Libertarians and War (Yet Again)

Non-libertarian Matthew Yglesias weighs in on the running debate between interventionist and non-interventionist libertarians:

Making war is a massive deployment of the state’s coercive force, both against the target population and (in order to acquire the necessary warmaking resources) the warmaking nation’s home population. All ideological points-of-view represented in contemporary American society involve some skepticism about the advisability and/or morality of deployments of the state’s coercive force. Libertarianism (in all its varieties) is all about taking this skepticism rather further than do other points of view. Since libertarians are skeptics about the use of the state’s coercive force and war is a huge use of coercive force, libertarians ought to be skeptics about war.

That seems right to me, both from a libertarian and a non-libertarian point of view. I think anyone in their right mind should be skeptical about the deployment of the state’s coercive force. Since war is far and away the most destructive use of that force, it ought to be subject to particularly strict scrutiny and moral restraints. This is what just-war theory is essentially all about. There is a presumption against the use of force, a presumption which should be overturned only under strict conditions.

I blogged on the great libertarian foreign policy debate a bit here and here.