A Libertarian Analysis of War and Collective Punishment
How warhawks equate the people and government to justify violence against innocents, and how a libertarian theory of foreign policy can be used to analyze war and justice properly
Antiwar leftist Caitlin Johnstone tweeted earlier this week that the phrase, “‘We oppose that country's GOVERNMENT, not its PEOPLE’ is the same line spewed by literally every warmongering neocon about literally every nation they've wanted to destroy.”
Though I disagree with her on economics and many domestic issues, Johnstone is one of the best non-interventionist voices on the left.
Her criticism of conflating a country's government with its people comes from a very good place because she's trying not to carry water for the war party by touting the same narrative.
The above-referenced tweet, for example, was in a thread specifically talking about the neoconservative and neoliberal narrative that supporting the people of China and not their government somehow means something like "the US should defend Taiwan against China militarily:"
Still, I think Johnstone is mistaken in completely dismissing the idea that we should separate the people and the government conceptually.
There is a methodological reason to separate the two. Just like politicians and war criminals will separate the government and the people when useful, they also conflate both when useful.
Government officials will equate the people and their government to justify aggression against innocents and impose collective punishment on an entire country. There are three clear examples of this. The first comes from the mouth of US government officials, the second is from an enemy of the United States, and the third is from a current ally of the United States.
These three examples demonstrate the problem of collective punishment. A libertarian theory of foreign policy provides a lens to look at war and justice properly.
US Bombing of Iraq
For the first example of how government officials equate people and their government to justify aggression against innocents, let’s look at when the United States conducted a strategic bombing on Iraq's infrastructure in 1991, specifically targeting electrical plants, oil refineries, and transportation networks.
The Pentagon, in a Washington Post article written in June 1991, acknowledged that the 43-day assault severely impacted and harmed the civilian population and economy and explained that they "sought to achieve some of their military objectives in the Persian Gulf War by disabling Iraqi society at large."
The Air Force defended these bombardments in a press briefing cited in the article by blurring the lines between the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government:
Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. "The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear," said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. "They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country."
And since the lines were blurred, they also justified the harm imposed on Iraqi citizens.
At the time, a Harvard health team, according to WaPo, reported that the lack of power, fuel, and transportation due to "United Nations-approved economic sanctions" and the Air Force bombardments resulted in epidemic levels of cholera and typhoid (which are caused by lack of clean water) and predicted, "at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects."
According to 1995 WHO data, the diet of the Iraqi population was at "semi-starvation" levels as the overall availability of calories decreased by 65% and Iraq was only receiving 25% of the needed red meat and poultry, 40% of cereals, 10% of fish, and 10% of sugar.
These were all intended effects. In the above-mentioned Washington Post article, an anonymous Air Force planning officer is cited:
People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.' Well, what were we trying to do with United Nations-approved economic sanctions -- help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.
In an infamous 1995 report that has been contested, the UN reported that a half-million children died as a result of the sanctions and bombings. A more conservative estimate puts the number around 300,000.
In a 1995 "60 Minutes" interview, correspondent Lesley Stahl, referring to the controversial report, said to the late U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright: “We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
In a response she never lived down, Albright said: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
The goal of these devastating sanctions was to punish the people of Iraq until they deposed Saddam Hussein. Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, who commanded the air campaign, and an anonymous Air Force planner communicated this in the Washington Post article:
... Air Force planner: "Big picture, we wanted to let people know, 'Get rid of this guy and we'll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We're not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we'll fix your electricity.' "
Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, who had overall command of the air campaign, said in an interview that a "side benefit" was the psychological effect on ordinary Iraqi citizens of having their lights go out.
The Biden Administration, in the case of sanctions on Russia, has recently tried to distance itself from the truth that sanctions hurt citizens as much if not more than the government, but with the Iraq bombings, this was explicitly the goal.
Osama Bin Laden
The case of the Iraq bombings is just one of many examples in which innocents are equated with their government in order to rationalize and justify the punishment of innocents as a proxy for their government.
The next example I am going to show is from the pen of an enemy of the United States.
