Reason Magazine - Staff

Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) — Tue, 01 May 2007 07:29:00 EDT

The latest Gallup poll shows that Sen. Hillary Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Obama has dropped to a mere five points. She has lost ground among liberals, independents, and -- surprisingly -- single young women. The poll comes during a dismal three-month stretch in which Clinton has dropped rapidly in the polls, and in which her record-breaking fund-raising operation was upstaged by Obama's surprising second-place finish. It only makes sense, then, that Senator Clinton would like to differentiate herself from Obama on substantive policy matters.

If only it were that simple. The Iraq war is the issue of greatest concern for Democratic primary and caucus voters, especially among the young people and first-time donors flocking to Obama. Clinton's recent struggles can be tied directly to her vote for war in October 2002, and to her ambivalence on the war effort as it has degenerated.

Asked how her views toward the war have evolved over the past four years, Sen. Clinton has explained that she is not sorry for voting as she did; she only regrets "the way the president used the authority." Her response sheds some light on how she would use the military as commander-in-chief, and it suggests that she has learned little from America's unfortunate experience in Iraq.

The public's discontent with the war has grown because the costs have vastly exceeded expectations. The hoped-for benefits of war with Iraq seem unlikely to materialize, and they don't seem worth the costs even if they ultimately do. And then there are the unintended consequences. With its chief rival removed, Iran is in a vastly stronger position today than it was four years ago. An unpleasant but manageable situation has been replaced by a power vacuum in Baghdad, a civil war that threatens to grow far worse, and the looming danger of a wider regional conflict.

In polls conducted in April 2003, approximately 76 percent of the public supported the war. Nearly four years later, that number has been cut in half. Based on what they know now, half of the intervention's original supporters would not have supported the war at its outset. Of the Americans who once believed our security depended on the creation of a stable, democratic, pro-American government in Iraq, most would now settle merely for a face-saving means for getting out, many without even the face-saving part: 58 percent of Americans favor a timeline for withdrawal, irrespective of the security situation on the ground.

Like most Americans, Sen. Clinton now endorses a troop withdrawal from Iraq. But does she agree that the war was a mistake from the outset?

Of course, we can never plumb the depths of Senator Clinton's conscience to know for sure. The standard, cynical view is her vote in October 2002, and her non-apology for that vote ever since, reflect little more than cold political calculation. The public in late 2002 was willing to support the war, especially if the president launched the invasion with broad international support, and Clinton reflected these sentiments. Public attitudes have since soured, and Clinton's public position has migrated accordingly.

Bad as the cynical interpretation of Clinton's stance may be, the alternative is even worse: that she hasn't apologized because she feels she has nothing to apologize for. Perhaps she still endorses the rationale behind the war. After all, she has long supported using the U.S. military to serve humanitarian aims, and it's logical to conclude that the experience in Iraq has done little to shake her faith.

President Bill Clinton was more than prepared to deploy the military and risk American lives to compel Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic to comply with U.S. and international demands in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though neither crisis threatened the lives and well-being of American citizens. President Clinton also used the threat of force to change the government in Haiti, elevated the disaster in Somalia, and launched missile strikes against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In each case, he took action with the support of most Democrats in Congress, including 2008 presidential aspirants Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd.

He also had support of the first lady. In her book Hillary's Choice, Gail Sheehy reports that Mrs. Clinton pressed the president to initiate military action in Kosovo in 1999. When Mr. Clinton worried that such action could have undesirable effects, including the prospect of even more civilian casualties, Hillary persisted, arguing that the risks of inaction were greater than the risks of action.

In her floor speech before the Iraq war vote, more than three years after she urged her husband on to act in Kosovo, Sen. Clinton pointed approvingly to his decision, and drew parallels to the Bush administration's rationale for removing Saddam from power. You can apply those same justifications to any number of unsavory regimes around the world today.

But should we? The costs of intervening in the Balkans were extraordinarily low compared to those of invading Iraq. Relying exclusively on air power, the U.S. ultimately succeeded in forcing the Serbs to desist in their campaign against the Albanian Kosovars. The bombing campaign lasted less than three months, and resulted in zero American combat fatalities. By contrast, we're now four years into Iraq, with 3,200 American troops dead, more than $400 billion spent, and no end in sight.

Has the Iraq experience shaken Sen. Clinton's faith? Have our multiple failures in Iraq instilled a newfound appreciation for the unintended consequences that inevitably flow from all wars, even those fought with the best of intentions? We simply don't know. And what do the rest of the Democrats in office think? If past history is any guide, many Democrats will renew their enthusiasm for military intervention once one of their own is back in the Oval Office.

If all Hillary has learned from the Iraq war is that the Bush administration botched the execution, if she remains convinced that the ideas that fueled the war were sound, then we could see even more foreign wars under a future President Clinton than we have under her predecessors. That can't be much comfort to Americans anxious for a new direction in U.S. foreign policy.

Christopher Preble is the director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Discuss this article online.

Are Failed States a Threat to America?

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) jlogan@cato.org (Justin Logan) — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:10:00 EDT

Throughout the 1990s, conservatives castigated the Clinton administration for conducting foreign policy like social work, taking on vague, ill-defined missions in remote locales from Haiti to Bosnia. Although the editors of The Weekly Standard enthusiastically supported the Clinton administration's interventions in the Balkans, most on the right were encouraged when George W. Bush and his senior foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, came out strongly against such missions during the 2000 presidential campaign. In 2000 Rice famously declared that "we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Bush was equally blunt. During one of his debates with Al Gore, he said: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building.…I mean, we're going to have some kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not."

We agree. That's why we're alarmed that the Bush administration has created a nation-building corps from America: the State Department's new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by Congress in July 2004. The office's mandate is to "help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife, so they can reach a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy." Meanwhile, a November 2005 Defense Department directive makes stability operations a "core U.S. military mission." Such operations would involve on-the-ground assistance, not unlike the provisional reconstruction teams in Iraq; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the office is presently looking at action in Haiti, Liberia, and Sudan. Beyond that, the details are unclear.

Bush and Rice's change of heart regarding nation building is usually attributed to 9/11. But while the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon certainly underscored the dangers that nontraditional threats can pose, they did not transform every poorly governed nation into a pressing national security concern. Nor did 9/11 change the dismal track record of past nation-building efforts. This debate has obvious relevance in Iraq, where the absence of a functioning state following the U.S. invasion is the most widely accepted argument against withdrawing American forces. But it has much wider implications for America's post–Cold War, post–9/11 foreign policy, pitting nation builders who want to protect the United States by fixing failed states against skeptics who believe such a strategy is unnecessary, impractical, and dangerous.

Depending on how you count, the U.S. is currently involved in as many as 10 nation-building missions—arguably more. Most of these—from Djibouti to Liberia to Kosovo—are far removed from America's national security interests, just as they were in the '90s. Taking on such missions in conflicted environments is even more worrisome today because it would threaten to embroil Americans in an array of foreign conflicts for indefinite periods of time with vague or ambiguous public mandates and little likelihood of success at a time when we should be focused on defeating Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups that intend to attack the United States. This approach to security policy squanders American power, American money, and American lives. Unless events in a failed state are genuinely likely to dramatically affect the lives of Americans, we should have normal diplomatic relations with their governments, assess potential threats discretely, and otherwise leave them alone.

Getting in on the Coming Anarchy

The idea that state failure is inherently threatening to the United States has been circulating for some time. In an influential 1994 article, The Atlantic Monthly's Robert Kaplan sounded the alarm about "the coming anarchy," urging Western strategists to start worrying about "what is occurring…throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war." He warned that "the coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering." He argued that insecurity and instability in remote regions should be high on the list of post–Cold War foreign policy concerns because the damage and depredations of the Third World would not always be contained, and would inevitably—though he doesn't really explain how—touch the lives of those in America and Western Europe. Although humanitarianism was the most frequently heard justification for the Clinton administration's attempts at nation building, the president's defenders in and out of government also offered a Kaplanesque rationale that fixing failed states would make the U.S. safer.

Despite his initial skepticism toward Clinton-era nation building, President Bush changed course dramatically after September 11, 2001. The United States National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, made "expand[ing] the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy" a central plank of America's response to the 9/11 attacks. Part of the administration's new security policy would be to "help build police forces, court systems, and legal codes, local and provincial government institutions, and electoral systems." The overarching goal was to "make the world not just safer but better."

According to the administration's October 2005 National Intelligence Strategy, "the lack of freedom in one state endangers the peace and freedom of others, and…failed states are a refuge and breeding ground of extremism." The strategy therefore asks our overworked intelligence services not just to gather information on America's enemies but to "bolster the growth of democracy and sustain peaceful democratic states." The premise is, as the former Cato foreign policy analyst Gary Dempsey put it, that "if only we could populate the planet with 'good' states, we could eradicate international conflict and terrorism."

