postal at MIT, is that his name?
Yeah.
You know, who's no ax to grind.
He's a recognized expert in this and we, we should take what he says seriously.
It doesn't mean he's, can't make a mistake and we should just take it on, you know, just that's it.
That's all we need to know.
No, we need to study it and, and decide and not be afraid to say, hey, he's right.
Assad didn't do this without someone saying, oh, so you're soft on Assad or, you know, Gabbard, Tulsi Gabbard's suffering this cause, cause as a member of Congress, she went to actually visit him.
She also visited some of his opposition and she's still dogged by the, you know, by the accusation that she's some kind of a puppet of Assad.
So you know, I'm not expecting consistent rationality on the other side.
They'll continue to accuse us of being toadies because we oppose intervention.
And no matter how many times I say, you know, that's wrong, it doesn't follow, you know, I don't believe I'll convince those people.
So I'm talking to these sort of uncommitted people who let them be skeptical.
They should be, when a non-interventionist says the bad guy didn't do all the bad things you're saying, the, you know, the fence sitter should be skeptical enough to say, yeah, okay, that doesn't mean you're an apologist.
I understand that.
So let's see what the facts are.
I'm just making a plea for rationality when it comes right down to it.
All right.
But what's the limit?
And because, well, let's say for example, what if Russia wanted to do to America the exact carbon copy thing of our Ukraine policy, and that would be overthrowing the government of Canada with a Nazi backed coup d'etat and then going to war against all the people in British Columbia who refuse to accept the results of the coup.
Should America not intervene if all this is going on in Canada next door?
Well, I don't think we should intervene in Canada.
No, I think we should.
I think we're capable of having a home defense.
But the Russians, Sheldon, I'm sorry, I'm trying to pretend to believe in it for devil's argument's sake.
But yeah.
No.
So seriously, though, if Putin overthrew the government in Canada, installed a Nazi backed, say he got the right sector and the Azov battalion of Canada to come out to back the new regime, we should sit here and cluck our tongues, huh?
Well, I don't know if we should cluck our tongues, I don't necessarily endorse tongue clucking.
But we shouldn't, we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't mobilize and invade Canada.
We could annex Crimea.
I guess we could do that.
You know, I'm just I'm just kidding about that.
Occupy Newfoundland?
Come up with nightmare scenarios.
It's true from now until the end of time.
And there may be some, you know, tough circumstances.
But let's deal with the world, you know, as we face it.
You know, Putin is not going to do that.
And I think there may be some resistance inside the Canada, even if even if he tried to do it.
I'm not convinced he's, you know, trying to use Facebook to change the outcome of our elections.
I don't think he's going to be staging a coup in Canada.
Someone just sent me a link.
Trump is a Russian asset is trending on Twitter right now.
There was a briefing.
Apparently there was an intelligence briefing yesterday where they, yeah, they in no way describe how they know this or why we should believe them.
But they just say, yeah, trust us, Putin is working to reelect Trump.
And Trump, I guess, said something publicly about the NSA, the NSA or whoever, whichever intelligent officials were doing the briefing, I guess he publicly criticized.
I saw some headline and I didn't see the story.
Anyway, look, you can't you can't base you can't base your day to day policy on nightmare scenarios or or extreme emergencies.
So, you know, I don't think it's very helpful to come up with, you know, what if Putin's about to take over Canada?
Yeah.
All right.
So what about well, we saw in history, I mean, one of the worst kind of auto genocides, probably the worst one ever would have been in Mao Zedong's China, where they just reduced that place to the Stone Age, man, and just tens of millions of people starved to death, this kind of thing.
And the U.S. government at that time, I guess they had the Soviet Union to contend with.
So it wasn't really even, you know, in question.
But someone might argue that, hey, you know, we've had enough worst case scenarios in our recent history here within living memory that, you know, what if there really was something like that where some some commie regime is starving their own people to death by the tens of millions?
And we frankly could change the regime if we would just bomb their capital city for a few weeks or whatever it is and put an end to something like that.