Osama bin Laden, in his “letters to America,” explained how he justified killing innocent civilians:
You may then dispute that [all the previously mentioned actions by the US government do] not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
When asked how bin Laden justified killing innocents in an interview with Al Jazeera, he said
We kill the kings of the infidels, kings of the crusaders, and civilian infidels in exchange for those of our children they kill. This is permissible in law and intellectually ... There is a saying, "If the infidels killed women and children on purpose, we shouldn't shy way from treating them in the same way to stop them from doing it again." The men that God helped [attack, on September 11] did not intend to kill babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon that houses more than 64,000 employees, a military center that houses the strength and the military intelligence ... The towers are an economic power and not a children's school. Those that were there are men that supported the biggest economic power in the world. They have to review their books. We will do as they do. If they kill our women and our innocent people, we will kill their women and their innocent people until they stop.
Zelensky on Russians
In a more recent example of governmental leaders calling for collective punishment of citizens and government officials alike, Ukrainian president Vladamir Zelensky said that all Russians are responsible for the war and should be barred from western countries.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Zelensky said:
Whichever kind of Russian … make them go to Russia ... They’ll understand then ... They’ll say, ‘This [war] has nothing to do with us. The whole population can’t be held responsible, can it?’ It can. The population picked this government and they’re not fighting it, not arguing with it, not shouting at it ... Don’t you want this isolation? You’re telling the whole world that it must live by your rules. Then go and live there. This is the only way to influence Putin.
Collectivist Theory of Justice
Of the three examples mentioned above, the Osama bin Laden quote presents itself as the clearest example of the philosophy that equates government with its people, and therefore it is the one most worthy of responding to in full.
He explicitly justified the killing of innocents because, in his view, the US people are the US government, the US government is of the US people, and, being that the US is a “free country,” the US population also chooses its government and therefore also consents to the violence he accuses the US of perpetrating.
We need to examine the foundation of his view, which is a collectivist theory of justice and of war, and a false belief that all people have consented to their government’s actions merely by living in the geographical territory of said government.
Additionally, putting aside the question of the truthfulness of his accusations of violence, bin Laden’s quote should lead us to question the philosophical issue of democracy and whether a whole population can really be understood to choose its government in the sense that all can be both legally and philosophically considered responsible for a government’s actions.
“Toward a Theory of Peace”
Libertarian theory can help us investigate these assumptions and build a proper libertarian theory of war.
In his essay Toward a Theory of Peace, Dan Sanchez argues that libertarianism’s aim is peace while the collectivist theory of justice only perpetuates war.
Libertarianism, Dan says, “holds agents of the government to the same moral standards as everybody else. And so it rightly looks upon war as mass murder: violating the individual right to life on an industrial scale.”
Libertarian philosophy is not necessarily a call for pacifism, though. It doesn’t prohibit all force. Rather, it permits defense and prohibits aggression.
Dan writes,
Liberty does not preclude force, but aggression, which is the initiation of force. And war always entails aggression. The term “war” is almost never used to describe the selective pursuit of justice targeting specific individuals. Wars target not specific perpetrators to make specific victims whole, but whole populations for obliteration and conquest.
Liberty, then, does not prohibit the pursuit of justice against individual perpetrators who commit violence, but instead, liberty prohibits the “collateral damage” that comes with war, even if it is incidental and not the intent of war.
The reasons for liberty’s opposition to this collateral damage are two-fold: it is contrary to the basic moral precept of libertarianism, the Non-Aggression Principle, and the collateral damage also perpetuates war.
Dan says,
Such “collective punishment” is antithetical to the individualistic notions of justice that are essential to the philosophy of liberty.
Libertarians are well familiar with how pernicious collectivism is when it comes to domestic affairs. Yet its perniciousness does not stop at national borders. International collectivist violence is just as pernicious as the domestic variety. It misaligns incentives and engenders intractable conflicts just as badly.
Harming foreigners indiscriminately creates grievance among the victims and/or their survivors. People don’t like having their wedding parties bombed by drones. Survivors of such attacks will sometimes seek retaliation. Those who are young and already on-edge may take up arms. Those who do not take up arms may give aid, comfort, or sanction to those who do.
Now, what shape will the retaliation take? The warfare may be conventional or “asymmetric” (i.e., terrorism). If the victims have the same collectivist notions of justice that their victimizers had, it will also involve civilian casualties. Then the “side” of the original attackers will retaliate over those civilian casualties with still further indiscriminate violence. Thus, war is cyclical and self-perpetuating, tending toward an ever-growing pile of victims.