Many foreign policy pundits agree with the Bush administration's goal of making the world safe through democracy. Lawrence J. Korb and Robert O. Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, for example, warn in a 2005 report that "weak and failing states pose as great a danger to the American people and international stability as do potential conflicts among the great powers." A 2003 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies agrees that "as a superpower with a global presence and global interests, the United States does have a stake in remedying failed states." In the course of commenting on a report from the Center for Global Development, Francis Fukuyama, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, argued that "it should be abundantly clear that state weakness and failure [are] the single most critical threat to U.S. national security."

Even foreign policy specialists known for their hard-nosed realism have succumbed to the idea that nation building is a matter of self-defense. A 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration and a critic of the current war in Iraq, produced a report that insists "action to stabilize and rebuild states marked by conflict is not 'foreign policy as social work,' a favorite quip of the 1990s. It is equally a humanitarian concern and a national security priority." The report says stability operations should be "a strategic priority for the armed forces" and the national security adviser should produce an "overarching policy associated with stabilization and reconstruction activities."

Those arguments suffer not so much from inaccuracy as from analytical sloppiness. It would be absurd to claim that the ongoing state failure in Haiti poses a national security threat of the same order as would state failure in Indonesia, with its population of 240 million, or in nuclear-armed Pakistan. In fact, the overwhelming majority of failed states have posed no security threat to the United States. Take, for example, the list of countries identified as failed or failing by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace in 2005. Using 12 different indicators of state failure, the researchers derived state failure scores, and then listed 60 countries whose cumulative scores marked them as "critical," "in danger," or "borderline," ranked in order. If state failure is itself threatening, then we should get very concerned about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Chad, Bangladesh, and on and on.

In short, state failure ranks rather low as an accurate metric for measuring threats. Likewise, while the lists of "failed states" and "security threats" will no doubt overlap, correlation does not equal causation. The obvious nonthreats that appear on all lists of failed states undermine the claim that there is something particular about failed states that is necessarily threatening.

The dangers that can arise from failed states are not the product of state failure itself. They are the result of other factors, such as the presence of terrorist cells or other malign actors. Afghanistan in the late 1990s met anyone's definition of a failed state, and the chaos in Afghanistan clearly contributed to Osama bin Laden's decision to relocate his operations there from Sudan in 1996. But the security threat to America arose from cooperation between Al Qaeda and the Taliban government, which tolerated the organization's training camps. Afghanistan under the Taliban was both a failed state and a threat, but in that respect it was a rarity. More common are failed states, from the Ivory Coast to Burma, that pose no threat to us at all.

It's true that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations can operate in failed states. But they also can (and do) operate in Germany, Canada, and other countries that are not failed states by any stretch of the imagination. Rather than making categorical statements about failed states, we should assess the extent to which any given state or nonstate actors within it intend and have the means to attack America. Afghanistan is a stark reminder that we must not overlook failed states, but it does not justify making them our top security concern.

That Fixer-Upper Isn't As Cheap As It Looks

If state failure does not in itself pose a threat to U.S. security, an ambitious program of nation building would, in turn, be a cure worse than the disease. One particularly troubling prospect is the erosion of internationally recognized sovereignty. As Winston Churchill said of democracy, sovereignty may be the worst system around, except for all the others. A system of sovereignty grants a kernel of legitimacy to regimes that rule barbarically; it values as equals countries that clearly are not; and it frequently enforces borders that were capriciously drawn by imperial powers. But it's far from clear that any available alternative is better.

Yet in his previous life as an academic, Stephen Krasner, the director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, flatly declared that the "rules of conventional sovereignty no longer work." A stroll through the work of scholars who support nation building reveals such alternative concepts as "shared sovereignty," "trusteeships," even "postmodern imperialism." (The latter is supposed to mean an attempt to manipulate domestic politics in foreign countries without all that old-fashioned imperial messiness.)

If the United States proceeds on a course of nation building, based largely on the premise that sovereignty should be de-emphasized, where will that logic stop? Who gets to decide which states retain their sovereignty and which states forfeit it? Will other powers use our own rhetoric against us to justify expansionist foreign policies? It's not hard to envision potential flashpoints in eastern Europe and East Asia.

An American exceptionalist might reply that the United States gets to decide, because we're different. But such an argument is unlikely to prevent other countries from using our own logic against us. If we tug at the thread of sovereignty, the whole sweater may quickly unravel.

An aggressive nation-building strategy would also detract from the struggle against terrorism, by diverting attention and resources, puncturing the mystique of American power, and provoking anger through promiscuous foreign intervention. A prerequisite for nation building is establishing security in the target country, which requires the presence of foreign troops, something that often inspires terrorism. In a survey of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2003, University of Chicago political scientist Robert A. Pape concluded that almost all suicide attacks "have in common…a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."

Such risks might be justified if the chances of success were high. But history suggests they're not. In the most thorough survey of American nation-building missions, the RAND Corporation in 2003 evaluated seven cases: Japan and West Germany after World War I, Somalia in 1992–94, Haiti in 1994–96, Bosnia from 1995 to the present, Kosovo from 1999 to the present, and Afghanistan from 2001 to the present. Assessing the cases individually, the authors count Japan and West Germany as successes but all the others as failures to various degrees. They then try to determine what made the Japanese and West German operations succeed when all the nation-building efforts since have failed.

Their answer is complex and not entirely satisfying. To the extent that any clear conclusion can be drawn from this research, the report says, it is that "nation building…is a time- and resource-consuming effort." Indeed, "among controllable factors, the most important determinant is the level of effort—measured in time, manpower, and money."

In its 2004 Summer Study on Transition to and From Hostilities, the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Defense Department on strategy, reached a similar conclusion. Although "postconflict success often depends on significant political changes," it said, the "barriers to transformation of [an] opponent's society [are] immense." And in the absence of a decisive outcome between warring parties (such as happened in World War II), there is always a danger that violence will continue.

Not surprisingly, successful nation building is highly contingent on security within the target country. The non-war-fighting roles a nation-building military has to play would be tremendously taxing for both the armed services and the U.S. treasury.

By the Defense Science Board's calculations, achieving "ambitious goals" in a failed state requires 20 foreign soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Applying this ratio to a few top-ranked failed states yields sobering results. Nation building in the Ivory Coast would require 345,000 foreign troops. Sudan would take 800,000. Iraq, where the U.S. and its allies currently have 153,000 troops, would need 520,000. And if history is any guide, effective execution would require deployments of 10 years or longer.

All this means that nation-building missions are extremely expensive, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and current ambassador to Iraq, believes that in the case of Afghanistan, "it will take annual assistance [of $4.5 billion] or higher for five to seven years to achieve our goals." Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, which restored a government and installed 8,000 peacekeepers but left that country in its perpetual state of chaos, cost more than $2 billion. Operations Provide Relief and Restore Hope in Somalia, which provided tons of food as humanitarian relief (which were in turn looted by warlords) and eventually got dozens of Americans killed and injured, leading to a hasty and disastrous American retreat, ended up costing $2.2 billion. As of 2002 the United States had spent more than $23 billion intervening in the Balkans since the early '90s. In Iraq, we have already crested the $300 billion mark, having decided that the vagaries of Iraqi sectarian politics should decide our future mission in that country.

Even Francis Fukuyama, a staunch advocate of nation building, admits such efforts have "an extremely troubled record of success." As Fukuyama wrote in his 2005 book State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, "It is not simply that nation building hasn't worked; in cases like sub-Saharan Africa, many of these efforts have actually eroded institutional capacity over time." Put simply, there is no "model" for nation building. The few broad lessons we can draw indicate that success depends on a relentless determination to impose a nation's will, manifested in many years of occupation and billions of dollars in spending.

In this light, the position of the more extreme neo-imperialists is more realistic than that of nation builders who think we can fix failed states on the cheap. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson argues that a proper approach to Iraq would put up to 1 million foreign troops on the ground there for up to 70 years. If resources were unlimited, or if the American people were prepared to shoulder such a burden, that might be a realistic suggestion. But the notion that such enterprises can be carried out quickly and inexpensively is badly mistaken.

A Really Distant Mirror

People who believe that failed states pose a threat to U.S. security and that nation building is the answer see the world as both simpler and more threatening than it is. Failed states generally do not represent security threats. At the same time, nation building in failed states is very difficult and usually unsuccessful.

There is certainly a point at which Robert Kaplan's "coming anarchy," if it were to materialize, would threaten American interests. Here's how Ferguson, in Foreign Policy magazine, describes a world in which America steps back from its role as a global policeman: "Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving."

It's telling that to find a historical precedent on which to base his argument, Ferguson has to reach back to the ninth century. His prediction of a "Dark Age" hinges on a belief that America will collapse (because of excessive consumption, an inadequate army, and an imperial "attention deficit"), the European Union will collapse (because of an inflexible welfare state and shifting demographics), and China will collapse (because of a currency or banking crisis). There is little reason to believe that if America refuses to administer foreign countries, the world will go down this path. The fact that advocates of fixing failed states have to rely on such outlandish scenarios to build their case tells us a good deal about the merit of their arguments.

