Necessary Evils: Libertarianism and War

Are libertarians obliged to be pacifists at all costs?

Recently, some readers of Liberty Itch took umbrage at my defence of Israel’s war conduct. ‘An apology for statism, nationalism and militarism,’ thundered one reader. None of which is remotely true, of course.

Still, some ‘outraged’ commenters had at least half a point: where was the ‘libertarian’ angle, in a piece published on a platform dedicated to ‘fearless, battle-tested libertarian ideas’. The short answer is that there wasn’t one: the article was about a different topic entirely. The longer answer is that the promotion of liberty was an enthymeme: an argument with an unstated, or assumed, premise. That premise is that war is sometimes necessary for the promotion of liberty.

Here’s the answer in full…

Those who ‘abjure violence’, as Orwell observed, can only do so safely because other people are prepared to be violent on their behalf. This is because we live in a world where, given less than half a chance, the strong will prey on the weak. War is practically the natural state of existence for living things on Earth. From ants to dolphins, creatures compete for territory and resources. Some termite species breed suicide bombers. Chimpanzees form ‘armies’ and wage war with savage intensity. Dolphins kill smaller animals for apparently no other reason than sport.

Humans may dream of a world without war, but that seems about as likely to happen as socialism working. So, for the time being, we have to accept a world with war. How, then, should a libertarian respond to war?

Libertarians are too often only slightly behind student socialists when it comes to castles-in-the-air theorising, if infinitely less likely to murder tens of millions in the pursuit of their utopia. Perhaps there will come a day where libertarians can contentedly polish their rifles and read Ayn Rand on the porch of their small steading in peace, with no government to bother them.

Which should happen some time after pigs grow wings, Satan breaks out the winter woollies, and long, long before socialists build a worker’s paradise where we can all fish in the morning and philosophise in the evening.

Until that sunny day, though, we’re going to remain firmly stuck in the real world. One consequence of living in the real world is the threat of war.

Until modern times, it’s been impossible to accurately gauge the scale of organised mass violence (aka, war) in the world. But, as Steven Pinker argues, it seems likely that (with two notable 20th century exceptions), the scale and frequency of human wars has slowly declined. It seems also likely that, in general, the growth of the modern nation-state has served to ameliorate the effects of war on the populace.

Again, there are exceptions, there will be blips in the trend. We’re dealing with the real world, remember. But it is almost certain that the effects of warfare in tribal societies were far more devastating than in nation-states. What are horrifying exceptions in the modern world – the scale of death and destruction in the two World Wars – were likely the norm for traditional societies. A ‘haemoclysm’ like WWII killed about 3 per cent of the global population. Tribal warfare kills about 20 times that ratio of its populations.

Even the most liberty-minded individual, short of an outright anarchist, necessarily accepts compromise. One such compromise is the nation-state. The state is a necessary evil in a less-than-perfect world. The trick is to make the necessary evil as minimally evil as possible. This is the libertarian position known as ‘minarchism’. Also dubbed ‘the night-watchman state’, minarchism advocates a minimal (well, duh!) state with limited functions. Those functions should be limited to the minimum necessary to protect its citizens and their property rights, and maximise their liberty.

Minarchists therefore, accept that such functions as a police force, court system, and military are among the necessary functions of a state.

So, having accepted the inevitability of war in a fallen world, and the necessary evil of the nation-state to prevent such greater evils as aggression, the question becomes just how far the state is allowed to go. The art, then, is finding the balance between defence and oppression. This is the sort of thing democracies must constantly wrestle with. But, in the end, the necessity of a military for even the most liberty-minded state is a given, although libertarians don’t accept handing the military an open mandate.

It’s also an inherent contradiction for a free state that the military itself is the opposite of liberty. A military is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian. It must be: commanders must be able to operate on the assumption that those in their command will obey orders.

Still, many libertarians seem to be able to accept that contradiction as a necessary compromise for furthering liberty. Indeed, some evidence suggests that the US military attracts more than its share of libertarians. A Cato Institute survey found that 39 per cent of active duty military supported libertarian candidates. The US may be exceptional because its military (theoretically, at least) serves the constitution, a liberty-minded document. Others argue that nothing is so likely to make one libertarian than seeing how poorly the government runs things from the inside. Some prominent liberty-minded thinkers certainly served: Friedrich Hayek was decorated in WWI and Ludwig Mises also served (albeit involuntarily).

But there are some things libertarians can countenance only with difficulty.

Conscription is the most obvious. Surely the most fundamental right a citizen should have is to not be coerced into sacrificing their life and liberty against their will. But, in his classic Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein (another military veteran, who stated that, “I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces”) also argued for a directly reciprocal relationship between citizenship and military service. (Not conscription: military service, in Starship Troopers, could only be voluntarily given, and voluntarily ended at any time.)

The other red line for a libertarian must surely be wars of aggression. If a military exists to defend the liberty of its citizens, it can only properly do so when aggressors threaten the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. The best defence is avoiding war altogether, of course. To that end, a standing military is surely necessary: the best way to avoid being attacked is being strong enough to defend. Peace through strength doesn’t justify bullying, of course. Nor does it justify a military that is burdensome beyond the necessities of preventive defence. Where that line is drawn, of course, is subject to the shifting sands of geopolitics and the strategic environment.

To consider some recent real world examples, Israel’s war of extermination against Hamas is as justified as the war against the Third Reich. To preserve the future peace, lives, and liberty of its citizens, Israel has no more choice but to crush Hamas completely than the Allies had to exterminate the Nazis, root and branch. Anything less, as history has shown, is to fail in the Israeli state’s duty to its citizens.

George W. Bush’s “Great War on Terror”, could not be justified from a libertarian perspective. Perhaps there was arguable justification for strikes on al Qaeda’s terror training camps, thus eliminating an obvious threat to the liberty of American citizens. But there was no justification for a prolonged war to supposedly ‘bring democracy’ to a benighted region which clearly had no interest in it. Afghans are not American citizens: the US military, or the Australian Defence Force, are not obliged to them in the same way they are to their own citizens.

Still, the fundamental principle remains: in an imperfect world, certain compromises must be made for the sake of maximising liberty. One is the acceptance of a minimal state. The other, following directly from that, is the necessity of a military. A military which must be able to defend the lives, liberty and property of the citizens they serve.