A Libertarian Theory of War
We can derive from the message of liberty expressed above two principles that set the libertarian theory of peace and war apart from collectivist theories of peace and war.
The Marxist school, in particular, describes all conflict as an oppressor class against an oppressed class. In cases of occupation and war, they identify actors as privileged and oppressor countries that exploit oppressed countries.
The framework is always through the lens of power and hierarchy, and an entire “class” is responsible. For more on the Marxist idea of class and class consciousness, read my earlier post Marxist Use of Polylogism to Evade Debate.
In contrast, the libertarian school uses methodological individualism to identify individual aggressors and victims and denounces all forms of collective punishment.
It determines who those individual aggressors and victims are by applying the non-aggression principle to particular instances of injustice, and that analysis is informed by methodological individualism.
The Non-Aggression Principle
The non-aggression principle is explained by libertarian Murray Rothbard as follows:
No one may threaten or commit violence against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
War is prohibited by libertarianism because government action is not exempt from the non-aggression principle, and war is aggression and imposes collective justice through “collateral damage” instead of pursuing individual aggressors.
Methodological Individualism and War
To focus more clearly on the methodology of identifying individual aggressors and why it is important to conceptualize individual aggressors within government separate from innocents, we turn to economist Ludwig von Mises.
Mises introduces the idea of methodological individualism in Human Action. I’ve quoted the entire excerpt on methodological individualism in this post.
In Human Action, Mises introduces the distinctive methodology of Austrian Economics, called praxeology, which rests on the axiom that humans engage in purposeful behavior as opposed to reflexive behavior.
Proper economics, we learn, begins with this necessary truth that man acts and uses this study of human action to deduce further implications about human action, such as that humans act because they perceive their actions will result in a state of affairs that is preferred to the state in which they didn’t act at all.
Importantly, though, Mises tells us that
Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men. It is only in the further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more universal category of human action as such.
He calls this methodological individualism. This method is in response to the concept that man is metaphysically, necessarily, and logically a part of a collective whole, that society begets individuals, that there is no way to conceptualize an “isolated individual,” or that there is no logical concept as an individual.
As to the claim that society exists before the individual, Mises says, “whether the whole or its parts are logically prior is vain. Logically the notions of a whole and its parts are correlative. As logical concepts they are both apart from time.”
Mises doesn’t outright reject the idea that there are such things as social collectives. On the contrary, Mises says:
Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it chooses the only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.
He explains the method:
First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. A collective operates always through the intermediary of one or several individuals whose actions are related to the collective as the secondary source. It is the meaning which the acting individuals and all those who are touched by their action attribute to an action, that determines its character. It is the meaning that marks one action as the action of an individual and another action as the action of the state or of the municipality. The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman's action an action of the state. A group of armed men occupies a place. It is the meaning of those concerned which imputes this occupation not to the officers and soldiers on the spot, but to their nation.
If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of collective wholes. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members' actions. The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting its body. There is no social collective conceivable which is not operative in the actions of some individuals. The reality of a social integer consists in its directing and releasing definite actions on the part of individuals. Thus the way to a cognition of collective wholes is through an analysis of the individuals' actions.
As a thinking and acting being, man emerges from his prehuman existence already as a social being. The evolution of reason, language, and cooperation is the outcome of the same process; they were inseparably and necessarily linked together. But this process took place in individuals. It consisted in changes in the behavior of individuals. There is no other substance in which it occurred than the individuals. There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.
That there are nations, states, and churches, that there is social cooperation under the division of labor, becomes discernible only in the actions of certain individuals. Nobody ever perceived a nation without perceiving its members. In this sense one may say that a social collective comes into being through the actions of individuals. That does not mean that the individual is temporally antecedent. It merely means that definite actions of individuals constitute the collective.
Using this method, we can see that an aggressive war should not be visualized as an entire nation or collective oppressing another. Instead, we must acknowledge that there are individual actors within a warring nation or collective that take purposeful action that brings about the war and the crimes that come with it.