Don't Intervene in Darfur

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 11:15:00 EDT

Under a plan being considered by the Bush administration, U.S. military personnel could soon be going to Darfur as part of a wider NATO mission aimed at halting the violence there. According to The Washington Post, based on interviews with administration officials, "The move would include some U.S. troops and mark a significant expansion of U.S. and allied involvement."

This latest proposal comes even as the chairman of the African Union, former president of Mali Alpha Oumar Konare, is resisting greater involvement by outside powers. Given that the AU's efforts have failed to halt the genocide there, there is more that the United States and other NATO countries can do to support the AU effort. But while U.S. policymakers should continue to work with African governments to seek a resolution to the crisis, the Bush administration should refrain from introducing U.S. troops into the country. Now is not the time, and Darfur is not the place, to add yet another peacemaking mission to our military's already-long list of responsibilities.

The reasons for this are straightforward. It is true that the United States spends considerably more on its military than any other country on the planet, and it is frustrating to spend so much money and yet to feel powerless in the face of great human suffering. However, our men and women in uniform cannot be everywhere, and they cannot do everything. Ambitious goals, no matter how well-intentioned, are not always matched by the resources to carry them out. Foreign policy entails a series of choices, all of them difficult, some of them painful.

The small minority of policy thinkers here in Washington who have pressured the Bush administration to send U.S. troops to Darfur are reluctant to confront these choices. They buy into the assumption that the United States has almost unlimited power. This belief is shared by many people around the world. But the United States lacks the military resources to intervene almost everywhere, and doesn't have the political will to sustain such operations indefinitely—a reality revealed by the American public's eroding support for the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Leaving aside the question of U.S. troops for the moment, calls to deploy NATO troops to Darfur may seem reasonable, and other member states in NATO may choose to send troops to Darfur. Those NATO countries with few troops in Iraq, for example, might be more inclined and more able to deploy troops to Africa.

On the other hand, Afghanistan is already a priority for NATO, and a Bush administration official told The Washington Post that some NATO allies "think Darfur could potentially become a distraction" from a mission that has clear security implications for all NATO member states. Americans also should be extremely wary about a NATO mission that has the potential to draw attention and resources away from the fight against al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan.

The advocates of NATO intervention claim that no such trade-offs are needed. According to Susan Rice of the Brookings Institution, NATO's Response Force includes 17,000 troops and "is ready to take on the full range of missions." Rice concedes, however, that a NATO deployment should include "at least a small U.S. presence."

To the extent that the military options in Darfur and elsewhere are limited, U.S. policy is partly to blame. Throughout the 1990s, officials in Washington actively discouraged the Europeans from developing an independent military force, one that was capable of operating without U.S. support. Addressing the EU's plans to develop an autonomous defense and foreign policy known as the European Security and Defense Initiative, Madeleine Albright dem anded that ESDI be based on "the principle that these institutions should be the European pillar of a strong transatlantic alliance and not separate and competing entities."

This short-sightedness is now undermining the West's ability to respond to multiple crises simultaneously. Darfur is precisely the sort of mission a European force might have been expected to take up, and it might have been able to do so without drawing forces away from NATO missions elsewhere.

Ultimately, however, individual governments will decide what to do based on the resources at hand, and consistent with the wishes of their citizens. And right now the public in both the United States and Europe demands that policymakers remain focused on security. Since the slaughter in Darfur does not threaten Western citizens, the solution to halting the genocide there must come from Africa, with the world's help, not the other way around.

The neighboring African countries recognize what is at stake. Although no one has known for certain what the United States and NATO might do, this uncertainty did not stop Nigeria and Egypt from sending peacekeepers to Darfur last year. The African Union force currently numbers some 7,000 troops, but two to three times that number might be needed to secure a region the size of Texas. Leaders in Chad, Kenya, and even Libya have expressed a willingness to help resolve the conflict.

The deployment in Darfur is an important test case of the African Union's credibility. Given the many urgent demands on American and European troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the United States and its allies should do nothing to discourage Sudan's neighbors from taking the initiative; unfortunately, that is exactly what NATO involvement would do.

Six Reasons to Kill Farm Subsidies and Trade Barriers

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST

America's agricultural policies have remained fundamentally unchanged for nearly three-quarters of a century. The U.S. government continues to subsidize the production of rice, milk, sugar, cotton, peanuts, tobacco, and other commodities, while restricting imports to maintain artificially high domestic prices. The competition and innovation that have changed the face of the planet have been effectively locked out of America's farm economy by politicians who fear farm voters more than the dispersed consumers who subsidize them.

The time is ripe for unilaterally removing those distorting trade policies. In 2006 Congress will begin to write a new farm bill to replace the protectionist and subsidy-laden 2002 legislation that is set to expire in 2007. Meanwhile, the Bush administration will be negotiating with 147 other members of the World Trade Organization to conclude the Doha Round before the president's trade promotion authority expires in mid-2007. Congress and the administration should seize the opportunity to do ourselves a big favor by eliminating farm subsidies and trade barriers, a change that would benefit all Americans in six important ways.

1. Lower Food Prices for American Families

The foremost reason to curtail farm protectionism is to benefit American consumers. By shielding the domestic market from global competition, government farm programs raise the cost of food and with it the overall cost of living. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the higher domestic food prices caused by U.S. farm programs transferred $16.2 billion from American consumers to domestic agricultural producers in 2004. That amounts to an annual "food tax" per household of $146. This consumer tax is paid over and above what we dole out to farmers through the federal budget.

American consumers pay more than double the world price for sugar. The federal sugar program guarantees domestic producers a take of 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar and 18 cents for cane sugar, while the world spot price for raw cane sugar is currently about 10 cents per pound. A 2000 study by the General Accounting Office estimated that Americans paid an extra $1.9 billion a year for sugar due to import quotas alone.

American families also pay more for their milk, butter, and cheese, thanks to federal dairy price supports and trade barriers. The federal government administers a byzantine system of domestic price supports, marketing orders, import controls, export subsidies, and domestic and international giveaway programs. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, between 2000 and 2002 the average domestic price of nonfat dry milk was 23 percent higher than the world price, cheese 37 percent higher, and butter more than double. Trade policies also drive up prices for peanuts, cotton, beef, orange juice, canned tuna, and other products.

These costs are compounded by escalating tariffs based on the amount of processing embodied in a product. If the government allowed lower, market prices for commodity inputs, processed foods would be substantially cheaper. Lifting sugar protection, for example, would apply downward pressure on the prices we pay for candy, soft drinks, bakery goods, and other sugar-containing products.

The burden of higher domestic food costs falls disproportionately on poor households. Farm protections act as a regressive tax, with higher prices at the grocery store negating some or all of the income support the government seeks to deliver via programs such as food stamps.

If American farm subsidies and trade barriers were significantly reduced, millions of American households would enjoy higher real incomes.

2. Lower Costs and Increased Exports for American Companies

Producers who export goods to the rest of the world and manufacturers who use agricultural inputs would also stand to benefit significantly from farm reform. So would their employees.

When government intervention raises domestic prices for raw materials and other commodities, it imposes higher costs on "downstream" users in the supply chain. Those higher costs can mean higher prices for consumers, reduced global competitiveness for American exporters, lower sales, less investment, and ultimately fewer employment opportunities and lower pay in the affected industries. Artificially high commodity prices drive domestic producers abroad to seek cheaper inputs--or out of business altogether.

In the last two decades, the number of sugar refineries in the U.S. has dwindled from 23 to eight, largely because of the doubled price of domestic raw sugar. During the last decade thousands of jobs have been lost in the confectionary industry, with losses especially heavy in the Chicago area. Expensive food also hurts restaurants.

Enterprises outside the food business would benefit from farm reform as well. Rich countries' agricultural trade barriers remain the single greatest obstacle to a comprehensive World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on trade liberalization. The current round of talks, the Doha Development Round, came to a halt in Cancun in 2003 when the Group of 20 developing countries demanded more serious farm reform by the rich countries as an essential pre-condition. Any progress at the December 2005 meeting in Hong Kong and beyond will depend on real progress in cutting U.S. farm subsidies and trade barriers.

A successful Doha Round would lower trade barriers for a whole swath of industrial products and services. A 2001 study by Drusilla Brown at Tufts University and Alan Deardorff and Robert Stern at the University of Michigan estimated that even a one-third cut in tariffs on agriculture, industry, and services would boost annual global production by $613 billion, including $177 billion in the United States--or about $1,700 per American household. Some of the country's most competitive sectors, including information technology, financial services, insurance, and consulting, probably would increase their share of global markets if the Doha Round were successful. Farm reform remains the key.

A common argument against liberalization is that the U.S. should hold onto its agricultural tariffs as "bargaining chips" in WTO negotiations. The worry is that if we were to dismantle our barriers unilaterally, other countries would lose any incentive to give up theirs.

But reducing protectionism would not primarily be a "concession" to other countries. It would be a favor to ourselves. In the process we would set a good example and create good will in global negotiations, inviting other countries to join us in realizing the benefits of lower domestic food costs.

