Libertarian Realism: Justin Raimondo’s Challenge to Empire, by Joseph Solis-Mullen

Why do we have perpetual wars? Because they benefit a small group of powerful individuals. From Joseph Solis-Mullen at libertarianinstitute.org

When the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder and longtime editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote in 2011 that the anti-interventionist movement needed a “big picture” framework, he was attempting to distill decades of polemic into a theory of international relations. In his essay “Looking at the ‘Big Picture,’” he dubbed this framework “Libertarian Realism.” Though Raimondo never set down a book-length treatise, his insights remain an invitation for libertarians to articulate a systematic foreign policy rooted in their own intellectual traditions.

At its core, libertarian realism rests on two pillars: public choice theory and the non-aggression principle (NAP). Together, they provide both a positive account of how foreign policy is made, and a normative standard by which to judge it.

First, public choice theory rejects the notion that politicians act for some collective good. Instead, it insists that policymakers, like all other individuals, pursue their own interests—power, prestige, financial gain, or reelection. Raimondo applied this logic directly to international affairs. Foreign policy, he argued, is not the unfolding of some objective “national interest” but the function of domestic political incentives.

This point distinguishes libertarian realism from both the neoconservative, realist, liberal internationalist schools. Neoconservatives cloak their ambitions in rhetoric about Washington’s global hegemony and an empire of democracy; traditional realists invoke the “national interest” as a guiding principle; while liberal internationalists speak of upholding the “rules based international order.”

Raimondo’s critique cuts deeper; global hegemony and world democracy are a chimera that have bankrupted and destroyed actual American democracy. There is no “national interest” because there is no national actor; only individuals act, and they act for themselves—thus, American foreign policy reflects not the welfare of 330 million citizens but the ambitions of a relatively small political elite and the networks of lobbyists, corporate beneficiaries, and ideological courtiers around them. With regard to a “rules based international order,” such rules have only ever served as a cudgel in Washington’s hands to be applied to foes and potential foes and never to itself or its allies.

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