War and Foreign Policy

There are only two ways human cooperation occurs: through voluntary means or through coercion. The free market stands for voluntary cooperation; coercion and violence are the means of the state.

Today's advocates of escalation in Ukraine are embracing an updated version of "Better dead than Red." They think themselves fit to decide for countless millions what's worth dying in a nuclear holocaust for.

We don't have a duty to evaluate every foreign quarrel and assess who is at fault. We do not have a duty to require leaders of regimes we don’t like to accept existing boundaries of countries as unchangeable.

The United States is no longer in any position to remake the world in its image. It's not 1945 or even 1970. Yet the US seems to be gearing up to bully half the world into compliance with the US Russia sanctions. 

Sanctions remain popular because they placate the voters who insist "we" must "do something," and government officials are more than happy to accept this invitation to grow state power.

President Harding wanted to see the end of war and a return to a more traditional American foreign policy.

The Ukrainian regime thinks it knows better than husbands and fathers when it comes to caring for their families. But no bureaucrat ought to be allowed to make such a decision.

Europe would have been immeasurably better off had its regimes chosen compromise instead of "countering aggression" in 1914. Sometimes this lesson is heeded, as when the US refused to intervene in 1956 and 1968. 

The scale of the sanctions which Washington has imposed on Russia (and Russians) should not distract us from a crucial fact. What Washington is doing against Moscow is not rare. It is something that happens every day. 

A funny thing has happened on the way to accepting the standard ruling-class narrative on the war in Ukraine: inconvenient and unpleasant facts about the region and its recent history.