3. Budget Savings and Equity for U.S. Taxpayers

Agricultural reform also would reduce the cost of government. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that taxpayers shelled out an expected $26 billion in direct agricultural subsidies in fiscal year 2005--the biggest single-year subsidy bill since 1986. Just nine years ago, Congress promised to phase out farm subsidies by 2003. Instead they've reached near-record highs.

Subsidy levels before 1996 were set by a formula that triggered an increase when crop prices fell. Starting in 1995, crop prices began to rise, resulting in lower payments from the federal government. The Freedom to Farm Act, passed in 1996 when commodity prices were high and demand for subsidies low, ended the price support program and replaced it with a declining fixed payment unrelated to market prices. Payouts were scheduled to drop from $5.6 billion in 1996 to $4 billion by 2002 and then disappear.

But Congress reversed course in 1998, when crop prices began to decline, passing an "emergency" supplemental bill that raised total farm subsidies to $12.4 billion. Subsequent supplementals hiked handouts to new heights, totaling more than $76 billion between 1999 and 2002, a whopping $57 billion more than the Freedom to Farm Act originally mandated.

In May 2002, President George W. Bush hammered the final nail into Freedom to Farm, signing a six-year appropriation that revived the old price support program. Taxpayers have coughed up $55.5 billion in the three fiscal years since. For the same money Congress paid to farmers during the "phase-out" period between 1995 and 2003, the federal government could have purchased outright more than a quarter of the country's farms.

Yet two-thirds of American farmers don't even receive subsidies. So where does all that tax money go? Mainly to large agribusinesses and the richest family farmers. In 2003, the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics are available, the top 10 percent of all subsidy recipients gobbled up 68 percent of the money, and the top 5 percent got 55 percent.

Take, for instance, Riceland Foods in Stuttgart, Arkansas, the largest single recipient of farm welfare. In 2003 it received $68.9 million in subsidies for producing rice,
soybeans, wheat, and corn--more than all the farmers in Rhode Island, Hawaii, Alaska, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, and New Jersey combined.

The second-largest recipient of farm welfare in 2003 was Producers Rice Mill, also in Stuttgart, Arkansas, which received $51.4 million. The agricultural welfare rolls also include many Fortune 500 companies, such as Archer Daniels Midland and International Paper, plus corporations most people don't associate with farming, such as Chevron, Caterpillar, and Electronic Data Systems.

From the taxpayer's perspective, there is no good reason why the federal government should continue to subsidize farmers or companies, especially those that can remain profitable on their own.

4. More Environmentally Friendly Land Use

The distortions and perverse incentives of U.S. agricultural policies have encouraged practices that damage the environment. Trade barriers and subsidies stimulate production on marginal land, leading to overuse of pesticides, fertilizers, and other effluents. A central if unstated purpose of American farm policy is to promote production of commodities that would not be economical under competitive, free market conditions. This often means emphasizing crops better grown elsewhere, requiring more chemical assistance.

Overuse of fertilizers and pesticides adds to runoff that pollutes rivers, lakes, and oceans. According to the World Resources Institute, agriculture is the biggest source of river and lake pollutants in the United States. A study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that 72 percent of U.S. rivers and 56 percent of lakes it surveyed suffer from agriculture-related pollution. Areas of the Gulf of Mexico have become "dead zones" because of the runoff from farms in the Midwest. Even where fertilizers and pesticides are not used intensively, the mere act of plowing soil eliminates forest and grass cover, leaving soil exposed for weeks at a time and vulnerable to erosion. Erosion can build up silt in nearby rivers and downstream lakes.

Domestic sugar protection has maintained a concentration of producers in central Florida who have used up water from the endangered Florida Everglades while spitting back phosphorous content far above the level consistent with maintaining the surrounding ecosystem. The high runoff has seriously reduced periphyton, such as algae, that supports birds and other animal life. Congress has spent billions to repair the damage caused to the Everglades by the protected sugar industry.

Farm programs also waste scarce water resources, especially in the arid West. Agricultural water subsidies alone amount to around $2 billion annually, propping up such uneconomical enterprises as growing cotton in the Arizona desert.

Finally, farm programs crowd out more environmentally friendly land uses by artificially driving up land prices. A sizeable share of the increased income that protection and subsidies deliver to farms becomes "capitalized" through higher land values, because the subsidies increase the stream of income that land can produce. Higher prices for farmland, in turn, render it more expensive to acquire and maintain environmental preserves, parkland, forests, or other land use alternatives that would be more likely to preserve habitat and biodiversity. By keeping marginal farmland under cultivation, the government has slowed the trend of reforestation.

When New Zealand dramatically reduced farm trade barriers and subsidies in the mid-1980s, farmland values fell sharply, allowing marginal land to return to such uses as forestry and eco-tourism. The use of fertilizers declined, along with overgrazing and soil erosion.

5. Larger Markets for U.S. Farmers and Economic Diversity for Rural America

Federal farm programs actually work against the interests of many farmers. Growers, especially the two-thirds who don't receive subsidies, pay a heavy price through lost export opportunities from high trade barriers abroad. Agriculture exporters face average foreign tariffs that are several times higher than the average tariffs on manufactured products. The most promising opportunity to lower those barriers is the Doha Round, which won't achieve a breakthrough until the rich countries stop trying to prop up their farms.

If global barriers to farm trade were removed, the World Bank estimates, worldwide farm exports would be 74 percent higher in 2015 than they would otherwise. American farmers would be among the biggest winners:

Comprehensive reform would mean an additional $88 billion in annual U.S. farm exports by 2015 and an additional $28 billion in farm imports, for a net $60 billion surplus.

Protection has not served the long-term interests of even the most protected farm sectors. Barriers to commodity imports discourage diversification of production into higher-value-added items and retard development of the food processing industry. They discourage domestic consumption and encourage the use of lower-priced substitutes, undermining the protected sectors' own domestic market share.

Artificially high prices for sugar, for example, have contributed to a long-term decline in domestic sugar consumption. Today Americans consume about 40 percent less sugar per capita than they did when consumption was at its peak in 1972. Domestic sugar has been replaced on the menu not by imports but by U.S.-made substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup and low-calorie sweeteners such as Splenda. Sugar's share of the domestic sweetener market has been cut in half since 1967.

Experience shows that American farmers can thrive in free and open markets. American farmers profitably produce lettuce, celery, cauliflower, potatoes, almonds, pistachios, apples, pears, cherries, melons, blueberries, grapes, and hundreds of other specialty crops without guaranteed prices or protected markets. The impact of farm subsidies on land prices makes growing these unprotected crops more expensive, and barriers caused by the protection of other crops block exports.

The experience of New Zealand and Australia demonstrates that farmers can survive and thrive without significant state support. Both of those countries enacted sweeping, unilateral reforms, including the elimination of import barriers and domestic price support subsidies. As expected, some farms have gone out of business, but many others have changed their operations to meet consumer demand. The result has been not a massive downsizing of the agriculture sector but a surge of innovation, productivity, and output.

6. A More Hospitable World

The collective effect of American farm policies is to depress the income of agricultural producers worldwide, exacerbating poverty in areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, where people are heavily dependent on agriculture.

The frustration and despair caused by these policies undermine American security. Many people who depend on agriculture for their survival, both as a source of nourishment and a means of acquiring wealth, perceive U.S. farm policy as part of an anti-American narrative in which Washington wants to keep the rest of the world locked in poverty. Indeed, in a survey of anti-American sentiment around the world, the Pew Research Center found a majority of respondents in more than a dozen countries were convinced that U.S. farm and trade policies increased the "poverty gap" worldwide. These sentiments transcended geographic, ethnic, or religious boundaries. In such an environment, terrorist ringleaders find fertile ground for their message of hate and violence.

Nicholas Stern, chief economist at the World Bank, is blunt about America's leadership role. "It is hypocritical to preach the advantages of free trade and free markets," Stern told the U.N. publication Africa Recovery, "and then erect obstacles in precisely those markets in which developing countries have a comparative advantage." Johan Norberg, of the Swedish think tank Timbro, argues that farm protection in developed countries amounts to a "deliberate and systematic means of undermining the very type of industry in which the developing countries do have comparative advantages." (See "Poor Man's Hero," December 2003.)

American subsidies and tariffs amount to much more money than its foreign aid to the developing world. According to Oxfam, "in crop year 2002, the U.S. government provided $3.4 billion in total subsidies to the cotton sector," including about 25,000 growers. "To put this figure into perspective," Oxfam says, "it is nearly twice the total amount of U.S. foreign aid given to sub-Saharan Africa. It is also more than the GDP of Benin, Burkina Faso, or Chad, the main cotton-producing countries in the region." The subsidies drive down world cotton prices, costing developing countries billions of dollars in lost export earnings.

Poor countries don't want our pity; they want our respect. To the extent that American security depends on the expansion of liberal democratic institutions and free market economics, Washington must be particularly sensitive to policies that exacerbate poverty in the developing world.