It seems like it is worth arguing because that's, of course, the nightmare scenarios are all they're ever going to come up with.
And there are enough to choose from for hypothetical example type things, you know?
Yeah, but the problem with the exact case you've used is that you've walked in the middle of the movie, walked into the theater, you know, after the movie started, because Mao is only in a position to do that because we intervened in Asia against Japan.
Now, it doesn't mean I'm a fan of the Japanese empire in the 1930s and 40s, but.
The U.S. intervened in Asia, which put Mao in the position, just like World War One put the Bolsheviks in a position to take power in Russia.
So you made a point there, you're giving an example that makes my earlier point, namely when the U.S. intervenes, chances are it's going to make things worse in ways you can't even imagine.
I assume they didn't really think the communists would take over China if we moved against Japan and broke the Japanese empire.
Yeah, but that's what happened.
That seems the lesson seems to be don't intervene.
And it sounds like it's the point that Brian Kaplan makes and when he makes his case, you can find this stuff on his blog at Econ, is it Econ Log?
Yeah, Econ Log, his case for what he calls pragmatic pacifism.
So it's a, you know, you can be pretty close to certain that when if the U.S. government intervenes in a foreign situation, it's gonna make things worse.
And I like how in the article you cite Albert J.
Knock, the guy that wrote As We Go Marching.
No, that was John T.
Flynn.
Oh, no, you're right.
Yeah, that was Flynn.
But Knock was our enemy, the state, right?
Yeah, which is a very good book, a very good look at American history, beginning with the Constitution, founding of the U.S.
So, right, and he's the one who just made this common sense point that you need to keep, you know, quote, your state, the one you live under, because that's the one you have, you may not have a lot of access, but that's the one you have the most access to, which may not be a lot.
But you got to keep that on a short leash, because when states collide, bystanders suffer.
There's a good shorthand way of putting it, right?
When states collide, bystanders suffer.
So let's at least keep our state, which is the most powerful in the world, of course, from colliding with other states, because the good is highly unlikely to come from it.
Well, and we certainly know in this case, you know, I saw a thing where Noam Chomsky once said that the only actual, you know, legitimately humanitarian war that was ever launched that he knows of, or at least in recent time anyway, modern times, was when the communists of Vietnam invaded Cambodia to put an end to Pol Pot's reign of terror there and the refugee crisis it was generating.
And then that was when Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan took Pol Pot's side, because they still hated the Vietnamese more.
I guess that means Carter and Reagan were good non-interventionists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny because people say, that's not true.
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan backed Pol Pot?
And then they Google it and then they go, oh, no, Ronald Reagan backed Pol Pot.
I think there's a good case to be made that there wouldn't have been Pol Pot.
Well, the person Pol Pot might would have still existed, but he wouldn't have been what he became had it not been for the U.S. intervention in the, you know, into China and Southeast Asia.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
In the name of preventing the dominoes from falling down, they blew up that domino and then created the absolute worst case scenario that you could have imagined as a result of it.
And then that's the big irony, right, is finally America lost and got out of the way of the Vietnamese regime, which went and put an end to that genocide finally.
Yeah.
So there's lots of ironies there.
It doesn't exactly make the case for non-intervention, does it?
And Ron Paul, speaking of Vietnam, Ron Paul would always say, you know, we fought and fought and there are people who would still have us fighting in Vietnam.
And yet we're friends with them now and trade with them.
Not that it's perfect, but it's certainly better, you know?
Of course.
And Chris, there are people who think we should stay in Afghanistan for 100 years.
You're right about that.
There are.
Forever.
Why, I can't, which seems like completely crazy to me, but there's not even a domino theory there.
They don't even have the cover of a domino theory.
Yep.
Nope.
Just the magic portal to Boston Logan Airport that they don't even ever have to describe.
They just imply it exists.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry we're out of time, but great to talk to you as always, Sheldon.
Thank you very much, sir.
Same here.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org, slash Sheldon.
And this one is TGIF, the Non-Intervention Principle.
And read the book, Coming to Palestine.
Libertarianinstitute.org.
