Daniel Klein and Christopher Coyne—both professors of economics at George Mason University— have recently issued a statement on the need for America’s foreign policy to move in the direction of peace and multipolarity. Below is the statement followed by a link to the original which includes more than three dozen signatories (so far) including Mises Institute contributors such as Robert Higgs, Scott Horton, Carlo Lottieri, Andrew Napolitano, Joseph Salerno, and myself. Scholars, commentators, and public officials who are interested in signing the letter can contact Prof. Daniel Klein via the original posting.
The Statement:
For Peace and Multipolarity
With this Statement, we, the undersigned, express our favor for peace and multipolarity. Multipolarity is a reality of international politics. Rather than resisting it through military, political, or economic coercion, states should adapt to it through prudence, peaceful coexistence, diplomacy, and mutually beneficial association.
Unlike the territorial empires of the past, modern governments in the West project power not through formal annexation of land, but through networks of political and military influence. Regime-change operations represent perhaps the clearest expression of this strategy. The aim of regime-changers is to get “our people” or “our friends” in control of the country targeted for regime change. The regime of the regime-changed country often maintains a nominal independence and sovereignty while becoming politically, militarily, and economically dependent on outside powers.
The means range widely, from carrots in the form of largesse and careers, to propaganda and election interference, to the vast array of sticks: weaponized trade policy, intimidation, censorship, persecution, assassination, terrorism, sabotage, false-flag operations, and full-blown war.
Through these and other means, democracy is now routinely despoiled by political actors wrapped in “Democracy.”
Whole peoples and countries are taken over to be used as proxies against another targeted country. Regime-change operations usher in the full playbook used against so-called enemies.
Behind it all is government’s unique feature: The institutionalization of the initiation of coercion. Due to the extraordinary nature of this feature, in which the government overtly does things that would be criminal for anyone else to do, this authority should remain subject to legal and moral restraints, with respect for dignity and individual rights. Government should strive to make its exercise of coercion lawful.
The regime-change playbook is fundamentally at odds with ideas of respect for individual rights, national sovereignty, and equality of sovereignty. The regime-change agenda is lawless and results in brutalism.
What drives the regime-changers? Institutions and the incentives they produce matter, but so too does the character of those who exercise power within them. Unwholesome dispositions, including vanity, pride, hubris, greed, and the desire to dominate others, can transform political power into an instrument of wickedness rather than peaceful coexistence.
These incentives and dispositions are not only foreign-facing: The playbook is now routinely used on the domestic population.
The only way to preserve sovereign polities in which citizens enjoy peace and freedom is to desist from the playbook, abroad and at home. This is also essential for avoiding the economic and financial burdens, and eventual disaster, that accompany perpetual intervention. The people’s rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness call for desisting from the playbook.
Nations can be good neighbors, as families can be good neighbors. Sages throughout the ages, including Hugo Grotius, Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and Rheinhold Niebuhr reconcile a human universalism with a just patriotism. The coexistence of peace and multipolarity is something that, in the past, man has achieved to an admirable degree.
The Pew Research Center[1] shows that most human beings on Earth view the United States negatively, and since 2023 the opinion has sunk precipitously. The policy of regime-change is destroying America’s soft power.
There is a grain of truth in “Might makes right.” But man lives in a moral universe. The profounder truth is “Right makes might”—as George Washington counseled us in his Farewell Address of September 1796:
Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all—religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that in the course of time and things the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
The faith is not specious; the hope is not vain.
To peace and multipolarity conscience calls.