An Opportunity for Real Reform

For the sake of our broader national interest, Congress and the president should reduce, with the ultimate goal of eliminating, all agricultural trade barriers and production subsides. The long-term interests of Americans as consumers, producers, taxpayers, and citizens of the world should not be sacrificed for the short-term interests of a small minority of farmers.

Reform is a real possibility. The WTO's Doha Round will hit a hard deadline in 2007. That's also when Bush's authority to negotiate trade agreements and present them to Congress for an up-or-down vote will expire under the terms of the Bipartisan Trade Promotion Authority Act of 2002. Without such authority, it will be virtually impossible for the White House to conclude a complex multilateral agreement with the other 147 members of the WTO. Aggressive proposals by the U.S. government to slash its farm subsidies and trade barriers, and the willingness of Congress to make those proposals a reality, will be necessary for the successful conclusion of Doha by the 2007 deadline.

Meanwhile, the U.S. cotton program and the European Union's sugar subsidies have been found in separate WTO cases to be in violation of the body's trade rules. Both cases cast doubt on the legality of similar farm programs in the rich countries.

On the domestic front, the farm bill will be coming up for reauthorization at about the same time that the Doha Round negotiations enter their final stages. A new farm bill offers Congress an obvious opportunity to fundamentally reshape agricultural policy.

A farm bill with deep cuts in subsidies and trade barriers would save U.S. taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of dollars during the next decade while potentially opening markets abroad for tens of billions more in American exports across the economy. Congress and the president should seize the opportunity to bring America's farm sector into the nurturing sunlight of an open global market.

Table 1: Government Support for Farm Production in 2004

	Total Producer Support of Farm Income	Support as a Share
European Union	$133.4	33%
Japan	48.7	56
United States	46.5	18
South Korea	19.8	63
Turkey	11.6	27
Switzerland	5.8	68
Canada	5.7	21
Mexico	5.4	17
Australia	1.1	4
New Zealand	.3	3
Total	$279.5	30%
*Producer support estimate, in billions U.S. $
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Table 2: Aggregate Measure of Protection Against Developing Countries (tariff equivalent)

	United States	European Union	Japan
Agriculture	19.9%	46.6%	82.0%
Textiles, Apparel	10.9	11.6	9.2
Other Manufacturers	2.1	3.2	1.5
Oil and Other*	.9	.6	.3
All	4.0%	9.5%	16.6%
*Other = "non agricultural raw materials"
Source: William R. Cline, “Effective Economic Growth for People: The Role of the United States,” Center for Global Development, December 2004, p.4; and Cline, Trade Policy and Global Poverty

Figure� 1: Direct U.S. Government Payment to Farmers, 1990�2004 (in billions of dollars)

(graph not available online)

George W. Bush, CEO

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Much was made during the 2000 campaign of the fact that George W. Bush would be the first president to hold an MBA. The implication, cultivated by members of then-Gov. Bush's campaign, was that he would approach the challenges of the presidency much as a CEO tackles the day-to-day tasks of running a company.

But the CEO analogy only goes so far, in part because President Bush is not subject to the same stringent standards that he imposed on business leaders when he signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill into law on July 30, 2002. The law, aimed at restoring public confidence in the integrity of the business community, requires all CEOs and CFOs of public companies to attest that their financial reports are complete and accurate, and holds chief executives—and their subordinates—criminally liable for any discrepancies. It's a law that's easier to write and sign than to follow, as seen in the example of former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, the first person to be indicted under it.

When the Scrushy trial began in late January, U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre told the jury to focus on "whether Mr. Scrushy knowingly participated in the fraud at HealthSouth." Following a nearly four-month-long trial, and three weeks of deliberations, the jury ultimately failed to convict Scrushy on any of the 36 charges brought against him, in part because they were not convinced that he personally sought to deceive investors. Scrushy's defense team consistently blamed the CEO's subordinates, and this may also have swayed the jurors. Quipped one former prosecutor: "This may be the first time that the Sergeant Schultz defense has worked."

But Sarbanes-Oxley, as written, did not necessarily take intent into consideration. The "my subordinates messed up" defense is equally unavailing; Sarbanes-Oxley established that ultimate authority and responsibility resides with the chief executive. Scrushy was acquitted in part becase the court held to a higher threshold of culpability than the law actually demanded.

President Bush would have to hope for a similarly high burden of proof if his own decisions were tested under the Sarbanes-Oxley standards. Did the president deceive Company USA's investors (a.k.a. the American public) when he led the country to war in early 2003? Even if the deception was unintentional, CEO Bush would be required to account for the disparities between the predicted and actual costs of the Iraqi "investment."

In September 2002, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey projected that the "upper bound" of Iraqi war costs would total between 1 percent and 2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, or somewhere between $100 and $200 billion. But this was just one estimate. White House budget director Mitch Daniels called Lindsey's figures "very high." Several months later, in January 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported that OMB estimates placed the cost of war under $50 billion, and he suggested that some of these costs might be carried by other countries.

Lindsey's "upper bound" has already proved not high enough. The U.S. Government has spent over $200 billion in Iraq, and the Department of Defense is now spending an additional $5 billion every month. According to the Congressional Budget Office, war costs might reach $600 billion by 2010.

A similar pattern emerges with respect to the anticipated personnel requirements of the Iraqi operation. In February 2003, then–Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki projected that it would take "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," operating over a period of several years, in order to bring stability to Iraq. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz disputed these figures, publicly declaring the general's estimates "wildly off the mark."

Today, over two years after President Bush declared that major combat operations were over in Iraq, the United States has almost 140,000 troops in Iraq. Many observers believe that is not nearly enough, and most Americans assume that U.S. forces will be in Iraq for at least several more years. Perhaps Gen. Shinseki had it right?

Reasonable observers (though not the framers and signer of Sarbanes-Oxley) might point out that accurate information is central to compliance with any standards of management. The financial projections that business leaders use to convince investors to support a particular initiative are often highly speculative.

The president's defenders might argue that, with regard to the invasion of Iraq, he based his decision on an honest assessment of the available facts (though this case is steadily becoming harder to make). But can the same be said, for example, about the way the White House knowingly lowballed the cost of its Medicare prescription drug benefit?

When George Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley, he declared, "This law says to every American: there will not be a different ethical standard for corporate America than the standard that applies to everyone else." But America's chief executives are in fact held to very different standards. What remains to be seen is whether the standards are too high for company CEOs, or whether they are too low for the nation's Commander in Chief. Or both.

Trade, Not Aid

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) info@reason.com (Marian Tupy) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with President Bush last week, he urged the United States to increase substantially its aid to Africa. Pressure on Mr. Bush is likely to multiply over the coming weeks as he prepares to depart for the G8 summit in Scotland. Despite political pressures, increasing the U.S1. foreign aid budget would be a mistake. The true cause of Africa's poverty is the continent's long history of crippling misgovernance—a problem that is exacerbated by rich countries' trade protectionism, particularly with respect to agriculture.

While advocates of current market-distorting agricultural policies do not intend to harm developing nations, the collective effect of U.S. farm policies is devastating for producers of agricultural goods worldwide. American farm policies might provide short-term benefits for agricultural producers in the U.S., but those benefits are more than offset by the cost to American consumers who pay higher taxes to support the U.S. farmers and higher prices for agricultural products. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs, quotas, and export subsidies exacerbate poverty in regions like sub-Saharan Africa where people are heavily dependent upon agriculture.

The frustration and despair caused by these policies in turn undermine American security. People who are dependent upon agriculture for their survival often have limited access to information. Unfamiliar with the historical and economic rationale behind U.S. agricultural policies, those individuals perceive U.S. farm policies to fit neatly within a competing narrative crafted by doomsayers who claim that the United States seeks to keep the rest of the world shackled in poverty. Protestations to the contrary from U.S. government officials typically fall on deaf ears.

U.S. agriculture policy undermines U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty because it drives down global agricultural prices, which in turn cost developing countries hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export earnings. The losses associated with cotton subsidies alone exceed the value of U.S. aid programs to the countries concerned. The British aid organization Oxfam charges that U.S. subsidies directly led to losses of more than $300 million in potential revenue in sub-Saharan Africa during the 2001/02 season. More than 12 million people in this region depend directly on the crop, with a typical small-scale producer making less than $400 on an annual cotton harvest. By damaging the livelihoods of people already on the edge of subsistence, U.S. agricultural policies take away with the right hand what the left hand gives in aid and development assistance.

Some want to correct that problem by increasing foreign aid, but transfer payments have failed to stimulate economic growth in Africa where the average income per person is 11 percent lower today than it was in 1960. State-to-state aid is inefficient because it is often based on geopolitical considerations, not on economic criteria. As a consequence, the least deserving regimes often obtain aid. International organizations such as the World Bank are also largely ineffective. In 2000, for example, the bipartisan Meltzer Commission found that the World Bank's aid projects failed 55 to 60 percent of the time.

