For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

We have seen that libertarians have as their prime responsibility the focussing on the invasions and aggressions of their own State. The libertarians of Graustark must center their attentions on attempting to limit and whittle down the Graustark State, the Walldavian libertarians must try to check the Walldavian State, and so on. In foreign affairs, the libertarians of every country must press their government to refrain from war and foreign intervention, and to withdraw from any war in which they may be engaged. If for no other reason, then, libertarians in the United States must center their critical attention on the imperial and warlike activities of their own government.

But there are still other reasons for libertarians here to focus upon the invasions and foreign interventions of the United States. For empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States. Such a statement is bound to shock Americans, subject as we have been for decades to intense propaganda by the Establishment on [p. 271] the invariable saintliness, peaceful intentions, and devotion to justice of the American government in foreign affairs.

The expansionist impulse of the American State began to take increasing hold in the late nineteenth century, leaping boldly overseas with America’s war against Spain, dominating Cuba, grabbing Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and brutally suppressing a Filipino rebellion for independence. The imperial expansion of the United States reached full flower in World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson’s leap into the fray prolonged the war and the mass slaughter, and unwittingly bred the grisly devastation that led directly to the Bolshevik triumph in Russia and the Nazi victory in Germany. It was Wilson’s particular genius to supply a pietistic and moralistic cloak for a new American policy of worldwide intervention and domination, a policy of trying to mould every country in the American image, suppressing radical or Marxist regimes on the one hand and old-fashioned monarchist governments on the other. It was Woodrow Wilson who was to fix the broad features of American foreign policy for the rest of this century. Almost every succeeding President has considered himself a Wilsonian and followed his policies. It was no accident that both Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt — so long thought of as polar opposites — played important roles in America’s first global crusade of World War I, and that both men harked back to their experience in World War I intervention and planning as the guideposts for their future foreign and domestic policies. And it was one of Richard Nixon’s first acts as President to place Woodrow Wilson’s picture upon his desk.

In the name of “national self-determination” and “collective security” against aggression, the American government has consistently pursued a goal and a policy of world domination and of the forcible suppression of any rebellion against the status quo anywhere in the world. In the name of combatting “aggression” everywhere — of being the world’s “policeman” — it has itself become a great and continuing aggressor.

Anyone who balks at such a description of American policy should simply consider what the typical American reaction is to any domestic or foreign crisis anywhere on the globe, even at some remote site that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a direct or even indirect threat to the lives and security of the American people. The military dictator of “Bumblestan” is in danger; perhaps his subjects are tired of being exploited by him and his colleagues. The United States then becomes gravely concerned; articles by journalists friendly to the State Department or the Pentagon spread the alarm about what might happen to the “stability” of Bumblestan and its surrounding area [p. 272] if the dictator should be toppled. For it so happens that he is a “pro-American” or “pro-Western” dictator: that is, he is one of “ours” instead of “theirs.” Millions or even billions of dollars’ worth of military and economic aid are then rushed by the United States to prop up the Bumblestani field marshal. If “our” dictator is saved, then a sigh of relief is heaved, and congratulations are passed around at the saving of “our” State. The continuing or intensified oppression of the American taxpayer and of the Bumblestanian citizens are, of course, not considered in the equation. Or if it should happen that the Bumblestani dictator may fall, hysteria might hit the American press and officialdom for the moment. But then, after a while, the American people seem to be able to live their lives after “losing” Bumblestan about as well as before — perhaps even better, if it means a few billion less in foreign aid extracted from them to prop up the Bumblestani State.

If it is understood and expected, then, that the United States will try to impose its will on every crisis everywhere in the world, then this is clear indication that America is the great interventionary and imperial power. The one place where the United States does not now attempt to work its will is the Soviet Union and the Communist countries — but, of course, it has tried to do so in the past. Woodrow Wilson, along with Britain and France, tried for several years to crush bolshevism in the cradle, with American and Allied troops being sent to Russia to aid the Czarist (”White”) forces in trying to defeat the Reds. After World War II, the United States tried its best to oust the Soviets from Eastern Europe, and succeeded in pushing them out of Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran. It also helped the British to crush a Communist regime in Greece. The United States tried its best to maintain Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial rule in China, flying many of Chiang’s troops northward to occupy Manchuria as the Russians pulled out after World War II; and it continues to prevent the Chinese from occupying their offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. After virtually installing the dictator Batista in Cuba, the United States tried desperately to oust the Communist Castro regime, by actions ranging from the CIA-engineered Bay of Pigs invasion to CIA-Mafia attempts to assassinate Castro.

