Non-Intervention Without the Fairy Tale of Sovereignty

“Humanitarian intervention” sells itself as a moral shortcut: bypass the messy politics, send in the troops, stop the monster. Many libertarians respond with a familiar reply: non-intervention, because aggression against another nation is wrong.

In his essay on Aggression Abroad, Jason Lee Byas’s point is that this reply often rests on a category mistake. If you take libertarianism seriously—if you really mean that only individuals have rights and only individuals can be wronged—then you can’t smuggle in a moral right called national sovereignty and treat states as if they’re rights-bearing persons. The tyrant does not become morally “injured” because his border was crossed, and the regime does not become a legitimate rights-holder because it has a flag and a seat at the UN.

So far, so interventionist: if sovereignty is a fiction, why not invade to stop atrocities?

Because the same individualism that dissolves the sovereignty myth also destroys the interventionist fantasy of “surgical” war. Byas’s central claim is that when you disaggregate war into what it actually is—many individuals making many choices under extreme uncertainty over extended time—you don’t get a clean story of rescuers versus villains. You get a machinery that predictably grinds up innocents, manufactures “war zones,” and invites atrocities as a regular feature rather than an unfortunate anomaly.

That is a distinctly libertarian way of thinking, and libertarians have been making adjacent arguments for decades. Rothbard’s non-aggression principle is not “don’t start fights with other governments.” It is “no violence against non-aggressors,” full stop—and modern war reliably fails that test because it cannot be neatly aimed at only the guilty. In “War, Peace, and the State,” Rothbard argues that state war almost inevitably becomes mass, indiscriminate violence—precisely the kind of “defense” that cannot be squared with libertarian ethics.

Once you see that, the “humanitarian war” pitch starts to look like a rhetorical laundering operation: take real crimes by real regimes, then ask you to endorse a second enterprise of coercion and killing—this time with better branding. David Gordon makes a related critique in his response to libertarian humanitarian-war defenses: even if states don’t have more rights than individuals, it does not follow that they have the same rights as individuals, as though the state “owns” territory like a person owns property. That conceptual slide is where interventionists hide the state’s gangster nature behind moral language.

And the sales pitch is rarely honest. “Weapons of mass destruction,” “humanitarian necessity,” “spreading democracy”—these are interchangeable costumes for the same power: the right to bomb strangers and call it virtue. Ryan McMaken notes how WMD claims function as a catch-all justification for invasions and sanctions, with Iraq as the canonical example of how easily the public is stampeded.

But, even if every motive were pure, the structure remains: interventions expand the intervening state’s capacity for violence and control, and that capacity doesn’t stay abroad. Jacob Hornberger—drawing on John Quincy Adams’s warning about going “in search of monsters to destroy”—emphasizes the predictable metamorphosis: a foreign policy of crusading produces a national-security state—standing armies, secret agencies, surveillance, and normalized brutality.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe goes further: the state is not merely a flawed provider of protection—it is systematically unreliable and often the greatest threat to security. Interventionism abroad generates enemies and blowback, turning distant populations into targets and then acting surprised when the cycle returns home. And the domestic consequences are not abstract: militarized policing, surveillance, and a permanent war-footing become “normal.” William D. Hartung’s article on police militarization also pointed to this “boomerang” dynamic—foreign policy feeding domestic coercion while multiplying violence rather than reducing it.

This is why Byas’s conclusion is more radical than the bumper-sticker non-interventionism that leans on national sovereignty. If the moral unit is the individual, then the relevant question is not, “Did we violate a nation?” It is: What predictable rights-violations are we authorizing against specific, non-liable individuals—especially given our knowledge of how war actually works? Once you ask that question, the presumption against intervention hardens into something closer to an antiwar position.

None of this requires indifference to suffering abroad. Ron Paul, in arguing for the “original” American foreign policy, stresses that non-intervention is not isolationism: it is peace and commerce, as opposed to military management; trade, travel, diplomacy, and voluntary ties instead of bombs and client regimes. That maps neatly onto the individualist ethic Byas is defending: solidarity with people, not partnership with states; help that is voluntary and targeted, rather than “aid” delivered by coercive taxation and high explosives.

A libertarian foreign policy worthy of the name does not say, “Let the tyrant rule in peace because borders are sacred,” but it does say that, although tyrants have no moral title to rule, neither do would-be liberators who propose to stop crimes by committing a rolling series of new ones. The state is not an instrument we can reliably aim at evil; it is a machine that feeds on crisis, enlarges itself through war, and converts moral urgency into permanent permission.

Non-intervention, on this view, is the refusal to hand the most predatory institution in society a blank check—especially when the check is written in other people’s blood.