The aid is ineffective because of the appalling way in which Africa is governed. In recent decades, of each dollar given to Africa in aid, 80 cents were stolen by corrupt leaders and transferred back into Western bank accounts. In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, "corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence." All that is left when these regimes eventually collapse is a massive public debt.

There is yet another practical problem with the "subsidies plus aid" approach. It forces taxpayers to pay twice—once to sustain the inefficient subsidies, and then again to pay for aid programs to those countries harmed by such policies. William R. Cline, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development, estimated that global trade liberalization would save the developed nations $141 billion a year and deliver economic benefits worth $87 billion a year to developing countries.

To the extent that U.S. security depends upon the expansion of liberal democratic institutions and free market economics, U.S. policymakers must be particularly sensitive to those policies that exacerbate poverty in the developing world. As Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni stated during his 2003 meeting with President Bush, "I don't want aid; I want trade. Aid cannot transform society."

Development economists have stressed this message for years. U.S. subsidies and protectionism are particularly galling for those countries that have tried to make market reforms work, only to see their producers undercut by subsidized goods in the "free" world market. Even though the United States is hardly the worst offender in the developed world when it comes to unfair trading practices, the United States should lead by example and eliminate its market-distorting agricultural policies. They are damaging to the interests of most Americans, and they render useless U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty in the poorest corners of the globe.

A Vote for Chaos

info@reason.com (Christopher Preble) — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

In a recent national poll of U.S. adults, 56 percent of respondents doubted that the upcoming elections in Iraq will produce a stable government that can rule effectively. This skepticism is warranted. Regardless of what happens next week, Americans should not expect that conditions will dramatically improve for the U.S. troops tasked with trying to bring peace and stability to the country.

While Iraq may acquire the trappings of democracy with its first nationwide elections in decades, the country is far from becoming a liberal democracy—one that protects individual rights from the whims of a potentially hostile majority. This is a crucial distinction. It helps to explain why a number of Iraqis have chosen to boycott the elections, and why a few pre-emptive bitter-enders have attempted to use violence and intimidation to prevent them from even taking place.

Contrast this behavior with our experience in the United States. The past two presidential elections have been among the most closely contested and contentious in our history. Although millions of Americans did not vote for George Bush, not a single person has taken up arms. The mere suggestion sounds absurd, precisely because Americans take it for granted that it is better to live in a society governed by laws than it is to live in no society at all.

Americans further assume that all of the candidates on the ballot have an equal chance at winning. But even this is a stretch. Cynical manipulation by the two major parties ensures that very few congressional races are competitive. And yet we still support the system, despite occasional grumbling.

By contrast, many Iraqis are not convinced that elections are better than chaos. And they think that they can "succeed," if it can be called that, by preventing the elections from taking place. They look upon their current predicament as a zero-sum game, and they fear that victory by one group could mean destruction for their group.

Some have opted for violence. Earlier this month, the head of Iraq's intelligence services estimated that the number of active insurgents in Iraq totaled 40,000 "hard-core fighters," with another 160,000 part-time guerillas and volunteers who provided support to the insurgents. These individuals may not prevent the elections from taking place, but they hope to intimidate a sufficient number of voters so as to undermine the legitimacy of the elected government, and thereby weaken the government.

This move is not completely crazy. Sunni Arabs comprise only about 20 percent of the total population throughout the country. Shia Arabs will win a comfortable majority of the vote and the lion's share of the seats in parliament. The decision by leading Sunni parties to boycott the elections will make the imbalance even more lopsided.

The electoral process, which throws all Iraqi voters into one national pool, has encouraged people to identity themselves according to religious affiliations, perversely dividing the country. Sunni fears that the Shia will use their inevitable majority to persecute their numerically smaller brethren may be overblown, but that's an easy call to make from the United States. Blue Americans living in red congressional districts, and red Americans living in blue districts, do not fear being persecuted or even killed by the victors in the election.

Will the Shia use their political power to institutionalize control of the Iraqi state, by shaping the national constitution to suit their ends? And will they then negotiate with Sunni Arabs from a position of strength? Or will Shia leaders direct, or acquiesce in, violence and retribution against Sunnis, and not just Saddam loyalists, for their complicity in the crimes of the past?

The Sunnis who are boycotting the elections, and those who are providing aid and comfort to a bloody insurgency, believe that they already know the answers. They are not waiting for the votes to be counted on election day. They'll take their chances with chaos.

Forcing Freedom

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Earlier this year, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey published a short, provocative column at reason online that sketched the outlines of what he considered a properly libertarian foreign policy. Based on the large and heated response -- pro and con -- to Bailey's ideas, reason asked him to expand on his original piece. We also asked three prominent writers on foreign policy to respond. What follows is that exchange, with a final reply by Bailey.

Should Libertarianism Stop at the Water's Edge?

Ronald Bailey

Libertarian philosophy amply justifies the limited role that government should play in the lives of the citizens of a free society. But what is the proper role for the government of a free society in managing relations between and among nation-states, some of which are definitely not free societies? In opening such a discussion, it's important to keep several points in mind.

First, the spread of liberal, free market democracy in the 20th century has been accomplished largely by force of arms -- largely, in fact, by force of American arms. Would the same fat, happy, complacent Europe that opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq now exist had not the United States helped to liberate that continent in World War II?

Germany and Japan are free societies today because free institutions were imposed on them by the victorious Allies. Additionally, would the Iron Curtain have lifted from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics without a 50-year policy of containment and, later, a strategy of confrontation known as the Reagan Doctrine? Reagan's active support of insurgent movements in Central America, Africa, and Central Asia was aimed at overthrowing Soviet client states and sapping Soviet resources. The policy worked, even as it created regrettable side effects, such as rogue rebels in Angola and a cadre of rootless mujahedin in Afghanistan. But it worked -- the Soviet empire is no more.

Second, a world that is half free is dangerous to liberty at home and abroad. In a half-free world, free societies must protect themselves from the ambitions of tyrants motivated by ideology (Hitler and Stalin) or greed (Saddam Hussein). In the face of tyrants and terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety, politicians in free societies persuade anxious voters that we need tighter borders, increased spying on visitors and citizens, and detentions based on the slimmest of national security pretexts.

The result is a growing national security apparatus, including a bigger military, a new Department of Homeland Security, and expanded domestic and international spy agencies. All of these diminish domestic liberty and soak up more and more of our citizens' wealth. These expanded state powers have even tempted some conservatives to agitate for the establishment of an American empire. In the past our government justified supporting unsavory regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Zaire as necessary allies in our nation's struggle against even more menacing tyrants and terrorist organizations. Not surprisingly, to people yearning to be free of their tyrants, our support of their oppressors looked like hypocrisy and thus often encouraged them to adopt anti-liberal ideologies as guides for their struggles against oppression.

Third, libertarians certainly believe in self-defense. Most Americans support going after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the 9/11 atrocities. But what about pre-emption, the most controversial element of George W. Bush's foreign policy? A person doesn't have to wait until someone hits her or shoots her before she can defend herself. Similarly, free societies certainly have the right to defend themselves against imminent attack.

Of course, the definition of imminent is crucial, and it's worth considering it in terms of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime in Iraq. Regardless of whether weapons of mass destruction -- the primary motive for the U.S. invasion -- ever turn up, even supporters of the war such as myself always understood that Saddam had no intention of directly attacking the United States in the near future. But it's reasonable to assume that, had he been left to run his country in peace, Saddam or his Ba'athist successors would have, like Libya and Sudan, ended up supporting groups that eventually would have struck at the United States. That is the main point: The existence of unfree regimes necessarily threatens the peace of free societies. And what if Saddam, who initiated wars with Iran and Kuwait, had been able to obtain nuclear weapons? If he had then gone to war against his neighbors, what country would have risked nuclear holocaust to rein him in?

In order to better guard domestic liberties over the long run, a libertarian foreign policy should be aimed at building a free world sooner rather than later. The ultimate aim of such a policy would be to guarantee liberties at home by removing the justifications for an intrusive national security apparatus. What's necessary for that to happen?

First, it is clearly in the interests of the United States to foster the creation of a world populated by commercial republics. One of the keys to achieving this goal is vigorously promoting free trade abroad. The prosperity engendered by free trade soothes resentments and fosters the spread of the ideals of liberty. Second, citizens from countries living under tyrannical regimes should be encouraged to spend some time in the United States so that they can experience the operation of our free institutions directly. Third, and most crucially, the U.S. government should revive the Reagan Doctrine. That is, our government should support, train, and finance insurgent movements aimed at overthrowing tyrannical regimes. And the U.S. should provide not just military training but also training in the advantages and operations of the institutions of constitutional liberalism: the rule of law, protection of minority rights, freedom of religion, private property, free markets, a free press, civilian control of the military, an independent judiciary.

There is no guarantee that U.S.-backed insurgents will establish free societies when they come to power. But if it is understood that, should they fail to do so, the United States would turn around and back another group of liberal insurgents, that would encourage U.S.-supported groups not to stray from the liberal path.

