It is always encouraging to find Rothbard receiving scholarly attention at institutions other than Mises today, particularly his writings on war and foreign policy. While Rothbard is, of course, remembered primarily as an economist, historian, and political theorist, foreign policy was never peripheral to these areas of study, nor indeed beyond his expertise. Indeed, as Christopher Coyne and Yuliya Yatsyshina emphasize in their excellent 2024 Independent Review essay, “Murray Rothbard on War and Foreign Policy,” Rothbard regarded questions of war and peace as fundamental to the possibility of a free society, brilliantly explained why, and further offered a solution.
Drawing on For A New Liberty and the essay “War, Peace, and the State,” Coyne and Yatsyshina place Rothbard’s foreign-policy writings squarely within his larger political economy. Their organizing themes—American imperialism, war and the growth of the state, nuclear weapons, and wartime propaganda—demonstrate the remarkable consistency of Rothbard’s analysis and their continued relevance. The connecting thread is the problem of concentrated state power.
Rothbard saw an obvious flaw in the conventional argument for government-provided security. A government powerful enough to protect people and their property is also powerful enough to violate both. And when that government assumes responsibility not merely for territorial defense but for managing political outcomes around the globe, the institutional problem becomes considerably worse.
A government committed to an activist foreign policy requires enormous bureaucracies, substantial discretion, secrecy, surveillance, and organizations capable of coercing populations thousands of miles away. Moreover, the international environment lacks even many of the imperfect institutional restraints operating domestically.
This leads naturally to Rothbard’s adoption of Randolph Bourne’s famous observation that “war is the health of the state.” War expands government not merely through military spending but by altering the relationship between citizen and state. Coyne and Yatsyshina connect Rothbard here with Robert Higgs’s later work on the ratchet effect: emergency institutions, expenditures, and expectations have an unfortunate tendency to survive the emergency that supposedly justified them.
The post-9/11 experience provides an obvious illustration. Powers and institutions once presented as extraordinary responses to terrorism became ordinary features of American life. Coyne and Yatsyshina also connect this process to Coyne and Abigail Hall’s work on the “boomerang effect”: techniques of surveillance and social control developed or refined overseas can subsequently migrate home. Their example of cell-site simulators developed for use abroad and later employed by domestic law enforcement makes Rothbard’s point unusually concrete.
Perhaps the most valuable section concerns nuclear weapons. Rothbard’s position was considerably more radical than merely opposing unnecessary wars. Nuclear weapons posed a categorical problem because their destructive effects made discrimination between combatants and innocent civilians impossible. Thus, for Rothbard, nuclear strategy presented not simply a geopolitical calculation but a problem for libertarian ethics itself, one requiring nuclear disarmament.
Equally relevant is their treatment of propaganda. Rothbard understood that large-scale intervention requires more than taxes, soldiers, and weapons. It requires public acquiescence. Hence, the recurring tendency to stigmatize dissent and collapse the distinction between support for one’s country and support for the policies of its government. Coyne and Yatsyshina trace Rothbard’s argument through the propaganda apparatuses of the world wars and the documented deceptions exposed by the Pentagon Papers—extending these to the more recent Afghanistan Papers.
Efforts such as these to connect Rothbard with contemporary happenings are one of the things that makes the essay particularly worthwhile, as it neither turns Rothbard into a museum piece nor simply repeats his conclusions. Instead, they show how his framework connects to subsequent scholarship on crisis-driven government growth, the military-industrial complex, domestic surveillance, propaganda, and the political economy of intervention.
That seems an appropriate way to mark Rothbard at 100—particularly given the abundant government deception regarding its numerous wars abroad. For Rothbard’s foreign-policy writings force the reader to apply the same skepticism toward centralized planning abroad that Austro-libertarians have long applied to centralized planning at home. In their article Coyne and Yatsyshina have done Rothbard—and contemporary readers—a real service by bringing that argument back into focus.
