What’s Wrong With Our Foreign Policy and What the Libertarian Party Can Do About It

This talk was given at Bridgeport, CT, at the CT Libertarian Convention on May 30th, 2009.

"I was asked to talk today about the problems of our foreign policy – a question so wide-ranging it would be impossible to address in a 20 minute speech – and yet it is a fascinating question. Like the search for a grand unified theory, it is also an irresistible challenge.

In thinking about our foreign policy – or any foreign policy – a libertarian would ask about force, and about freedom. A libertarian would also wisely observe, as Frederic Bastiat did in the 1800s that when goods cease to cross borders, armies will. A libertarian would consider how foreign policy would exist – if at all – without the state.

When you think about it, we all have our own foreign policies, in a way. This foreign policy is our personality – how we think about those we don’t know well, how we learn or don’t learn from those we meet or with whom we interact, our sense of the future and the past, the things we value, what we covet, the things we hope to gain, or wish to lose. And fundamentally, we already know from our own family, work and political experience that all kinds of very different personalities can live together closely, kindly and profitably, as long as communication happens and force is not brought into picture.

Think about any good movie you have seen – be it a romantic comedy or a cops and robbers buddy flick. Whether it’s "You’ve Got Mail" or "Lethal Weapon" – the good guys are never clones of each other – most often they are odd couples of an extreme sort who through understanding and communication actually make a winning team. If anyone is clonelike, it’s the bad guys – and they are bad guys for one reason and one reason only.

They use force and deceit to get their way, destroying people, wealth, faith and justice.

If we were considering problems in an individual’s personality – a.k.a. foreign policy – we would identify things like greed, quickness to anger, willingness to use force or manipulation in plotting their desires, and faithlessness. A person who is ill-informed or whose beliefs do not conform with a known reality, who is a bully, and who constantly lie to get their way…why, we would probably institutionalize such a person! People who live their lives like that are unhinged, obnoxious and unproductive, and sometimes dangerous.

But when such a personality belongs to something called the state, we stand proudly, our hearts beat reverently, we wave the flag assiduously and we pledge our undying allegiance.

OK, we here today don’t do that. But most of us have been taught from an early age to revere the state, and we are in varying stages of personal recovery from that indoctrination. As we all observed on TV, on the radio, in newspapers, and even in church last Memorial Day weekend, many people in this country – who themselves have functional and healthy personal foreign policies – become schizoid when it comes to the foreign policy of the state."

To read the complete article, see: http://lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski230.html
It is excellent.