Libertarians and War

From today's Von Mises dispatch:

To conclude: A libertarian just war would have to be declared in response to an act of aggression that could not be remedied by a lesser level of defensive violence. It would have to be declared by an agency on behalf of people who had assigned their rights of self defense. The war could be declared only on behalf of those assignees. Dissenters would have to be left in peace to defend themselves, or not. The declaration of war would be against the individuals responsible for an attack but not against the "enemy" civilian population. And, finally, the war would have to be conducted with strategies and weaponry that could not foreseeably involve injuring or killing innocents.

Given these requirements, a libertarian just war remains unimaginable.

Indeed it does. Which is one reason Lew Rockwell libertarianism unfortunately remains unimaginable. Perhaps a libertarian may not justly go to war, but war will come to the libertarian. And it's in the interests of liberty that when it does, he wins.

John Keegan's A History of Warfare is interesting on the subject. Keegan makes an anthropological case (not with any particular joy) that Clausewitz was wrong. War is the human condition and politics is the extension of war by other means. The public choice economic argument for war also seems compelling. If your population exceeds your resources, you must reduce population, increase resources, or improve efficiency through advancements in productivity and technology - and there is one human activity that holds out the promise, however illusory, of doing all three at once.

It is possible even in the face of the seeming inevitability of war to refuse to participate. I'm much more eager for the United States to refuse to participate than I once was. It once seemed to me that nothing could be more libertarian than knocking off a genocidal dictator. But the game has seldom proven to be worth the candle.

Nevertheless it would be wrong to say there can never be a game worth playing, nor a candle worth burning. That way lies the fate of the Moriori. The modern test I like to apply is whether someone's philosophy would have required them to allow the Nazis or Soviets to conquer everything outside the U.S. border (or worse, the U.S. itself) without Americans entering the fight. Call me crazy, but I don't think it's conducive to liberty to give blood transfusions to those states that are especially likely to derive their health from war.