Think for a moment what it would mean if the world were not barely half free. What if every nation in the world were a prosperous commercial republic? What would international relations look like? They would look a lot like what is happening within Europe today -- growing peaceful integration of economies, increasingly open borders, and shrinking military forces. By aggressively expanding the scope of free institutions worldwide, we ultimately guarantee our own liberties at home.

Ronald Bailey , Reason's science correspondent, is a former producer for the PBS foreign affairs series American Interests.

War Can Be an Engine of Dynamism and Innovation

Christopher Hitchens

The question as put by Ronald Bailey is both more and less severe, in its implications for libertarians, than it first appears. To what extent does libertarianism, or any other philosophy, take the existence of a constitutional and continental United States for granted? Is libertarianism, to put it more shortly, protected by state power?

The bluntest instance of this problem in practice might be that of Abraham Lincoln, who was not only prepared to kill any number of actual or potential United States citizens, and to level and bombard their cities, but also ready to suspend habeas corpus and other protections, even for those who agreed with him. Many have compared Lincoln's "nation building" to the erection of the over-mighty state, and Gore Vidal openly suggests in his wonderful novel Lincoln that Honest Abe belongs in the same category as Bismarck. The fact must also be faced that the Emancipation Proclamation -- prelude to the full abolition of chattel slavery and the holding of people as property -- was conceived as a limited war measure only.

War is the health of the state, as was pointed out by the leftist Randolph Bourne in the early years of what was then called the Great War. But war has also, like revolution, been an engine of dynamism and innovation (let's agree not to call this "progress" too glibly). It's also been an occasion, at least sometimes, for the extension of rights and of the role of the autonomous citizen.

It would be nice to think that we could choose our allies or proxies on the basis of their similarity to our "own" ideals. But we would first have to be sure that these were, in fact, our ideals. And we would in any case have to make a prudent guess as to how long it might take for us to be vindicated in that choice. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, for example, was as far as I can see a much better ally than the Taliban. But how far can I, or any of us, be expected to see?

I have never heard it argued that Lincoln's extra-ordinary measures on the legal and authoritarian front, any more than his permission for Unionists to pay others to take their place in the ranks of the army, actually advanced the cause. One might well have had one with-out the other(s). Censorship in wartime, for example, usually turns out to be even more stupid than censorship in peacetime. The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both. It is plain to anyone that John Ashcroft is too doltish to hold the office of attorney general in war or peace, is illiterate as regards the Constitution, and despises the idea of church-state separation for which, in part, we are supposed to be fighting. Who can propose that we are made safer by being denied even the names of those who are imprisoned under his special legislation?

It has been encouraging, to me at least, to see how many libertarians and conservatives have been willing to challenge the more exorbitant points of the USA PATRIOT Act. It's also been depressing to have made their objection to Ashcroft into an underhanded opposition to a war against a clear and present danger. The requirement of an oath to the Constitution is that it commits you to uphold it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Given the fact that a very convincing attempt has been made to form a secret army within our borders, and to connect it with a lethal theocratic movement overseas, I'm very unimpressed by anyone who wants to counterpose these two elements of the commitment.

I somehow doubt that a superpower, however defined (even as a democratic or liberal superpower) can ever practice a "libertarian" foreign policy. Neither the populist nor the elite version of such a system seems to lend itself to limited government. However, it can perhaps be made, with a protracted struggle, to uphold the anti-totalitarian and above all secular values for which it claims to be contending. These are not easy times to be a libertarian, whether civil or social. But the easy time for that will never arrive. It's supposed to be difficult.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book is A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume).

The Perils of Global Libertarian Utopianism

Christopher Preble

The state poses the greatest threat to liberty, and the greatest expansions of state power occur during times of threat -- both real and imagined. To protect us from these threats, and ultimately from the state, Ronald Bailey advocates an aggressive foreign policy "aimed at building a free world sooner rather than later." Bailey argues that this policy would be only temporary, and that the ultimate goal would be the creation of a new order, whereby liberty could be guaranteed at home without the need for "an intrusive national security apparatus."

This is global libertarian utopianism. By this logic, freedom-loving people will use government action to mold a perfect, free world. But if libertarians are opposed to government action to make a perfect domestic world, why discard those principles beyond the water's edge?

The practical and moral difficulties of welfare-statism on the domestic front pale in comparison to those of global libertarian utopianism. For one, Bailey vastly underestimates the capacity of the state to hold onto power once that "new" world is created, once the unfree are made free. He also underestimates what it would actually take to force democracy down the throats of the approximately 3 billion people who currently live under some other system of government.

An overwhelmingly powerful national security state would certainly be needed. Bailey implies it would be only temporary, but how long is that? A decade? A century? How will we know when we have won, when we can return to our happy cocoon, safe from external threats, and therefore content to demobilize our armies, scrap our ships, and leave our airplanes to bake in the desert? Talk of temporary measures enacted in the name of defense should consider how other "temporary" measures -- from federal tax withholding to mohair subsidies to NATO -- seem stubbornly permanent, even after the crises in question (World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, respectively) have long since abated.

The state will always find new justifications for its existence. The end of the Cold War should have opened the door to a reduction in the threats posed to Americans and American interests. But other threats rose to the surface. Liberal governments might have taken action to mitigate the threat from global terrorism, but for a variety of reasons most looked the other way. September 11 refocused our attention.

It should also have refocused our attention on the proper means for dealing with threats. A reflexive return to the Cold War model, focused on state actors, is particularly unwise because Al Qaeda is not at all like the Soviet Union. Since the 9/11 attacks, more harm has been done to this loose-knit network of terrorists and fanatics through timely intelligence gathering, cooperative law enforcement, criminal prosecution, and international financial pressure than by laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles.

Yet the Bush administration seems determined to implement an over-ambitious strategy that often deals only tangentially with Al Qaeda and that draws most heavily on military resources to accomplish the mission of eliminating all terrorism. In this environment -- filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of threats, both real and imagined -- there will be ample opportunities for the state to expand its power over the individual. The most obvious manifestation is the American military machine, which is now projected to consume nearly $400 billion in fiscal year 2003 and over $500 billion by fiscal year 2009. Very little of this spending buys anything that will protect us from terrorism.

In the interest of protecting individual liberties, liberal democracies are constrained in their use of power. The most important of these constraints is the limitation on the use of force abroad, which is tied to the notion that states may act only when their vital security interests are threatened. To lift these constraints, and grant liberal governments the authority to engage in military action when vital interests are not at risk, ultimately would erode the very notion of a democratic peace that is at the core of the global libertarian utopian vision.

This is not to say that freedom-loving people must sit idly by while half the world's population struggles under autocracy. Libertarians know what works best to promote positive change in the domestic realm: political and economic freedom. Men and women advance the cause of liberty every day not by government edict but out of self-interest. We should be no less optimistic about the power of economic activity, trade, voluntary exchange, and person-to-person cultural contact to change even the most illiberal and autocratic countries in the world. Peaceful, voluntary exchange is far more in keeping with classical liberal principles than an empire of force, dedicated to the principles of compelling "illiberal" nations to heel. Liberal governments can best promote democracy not at the point of a bayonet but rather at the point of sale.

Liberal, free market democracy spreads naturally, from free states to unfree states, from dynamic societies to stagnant ones. And we all know why. Classical liberalism encourages intellectual inquiry; autocracy stifles it. Free markets reward entrepreneurial spirit; the state punishes it. Growing, vibrant liberal states combine the traits of political and economic freedom to defeat their autocratic neighbors not by killing their soldiers, bombing their cities, and jailing their leaders, but by luring away the most ambitious, intelligent, and gifted individuals. Faced with this exodus of talent, illiberal governments have only two choices: isolation or reform. Isolation leads to collapse -- not immediately, but eventually. In the meantime, for individuals living in free countries, the threat posed by the self-isolated states is typically quite small; when and if these unfree states actually do pose an imminent danger, the free states are in a far stronger position to prevail militarily.

Aside from these rare instances, however, we should be far more fearful of the state's insatiable appetite for power, and we should avoid inviting government to pursue illiberal ends abroad under the guise of promoting freedom at home.

Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Ivan Eland

Ronald Bailey's argument essentially is, "Let's fight wars, with their concomitant requirement for bigger government, now so that we will have peace and reduced government later." This tack is similar to Woodrow Wilson's often-parodied slogan about "the war to end all wars" or historian Charles Beard's astute and sarcastic aphorism about waging "perpetual war for perpetual peace."

Even if the United States spent the trillions of dollars needed to depose -- directly or indirectly -- the remaining tyrants in the world (and there are a lot of them left), the voracious security bureaucracies would think up new threats to justify an interventionist foreign policy and to maintain defense spending at levels exceeding Cold War averages. Deposing the world's tyrants is only the first of many difficult steps to utopia. As the United States keeps rediscovering in the developing world -- for example, in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq -- even after the despots' rule has been removed, rebuilding societies that have little experience with freedom into republics has not been very successful. The accomplishments in Japan and Germany were achieved by industrial societies with much human capital, a strong sense of national identity, and (in the case of Germany) some experience with representative government.

