Murray N. Rothbard

Murray Rothbard’s isolationist fallacies

by François Guillaumat

In the same way as in economic theory Murray Rothbard recommended a monetary policy inconsistent both with his own political principles and with the necessities of monetary adjustment, in international politics his thinking was fraught with fallacies, which arose from his attempt to use the philosophical a priori approach beyond the limits of its validity, that is to say in a field of knowledge where, on the contrary, prior historical analysis is absolutely necessary.

We must insist on the fact that the Rothbardians’ principled isolationism is inspired by fallacies and not only by different assessments or a lesser tendency to compromise, because its critics as well as its supporters still mistakenly believe that Rothbard’s isolationism was a direct consequence of his anarcho-capitalist principles, whereas it is not the case: on the contrary, it stems from his inability to apply them seriously to a complex political reality.

The category error of an a priori foreign policy

Indeed international politics, like all politics, but even more than national politics because it deals with two or more states -- by definition aggressive and violent, is the domain of the dilemmas, of seeking the lesser evil, where the principles of freedom cannot be applied directly nor with certainty.

On the contrary, we can only identify the policy to be pursued though political intuition, after a thorough analysis of its implications. It requires knowledge and direct experience of the political societies in question, and of their mutual relationships, which obviously cannot be gained by anyone who thinks he can decide everything in advance.

Similarly, the advisability of a policy depends largely on the circumstances, not least because it depends on balances of forces which are constantly changing.

To claim a priori knowledge of the right decision is a guarantee of failure for the policy at hand, whatever it may be.

To try and determine foreign policy a priori is a category error which in turn guarantees the incompetence of those who commit it.

Thus the advisability of a policy must necessarily depend on the circumstances, and any decision made upon it must be the end product of a localized and dated historical study, and not of a general philosophical argument.

A logical consequence of that is that the very concepts of "isolationism" or "interventionism", or "pacifism" or "warmongering" are meaningless if taken in absolute terms, that is to say, independently of the political circumstances to which the decision applies.

Yet that is precisely what Murray Rothbard did as he tried in For a New Liberty to define isolationism as "the" free-market foreign policy.

As a consequence, anyone who has seriously studied any matter of international politics can only conclude that in those matters Rothbard and the Rothbardians as such regularly ignore relevant facts which run counter to their pre-determined conclusions.

As they generally know only the United States and believe that they can dispense with knowing other governments, they have failed to take the measure of how much more mendacious and criminal those can be, and as a consequence they have more often than not sided with the worst murderers against those who tried to neutralize them, while repeating lies from their propaganda.

The false "exception" of isolationism

The inability to understand politics engendered by this categorical error has inspired its followers a set of secondary fallacies which essentially consist in postulating natural differences between the policies they advocate and those they denounce which are in fact purely imaginary :

The fallacy of borders

The fallacy of borders means to believe that the laws of politics are different once the border has been crossed: Whereas he knows better than anyone that if you do not care about politics, that will not prevent politics from dealing with you, the Rothbardian isolationist believes that, on the other side of the border, then things change, and there are no aggressors among foreigners:

"if we leave them alone, they will leave us alone."

Anthropology could suffice to dispel this illusion by refuting its racist underlying assumption that non-Westerners have no power of agency and can only react to the initiatives of the West -- who, in the anti-white version of this kind of racism, could be the only ones who ever commit aggression.

Yet, the history of the United States should also have been enough: in the first quarter century of their existence, the United States were attacked by the Barbary pirates, by France, and by England. That is why they spent the rest of the nineteenth century preventively conquering the strategic space outside of their state : that was the "Frontier". Now that the conquered territories have been incorporated to it, we forget that they were not part of it and claim that a US "imperialism" was born in the late 19th century; this way of writing history rests on a biased selection of the events and their questionable interpretation, which allows for a suspicion that evidence has been sought exclusively to support pre-determined conclusions.

The verbal analogy of interventionism

Another, simpler fallacy rests on a verbal confusion: Rothbardian isolationism, in order to say that "interventionism" abroad is bound to fail, points to the fact that economic "interventionism" always fails to achieve its purported goals.

Yet, if economic "interventionism" does fail to achieve its purported goals, it achieves by definition at least one of its real objectives, which is to enable the powerful to steal from the weak. As regards its purported goals, economic "interventionism" can only fail because it claims to serve production whereas it is inherently aggressive and aggressive violence is pure destruction -- and total destruction to boot, since it involves investments made not in production but in trying to avail oneself of the production of others: those are pseudo-investments, in effect lost for any production.