We must apply this method to our theories of justice too. Since there are individual actors that take the steps to bring about war and its consequences, those individual actors ought to be the ones considered responsible, not the entire nation.
For demonstration, in a libertarian theory of justice, it would not be the entire country of Russia that is responsible for war crimes in Ukraine, but only those individual actors, starting with Putin, who purposefully gave orders, aided, abetted, or followed through with orders, that are actually, morally, and legally responsible for their crimes.
However, we find that our governments of today are intellectually lazy. They take the quick and easy option of labeling all in one country as responsible, and they refuse to seek out any semblance of justice with precision.
As a result of this asymmetrical response of killing innocents as proxies for actual guilty parties, the governmental officials who might have originally identified and were potentially responding to legitimate instances of aggression become aggressors themselves.
Consent of the Governed and War
Finally, we must return to bin Laden’s accusations that the people of the United States consented to and are therefore responsible for crimes of actors within the United States government.
He makes two primary arguments for why the people of the US are responsible and worthy of punishment for the alleged crimes of the US government.
First, he makes the argument of voting: it is said the US is a free or democratic country, and the people voted for the US government, therefore they are responsible for the actions of the US government.
In a previous post, I posted an excerpt from abolitionist Lysander Spooner’s No Treason addressing the idea that voting signifies the consent of the governed.
In the excerpt, Spooner argues that when one considers the percentage of the population in the US who usually votes (which is about one-half of the population of the US today), and contrasts that with those who never vote or only ever vote in years of excitement, it cannot be argued that the entire population has assented to the government.
Further, he argues that, even if the entire US population had actually voted, it still wouldn’t be the case that all had truthfully assented to the government and the actions of individuals within the government:
In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself.
Spooner goes on to argue that no person can be understood to consent to the government “until every person is left perfectly free to consent, or not, without thereby subjecting himself or his property to be disturbed or injured by others.”
From a legal perspective, Spooner says that, because there is no explicit written evidence or signatures affirming one’s support of government because of secret ballots, “voting furnishes no legal evidence as to who the particular individuals are (if there are any), who voluntarily support the Constitution [or government, politicians, etc.]. It, therefore, furnishes no legal evidence that anybody supports it voluntarily.”
The entire excerpt from No Treason is published in this post and should be considered in full, but these selected quotes are sufficient to demonstrate his argument for now.
When we look at foreign governments, such as the government of Russia, this idea that the people did not agree to their government is easier to digest. We can quite easily admit that Putin has opposition within his country and not everyone has consented to the system, or that Putin is in power by force alone. But we must admit the same applies to our own government as well.
Taxation and War
In Anatomy of the State, Murray Rothbard defines the state as
[T]hat organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
This definition of the state strengthens Spooner’s above argument about consent, and it also serves as a good transition to address bin Laden’s second argument regarding taxation.
Bin Laden argues,
“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine [etc.] … So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
Libertarianism’s answer to this argument is really simple. As indicated in Rothbard’s quote above, libertarianism regards all taxation as theft.
Taxation is not the voluntary giving up of one’s money. Instead, people are required to pay taxes by force. If someone refuses to pay taxes, they may be audited, their property may be stolen without due process, and they may be imprisoned, and if they resist imprisonment, they may be killed.
Notably though, in the case of the United States’s foreign interventions in the Middle East, it cannot be argued that these wars were financed through direct taxation alone.
Instead, these wars have been financed through inflation, the expansion of the money supply, to fuel the federal government’s deficit spending.
Congress and the Treasury have authorized the central bank, the Federal Reserve, to devalue the currency in order to finance the government’s wars.
If the federal government actually had to directly tax the people to pay for their wars, taxes would be so high there would not be any tolerance for it.
So, even if it could be argued that direct taxation is a voluntary giving up of one’s money, it cannot be said that the federal government is currently running off of direct taxation.
When considering all of these facts, the argument that the people can be understood to have assented to the government and its actions through voting or taxation fails.
Conclusion
We should push back when warmongers separate the people and the government to justify interventions in foreign countries. Still, there are many reasons to think of government as separate from the people.
As shown, warmongers do equate the people and their governments to justify the killing of innocents, too.
Instead, we should use the libertarian theory of justice and peace to identify individual aggressors and victims and denounce all forms of collective punishment and war.