The Fifth Column in the Liberty Movement

 

The Fifth Column in the Liberty Movement

 

While driving around yesterday I had a chance to hear one of the talks from a recent Mises Institute event, this one from Ted Galen Carpenter, formerly of the Cato Institute.

Carpenter spoke bluntly about a problem we've known about for a long time.

There are plenty of people who say: I agree with libertarians except on foreign policy. I used to be such a person, until it occurred to me that it's precisely in foreign policy where libertarians have been perhaps most dramatically vindicated, especially over the past 30 years or so.

Even Russell Kirk, among the founders of modern American conservatism and a man who had more than his share of unkind words for libertarians, spoke favorably of their approach to foreign policy. This will come as a surprise to those who got their conservatism from neoconservative radio hosts, but Kirk appreciated that libertarians tried "to exert some check upon vainglorious foreign policy. They do not believe that the United States should station garrisons throughout the world; no more do I.... Let it suffice for the present for me to declare that so far as the libertarians set their faces against a policy of American domination worldwide -- why, I am with them."

Back to our subject: Carpenter says there's a portion of the libertarian movement, particularly but not exclusively in Europe, that can be counted on to repeat whatever the current talking points from the State Department and the CIA happen to be.

Some excerpts from Carpenter:

It is my belief that the libertarian movement has a destructive, pro-war, pro-imperial fifth column.

Some of this goes back a long time. I remember a good many libertarians early on who said that they believed in all the libertarian positions except with respect to a non-interventionist foreign policy.

And that attitude has been especially prevalent today among European libertarians, who slavishly endorse US global leadership.... They believe NATO should not only exist forever, but it should expand and even become a global force. You find so many of those kinds of hawkish, pro-imperial libertarians endorsing the US-led proxy war in Ukraine today.

Now to them, a non-interventionist foreign policy is at best a luxury option. They can choose to adopt it, or they can choose to adopt a much more hawkish policy. I would argue that is a fundamental error. That foreign policy, avoiding war, avoiding needless interventions is not only a crucial issue -- it is the most crucial issue.

As Randolph Bourne observed more than a century ago, war is the health of the state. And indeed so many government abuses, so many expansions of government power, have taken place because of our foreign policy, because of involvement in wars and constant preparation for wars. And the logic in that, I think, is unassailable.

The requirements of an imperial foreign policy are fairly simple. You can't run a global empire on the cheap. You can't do it. It requires high taxes. It requires pervasive regulations -- all, of course, in the name of national security. It leads to a powerful, excessively powerful, executive. That is the origin of the imperial presidency that we're now dealing with that has so eclipsed the legislative branch and the judicial branch in terms of power. It leads to pervasive secrecy. Everything gets classified. You know, we have now nearly two billion classified documents....

Instead of standing against the hysteria surrounding whatever the crisis of the day is, peddled to them by the official propaganda outlets, the fifth column is all too happy to repeat the hysteria.

Carpenter gives specifics:

Too many libertarians succumb to government propaganda on foreign policy, especially on issues of war and peace. So they fall for the hyped threats and the terrible crisis of the day.... The reaction to the Ukraine war, I think illustrates the problem. Students for Liberty put numerous articles on their website with respect to that topic. More than half a dozen in just the first couple of months. All of them endorsed strong support for Ukraine. Some even hinted and rather hinted quite clearly about the need for Western military intervention. No opposing pieces were published during that period.

I am most familiar with the problem of the pro-war, pro-imperial fifth column during my years at the Cato Institute. Cato started out being staunchly non-interventionist, and it was that at the time that I joined the Institute in 1985....

The Institute clearly is de-emphasizing defense and foreign policy. In 2017, for the 40th anniversary of the institute's founding, they produced a video about a 20-minute video on the work of the institute and what had had accomplished over the years. Fine. Defence and foreign policy got about 45 seconds in that 20 minute video. And all of that was devoted to our work against conscription, which, let's be blunt, was not exactly a front-burner issue in 2017. Nothing about Iraq, nothing about Syria, nothing about Libya, nothing about the Balkan wars, which we had vehemently opposed. And yet that wasn't considered very important. More recently, a few years ago, the Foreign and Defense Policy Program was downgraded within the bureaucratic chart....

We've now seen several Cato scholars endorse both economic and military aid to Ukraine. They simply quibble about the extent of the military aid.... Fortunately, the institute and its scholars continue to oppose direct US military intervention. But they've largely embraced the current proxy war, which has been horribly cruel to the people of Ukraine especially, and to the people of Russia....

Senior fellow Tom Palmer, in a May 2022 speech before Students for Liberty, embraced nearly every talking point about the Ukraine war put out by the State Department and the CIA. He even denied that NATO expansion into Russia's immediate neighborhood, into turning Ukraine into a NATO military asset, played any role in the Kremlin's decision to launch the invasion in February of 2022....

Well, unfortunately for him, the NATO secretary general just came clean on that, admitting that the Russian military response was, at least in large part, a response to an ever-larger NATO getting ever closer to the Russian border. So I hope that Mr. Palmer engages with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and tells him how he was wrong, that clearly NATO did not play any role in this....

With friends like these, I would argue the liberty movement doesn't need any enemies. Foreign policy is not a luxury option. So-called libertarians who embrace American empire undermine the cause of freedom at home and around the world. We should call them what they really are: imperial apologists and pro-war fifth columnists. Thank you very much.

You'll find the whole thing here.

Now, a few items for you:

(1) There's another Mises Institute event taking place November 4 in Ft. Myers, Florida, called "The White House, the Fed, and the Economy," featuring top-notch speakers. Click here for details. If you'd like a $15 discount that's just for my readers, reply to this email and I'll send you the discount code.

(2) In a day and age in which older wisdom is despised in favor of modern pap, the great Russell Brunson is on a mission to recapture and reprint old books on success and wealth that we've foolishly cast aside. He's making a free-plus-shipping offer of Napoleon Hill's classic Think and Grow Rich, along with two other volumes. Borderline irresistible. Snap it up: https://www.tomwoods.com/oldies

(3) My friend Amy Curtis is running a free session called "5 Myths About College (and Some SIGNIFICANTLY Cheaper Alternatives." Very much worth your time. Click here to attend.

Tom Woods