That, and that alone is true a priori reasoning about "interventionism": every extension of such reasoning beyond this axiomatic truth, which Rothbard did and Rothbardians do, is fallacious and leads inevitably to error. That is true of the other aspects of economic interventionism, like who its real victims and beneficiaries are, which do depend on the a priori economic laws of fiscal incidence and effective protection, but not independently of the circumstances.

That is obviously also true of "interventionism" abroad, where all that can be known a priori is that gangs of aggressors confront other gangs of aggressors there, so that, logically, the advisability of siding with the ones or the others cannot be determined a priori. And as regards the effectiveness of such intervention, victory, not production, is the ostensible criterion of its success or failure; also, such violence may well serve production to the extent that it assaults criminals, something which the officials of the foreign states are by definition.

The warfare-welfare state

Another variant of the verbal sleight-of-hand about "interventionism", this time borrowed from the left, and which is also characteristic of the illegitimate use of an a priori approach in matters of history, is the warfare-welfare-state argument: this argument represents as a necessary and universal connection the coincidence between the development of the welfare state and the war observed in the United States during the 1960s. Without even having to explain this historical coincidence, only one counter-example is logically necessary to refute the universality of those claims, and two can already be given: Britain’s evolution towards laissez-faire as it was developing its empire, and conversely, the expansion of the welfare state in Western Europe at the expense of defense since the mid-1960s.

The contradictions inherent in the complexity objection

The confusion over the word "interventionism" sometimes expresses a more subtle argument: that which argues that foreign policy is doomed to failure because society is opaque to those who would change it: that society is too complex and unpredictable for anyone to act effectively upon it.

It is true that international politics is more complex than national politics; and it is therefore also true that one must conclude that political action is even more uncertain and should be more cautious there than in national politics. Yet it remains to be seen what will be called "prudence" in this case, since in those matters, to do nothing is still to do something (see below). And that is why the complexity of international politics is an argument that a Rothbardian can hardly use without contradiction, since it means that it should be studied even more deeply in order to avoid elementary failures, whereas he claims on the contrary, with his a priori defined "libertarian foreign policy", that such study could be completely dispensed with.

If the “complexity” argument proved that any "intervention" abroad is necessarily doomed to failure, then it would prove the same of any kind of political choice, and first, of any kind of foreign policy whatsoever – including an isolationist one. Again, borders are irrelevant: whoever preaches isolationism expects some effects from it, and those may very well not obtain, especially if such a policy was based on fallacies which inspired a refusal to get seriously informed.

A self-refuting position

Furthermore, if the opaque and unpredictable nature of society necessarily doomed any foreign intervention to failure, that would hardly be less true of all political action, including in national politics. And what do you do when you denounce a foreign policy in the name of the "unknowable and unpredictable" nature of international society, if not politics, "unknowable and unpredictable" according to your own disqualifications? Is it not an obvious practical contradiction to derive policy recommendations from an attempt to disqualify any policy for reasons of principle?

Winners and losers

To establish the fallacious nature of such an argument, let us just recall that in politics, the criterion of success is victory, and there is necessarily a winner and a loser at one time or another. This fact is enough to refute finally the idea that all politics is necessarily doomed to failure by the opaque and unpredictable nature of social reality.

The mere fact that in politics there must be a winner for there to be a loser then refutes the idea that every policy is inevitably doomed to failure because events are inherently unpredictable. In fact, there are policies that win because they were adapted to a complex situation, and therefore, policies that lose because they were not.

If you want to win in politics, you must analyze the situation. And no, indeed, there is no guarantee that a mistake made or an event unforeseen will not change everything, and yes, that is because people are rational and inventive -- and, abroad, different. But we know that there will be a winner and a loser, so that you can succeed, but you can also be crushed -- even if you do nothing. And we can no less know that, if you purport to define a policy a priori, that is to say, if you think that you can dispense with knowing the circumstances where you intend to implement it, then you are quite sure to be crushed.

How easy it is to be right when you are the one who writes history

For example, nothing is easier than to rewrite history and say that everything would have gone better if the U.S. had not intervened during the First World War: but if it is so easy, that is precisely because we know nothing about what would have happened in that case. And anyway you must carefully choose your examples to draw, falsely, general conclusions from that kind of virtual rewritten history.

In order to refute such virtual rewritten history, all that is needed is to use against it the argument of opacity and unpredictability - adding to that, of course, that of absolute ignorance. Which brings us to the last instance of the fallacy of imaginary differences

The myth of innocent politics

Rothbardian isolationism ultimately rests on the utopian premise that certain types of policy choices could be free of the uncertainties and moral responsibilities which are in fact inherent in politics, so that no policy can ever avoid them: We have just concluded that if social complexity and the free will of the players inevitably doomed intervention abroad to failure, that would be equally true of any foreign policy.