Of all America’s recent wars, certainly the most traumatic for Americans and their attitude toward foreign policy was the Vietnam war. America’s imperial war in Vietnam was, indeed, a microcosm of what has been tragically wrong with American foreign policy in this century. American intervention in Vietnam did not begin, as most people believe, with Kennedy or Eisenhower or even Truman. It began no later than the date when the American government, under Franklin Roosevelt, [p. 273] on November 26, 1941, delivered a sharp and insulting ultimatum to Japan to get its armed forces out of China and Indochina, from what would later be Vietnam. This U.S. ultimatum set the stage inevitably for Pearl Harbor. Engaged in a war in the Pacific to oust Japan from the Asian continent, the United States and its OSS (predecessor to the CIA) favored and aided Ho Chi Minh’s Communist-run national resistance movement against the Japanese. After World War II, the Communist Viet Minh was in charge of all northern Vietnam. But then France, previously the imperial ruler of Vietnam, betrayed its agreement with Ho and massacred Viet Minh forces. In this double cross, France was aided by Britain and the United States.

When the French lost to the reconstituted Viet Minh guerrilla movement under Ho, the United States endorsed the Geneva agreement of 1954, under which Vietnam was to be quickly reunited as one nation. For it was generally recognized that the postwar occupation divisions of the country into North and South were purely arbitrary and merely for military convenience. But, having by trickery managed to oust the Viet Minh from the southern half of Vietnam, the United States proceeded to break the Geneva agreement and to replace the French and their puppet Emperor Bao Dai by its own clients, Ngo Dinh Diem and his family, who were installed in dictatorial rule over South Vietnam. When Diem became an embarrassment, the CIA engineered a coup to assassinate Diem and replace him with another dictatorial regime. To suppress the Viet Cong, the Communist-led national independence movement in the South, the United States rained devastation on South and North Vietnam alike — bombing and murdering a million Vietnamese and dragging half a million American soldiers into the quagmires and jungles of Vietnam.

Throughout the tragic Vietnamese conflict, the United States maintained the fiction that it was a war of “aggression” by the Communist North Vietnamese State against a friendly and “pro-Western” (whatever that term may mean) South Vietnamese State which had called for our aid. Actually, the war was really a doomed but lengthy attempt by an imperial United States to suppress the wishes of the great bulk of the Vietnamese population and to maintain unpopular client dictators in the southern half of the country, by virtual genocide if necessary.

Americans are not accustomed to applying the term “imperialism” to the actions of the U.S. government, but the word is a particularly apt one. In its broadest sense, imperialism may be defined as aggression by State A against the people of country B, followed by the subsequent coercive maintenance of such foreign rule. In our example above, the [p. 274] permanent rule by the Graustark State over formerly northeastern Belgravia would be an example of such imperialism. But imperialism does not have to take the form of direct rule over the foreign population. In the twentieth century, the indirect form of “neoimperialism” has increasingly replaced the old-fashioned direct kind; it is more subtle and less visible but no less effective a form of imperialism. In this situation, the imperial State rules the foreign population through its effective control over native client-rulers. This version of modern Western imperialism has been trenchantly denned by the libertarian historian Leonard Liggio:

The imperialist power of the Western countries . . . imposed on the world’s peoples a double or reinforced system of exploitation — imperialism — by which the power of the Western governments maintains the local ruling class in exchange for the opportunity to superimpose Western exploitation upon existing exploitation by local states.3

This view of America as a long-time imperial world power has taken hold among historians in recent years as the result of compelling and scholarly work by a distinguished group of New Left revisionist historians inspired by Professor William Appleman Williams. But this was also the view of conservative as well as classical liberal “isolationists” during World War II and in the early days of the Cold War.4

• 3Leonard P. Liggio, Why the Futile Crusade? (New York: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1978), p. 3.
• 4For “New Left” revisionists, see, in addition to Williams himself, the work of Gabriel Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Stephen E. Ambrose, N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Walter LaFeber, Robert F. Smith, Barton Bernstein, and Ronald Radosh. Coming to similar conclusions from far different revisionist traditions were Charles A. Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, the libertarian James J. Martin, and classical liberals John T. Flynn and Caret Garrett.