What Jim says about Radley Balko’s TCS piece on libertarians and foreign policy. Jim:
Radley Balko’s TCS article this weekend leaves a smoking crater where claims of “libertarian unseriousness” on foreign policy have been.
Radley Balko, “That Republicans don’t take libertarian ideas on foreign policy seriously could very well be a problem with the Republicans, not with libertarian foreign policy.”
Also, don’t miss Roderick Long’s That Pre-9/11 Mindset: Meet the New Normal, Same as the Old Normal which hits some of the same points Balko does. Long:
Critics of the current régime’s so-called “War on Terror” are often accused of having a “September 10th” or “pre-9/11” mindset. (Our ever-articulate Prince President garbled both descriptions into the phrase “pre-September 10th mentality” during the first debate.) The suggestion is that everyone’s worldview should have been radically transformed by the events of September 11th; anyone whose worldview wasn’t so altered, anyone who continues to favour diplomacy over a resort to military force, must simply be blind to reality.
But there’s a problem with this argument: it assumes that everyone’s worldview needed changing. After all, any worldview that was radically altered by the September 11th attacks must have been radically mistaken to begin with. But anyone whose understanding of the world was substantially correct would not have had his or her overall view of things shaken by those events.
Why didn’t more of us (“us” being those of the anti-war/anti-state persuasion, whether “left” or “right”) abandon our way of thinking in response to 9/11? Because 9/11 didn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know. We’ve been saying for decades that the U.S. government’s arrogant interventions around the world have only been increasing the risk of blowback, and that the State, in the event of such blowback, would be as ineffective at protecting the civilian population as it is at everything else. The 9/11 attacks simply corroborated our “pre-9/11 mindset.”
We were right all along, so why would 9/11 have changed our minds? As Roderick Long says, “Those whose worldview was shaken by the 9/11 attacks must have had their heads in the sand. It may sound rude to say “we told you so,” but given that our opponents’ decision to ignore our warnings has led to thousands of deaths, perhaps a bit of rudeness is in order. We told them so.“