It's time to remember that when you can act, even doing nothing is to act. It is an illusion – of a "precautionary principle" kind- to fantasize that action would have consequences while inaction would have none. As the example of the Leninist and Hitlerian socialisms, both of which could and should have been nipped in the bud, inaction too has unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences on an opaque and dangerous reality.

To refuse to use force against a aggressor when we can do it is to authorize his aggressions. To refuse the use of violence against tyrants under the excuse of "not adding war to war” (Mitterrand, as a de facto accomplice of Serbian aggression) is to let aggressive violence run free, as if we did not accept that violence can -- and must -- be defensive and restorative, is to confuse libertarianism with pacifism, which is a different political philosophy --so different that, unlike libertarianism, it is a self-contradictory one, since no practical defense of any definition of justice can be based on an equal condemnation of aggressive and defensive violence.

You take political positions in the context of a power struggle

Another aspect of the illusion of innocent politics is the Rothbardians’ idea that they could take political positions without regard to their implications in real political society. Thus, Rothbardians are periodically surprised to be shoved in the same basket as the fanatical "anti-imperialist" advocates of absurdist slavery who, like them, apologize for genocidal tyrants using blatant lies and sophistry, whereas their own blatant lies and sophistry are sometimes a different kind of blatant lies and sophistry.

This surprise comes from their self-inflicted inability to do political analysis. For those for whom such analysis is natural, it is clear that in a conflict there are two camps, and if you denounce one of them you belong to the other ; self-evident that in times of war, those who want their government to quit fighting root for the victory of its enemies. If you do not understand that, you should not be surprised that others do, and draw the consequences.

Conclusion: if you want to do politics, you must accept all its rules and implications

Thus, Murray Rothbard and his successors in foreign policy have criticized certain policies to demande another single one, on behalf of general statements which are quite untrue, notably:

— Their fallacious pretension to define foreign policy a priori, a delusion which guarantees the incompetence of whomever it deceives;

A substantive error which comes with

-- The implicit assertion of alleged "differences in nature" between the policies they criticize and their own, "differences" which in reality do not exist.

In anarcho-capitalist terms, international politics by definition deals with complex relationships between criminal gangs. If you pretend to judge them, you must analyze every time the concrete political situation, in order to know which approach happens to be the least harmful, and where, and when.

The particular hostility that Rothbardians harbor towards the so-called neo-conservatives on foreign policy, --while the objectivists, whom they do not attack so much, are only different because they are much less expert and much more ruthless (verbally)-- shows that there is jealousy in this hostility ; yet if those “neo-conservatives” have influence while the Rothbardians have none, that is also because, on the basis of false reasoning, they have failed to engage in any serious study of international politics.

The failed politician

Murray Rothbard’s political commitments do not reflect, as we have seen, a sense of political advisability as sharp as most of his reasonings were in political philosophy and economics. They reflect instead the quandaries of the philosopher who would apply his principles of justice to a complex and changing political society, where most players are only trying to violate such rules of justice.

Incompetent in domestic politics

Thus, Murray Rothbard failed to give real weight to the U.S. Libertarian Party which he had helped create. Seeking to influence policy without compromising his principles, he finally found himself taking political positions which were not only fluctuating but put him at odds with the "camps" that could come to power. During the Vietnam War, he was seen cozying up to the communist and defeatist left which caused the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, with the 3 million murders which ensued. After Reagan, whom the thought was an "idiot", had won the Cold War, his dislike for the actually eligible candidates led him to contribute to the victory of the left by supporting the diversionary candidate Ross Perot in 1992, and then support the right-wing socialist (the increasingly out-of-touch protectionist) Patrick Buchanan. At the end of his life, he spent less time denouncing the worst enemies of freedom than his own potential allies in the political arena, because those make realistic assessments of political situations and have accepted that, in order to exercise influence, you should hold a definite position, and one consistent with belonging to a camp.

Harmful in foreign policy

His positions on foreign policy also reflected his philosophical errors in that field. Murray Rothbard could have acknowledged his own incompetence, as he did not read any foreign language and was afraid of flying. Instead, having adopted Senator Taft's isolationist stance through an accident of history, and believing that he could directly apply his own principles, he argued for an a priori definition of a libertarian foreign policy as "non-interventionist". Armed with this categorical error, knowing better than anyone the depravity of his own government and unable to assess the extent of the others', he never ceased denouncing the foreign policy of the United States only, occasionally supporting the worst tyrannies and repeating their propaganda lies. Some of his successors still follow him on this path, less the genius and the care for accuracy. Devoid of any influence, they seek to attract attention by making outrageous statements in support of some genocidal murderer, provided he is the enemy of the United States: they are visibly content with the illusion of existence which some of the commentators who count on the right bestow upon them when, on occasion, they condescend to denounce them.