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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Libertarianism and Preventive War Don’t Mix

There is no way to make a coherent libertarian case for preventive war.

Fernando Teson’s contribution to Reason’s symposium on libertarian realism is thoroughly unpersuasive. Here is his attempt to justify a ground war against ISIS:

An invasion to defeat ISIS, in other words, might be necessary to defend us effectively against future attacks emanating from the Islamic State. I know that similar arguments were made in the lead-up to the Iraq war. But the fact that those arguments were wrong then (if they were wrong) does not mean they are wrong now [bold mine-DL].

There is no way to make a coherent libertarian case for preventive war. Even when the target of a preventive war is an atrocious regime or a terrorist quasi-state, there is no way to claim that preventive war is either necessary or defensive. It is an inherently arbitrary and aggressive kind of warfare. As long as libertarians are committed to rejecting aggression against others, libertarians can’t credibly support preventive war without making a mockery of everything else they claim to believe.

A government wages preventive war to eliminate the future possibility of an attack that may never be coming. It isn’t acting out of necessity. This treats an unlikely future attack as a sufficient basis for starting a war now. Any state that engages in preventive war has dispensed with the pretense that it resorts to force as a last resort. By definition, waging preventive war involves attacking another state or group long before it has the ability to attack the U.S., so this has nothing to do with self-defense. Preventive war is inherently unjust, so it isn’t really possible to provide a defense of this kind of warfare. The argument for preventive war doesn’t get any better under different circumstances. The case for invading Iraq in 2003 depended on grossly exaggerating the danger to the U.S., dismissing conventional deterrence as useless, and speculating about fantastical future scenarios that were never going to happen. Teson is making essentially the same case now to support another invasion directed against ISIS, and it is just as absurd as the original argument for the Iraq war was over a decade ago.

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