More important, although an argument can be made that World War II had to be fought to safeguard U.S. security (U.S. intervention in World War I, by contrast, tipped the balance toward the Allies and created the conditions leading to the rise of authoritarianism and World War II), wars usually stifle rather than expand liberty. Despite the liberation of some peoples during each world war, the net outcome of each global conflict, and the civil wars spawned or aggravated by it (major conflagrations often lead to civil unrest in the belligerents, such as the Russian revolution during World War I and the Chinese civil war after World War II), was that far more people were under the yoke of oppression than ever before.

Furthermore, the hypothesis that no war would exist in a world of democracies is a theory based on flawed logic and twisted historical evidence (as the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World War I illustrate). Thus, Gulf War II and other future brush-fire wars championed by Bailey to democratize the planet have little to do with ensuring U.S. security, and will most likely undermine it. Bailey believes that petty despots of small, relatively poor rogue states -- for example, Saddam Hussein -- are a threat to a superpower. But rogue states, which have known addresses, have no incentive to give -- or track record of giving -- weapons of mass destruction to radical groups who could get them in big trouble with the nuclear powers. Even if a rogue state (North Korea, for example) obtains a few nuclear warheads, it can be deterred from attacking the United States by the world-dominant U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Horrific blowback from terrorists reacting to interventionist U.S. foreign policy is now the biggest threat facing the country. The terrorists say, and polls of Arabic and Islamic public opinion confirm, that U.S. interventionist foreign policy -- not U.S. culture or economic and political freedoms -- is the cause of terrorist strikes against U.S. targets. Attacking foreign countries raises hatred of the United States in the world, increases retaliatory terrorism, and thereby ultimately increases -- not reduces, as Bailey claims -- U.S. government intrusion into civil liberties at home.

Because of such ill effects on government activism at home, the nation's founders advocated staying out of foreign wars. They learned from history that wars lead to bigger government and the accumulation of power by the ruler. James Madison said it best: "Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

In the 20th century, war was the primary cause of U.S. government growth, and not just in areas related to national security. Massive government intrusion into civil society during World War I provided a precedent -- as well as administrators and renamed government programs -- for the Depression-era expansion of the state. Restraining U.S. government intervention internationally is fundamental to reducing the role of the state domestically, and government coercion abroad is as immoral as it is at home.

It is puzzling that "libertarian" interventionists are skeptical of state activism at home -- where the U.S. government has at least some legitimacy -- yet have great faith that Uncle Sam can successfully conduct social engineering abroad, where he has no legitimacy. Furthermore, opening markets at gunpoint isn't free trade. Some libertarians, possessing an affinity for the right, find it difficult to move away from the right's bread-and-butter issue -- a statist, interventionist foreign policy and concomitant bloated defense budgets. All U.S. presidents since World War II -- not only Reagan -- intervened excessively in strategically marginal areas of the world in the name of fighting communism. Such puttering around at the edge of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence to sap its resources undoubtedly had less of an effect on communism's collapse than its nonviable and grossly inefficient economic and social system.

Bailey goes out of his way to praise Ronald Reagan -- a president who increased government spending faster than Bill Clinton and who, in his proxy war against the Soviets in the unimportant backwater of Afghanistan, created one of the few threats to the American mainland and way of life in the history of the republic. Bailey refers to this monster, now called Al Qaeda, as one of the "regrettable side effects" of Reagan's heroic Cold War struggle. But Reagan's intervention, instead of moving Afghanistan toward democracy, strengthened a proxy that became the devil incarnate. Such unintended and counterproductive blowback from unnecessary wars may be one of the best reasons not to get involved in them. Instead of using coercion unbecoming of a republic, the best way to help other nations onto the path of freedom is to lead by example.

Ivan Eland is director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, and author of Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World (Praeger).

Fighting for the Rule of Law

Ronald Bailey

Christopher Preble and Ivan Eland want to avoid U.S. military adventures abroad and the creation of a national security state at home. So do I. Naturally, they agree with the first two pillars of my proposed libertarian foreign policy: expand global free trade and lead by example, showing foreigners how our free institutions operate at home. We're all for "peaceful voluntary exchange." We all also acknowledge the right of the United States to self-defense. So far, so good. But then they apparently think I am advocating "perpetual war" and "an empire of force." Not at all. Nor am I in favor of an open-ended War on Terrorism.

Preble asks, "If libertarians are opposed to government action to make a perfect domestic world, why discard those principles beyond the water's edge?" Because those principles can't and don't apply to relations among nation-states. Individual liberty exists within the context of the rule of law and limits on government power, i.e., constitutional liberalism. As earnestly as one might wish it otherwise, there is no such thing as the rule of law among states. While it seems unlikely that any state (other than perhaps North Korea) would directly attack the United States, it is undeniable that many illiberal regimes are ideological breeding grounds for enemies of liberal democratic capitalism, and some even offer safe harbor for groups that do plan to physically attack the United States. Most libertarians would agree that the U.S. liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban regime that was giving refuge to Al Qaeda terrorists was clearly justified on grounds of self-defense.

Preble also accuses me of wanting to "force democracy down the throats" of people living under tyrannical regimes. Again, not so. Instead, I am calling for the revival of the Reagan Doctrine. President Reagan defined it this way in his February 1985 State of the Union address: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives...on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua...to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense." The Soviet Union has been tossed into the dustbin of history, but there are still plenty of people willing to risk their lives fighting against their own tyrants to secure for themselves the blessings of liberty. It should be our policy to help them. Setting aside a discussion of the merits of the war with Iraq, it would have been a wiser policy to have earlier trained and supported Iraqi rebels to overthrow the Ba'athist regime.

Preble believes I underestimate the state's capacity to hold onto power once an alleged emergency has passed. That's certainly a valid concern. But a policy of supporting liberal insurgencies will eliminate national security as a rationale for expanding state power at home. The immediate aftermath of the Cold War is instructive here. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the fact is that the U.S. did substantially "demobilize our armies, scrap our ships, and leave our airplanes to bake in the desert." For example, active duty U.S. Army forces were cut by about 40 percent in the 1990s, and the U.S. Navy is down from 594 ships in 1989 to around 300 today. Yes, as Preble notes, "the state will always find new justifications for its existence," but recent experience shows that America's liberal democracy is capable of containing its military when perceived threats to our national security recede. Consider further that the post-Cold War defense budgets of most European countries are still declining as the peaceful economic and political integration of that continent proceeds. (By the way, nowhere do I advocate an increase in the U.S. defense budget.)

Ivan Eland notes that transforming societies the U.S. military has invaded recently -- e.g., Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- into republics has not been very successful so far. The chief problem is that few people in those places are committed to liberalism; they remain essentially tribal loyalists. The goal of a libertarian foreign policy is to train insurgents first in liberalism and then in military competencies. Tyrants throughout history have appealed to tribalism and its modern incarnation, nationalism, to justify their rule. Liberalism breaks the bonds of tribe and teaches people who disagree how to live peaceably together. There would be no need for a War on Terrorism in a world of liberal commercial republics.

"Attacking foreign countries raises hatred of the United States in the world," Eland claims. Maybe so, but attacking countries is not the goal of a libertarian foreign policy; helping people liberate themselves is. Eland also claims "libertarian interventionists" have "great faith that Uncle Sam can successfully conduct social engineering abroad." No more "social engineering" than helping tyrannized people to establish constitutionally limited governments is contemplated here. America's support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders led to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But would it have been better to have just left the Soviets to do as they wanted there?

Christopher Hitchens is right that none of us has perfect foresight. But a more engaged policy along the lines being discussed here -- one in which the U.S. trained cadres of Afghans who then returned to their country after it was liberated from the Soviets -- might have derailed the Taliban's rise to power. Our shortsighted policy was to get the Soviets out, then hope that free market democracy would develop naturally. It didn't work.

"Is libertarianism protected by state power?" Hitchens asks. If he means, "Is libertarianism protected by a constitutionally limited government enforcing the rule of law equally among its citizens?," well, yes, that's the idea. Of course, the U.S. today is not a libertarian utopia, but it is certainly not the sort of arbitrary tyranny under which hundreds of millions still groan across the globe. I will forego Christopher Hitchens' invitation to refight the constitutional legalities of the Civil War, but the liberation of the slaves was a moral imperative, period. It also is worth noting that if a nation could not continue half-slave and half-free, neither should we expect the globe to continue half-slave and half-free. It is true that the federal government never fell back to its antebellum size, but habeas corpus and press freedom were restored. I wholeheartedly agree with Hitchens that there is no tradeoff between freedom and security. The chief domestic benefit of a libertarian foreign policy would be that, with the development of a world of liberal commercial republics, Americans could not be bamboozled into supporting intrusive measures like the USA PATRIOT Act.

The bottom line is that a libertarian foreign policy ultimately recognizes that support for genuine freedom fighters is the best self-defense.