Forcing Freedom

Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?

Ronald Bailey, Christopher Preble, Christopher Hitchens & Ivan Eland from the August/September 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

An overwhelmingly powerful national security state would certainly be needed. Bailey implies it would be only temporary, but how long is that? A decade? A century? How will we know when we have won, when we can return to our happy cocoon, safe from external threats, and therefore content to demobilize our armies, scrap our ships, and leave our airplanes to bake in the desert? Talk of temporary measures enacted in the name of defense should consider how other "temporary" measures -- from federal tax withholding to mohair subsidies to NATO -- seem stubbornly permanent, even after the crises in question (World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, respectively) have long since abated.

The state will always find new justifications for its existence. The end of the Cold War should have opened the door to a reduction in the threats posed to Americans and American interests. But other threats rose to the surface. Liberal governments might have taken action to mitigate the threat from global terrorism, but for a variety of reasons most looked the other way. September 11 refocused our attention.

It should also have refocused our attention on the proper means for dealing with threats. A reflexive return to the Cold War model, focused on state actors, is particularly unwise because Al Qaeda is not at all like the Soviet Union. Since the 9/11 attacks, more harm has been done to this loose-knit network of terrorists and fanatics through timely intelligence gathering, cooperative law enforcement, criminal prosecution, and international financial pressure than by laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles.

Yet the Bush administration seems determined to implement an over-ambitious strategy that often deals only tangentially with Al Qaeda and that draws most heavily on military resources to accomplish the mission of eliminating all terrorism. In this environment -- filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of threats, both real and imagined -- there will be ample opportunities for the state to expand its power over the individual. The most obvious manifestation is the American military machine, which is now projected to consume nearly $400 billion in fiscal year 2003 and over $500 billion by fiscal year 2009. Very little of this spending buys anything that will protect us from terrorism.

In the interest of protecting individual liberties, liberal democracies are constrained in their use of power. The most important of these constraints is the limitation on the use of force abroad, which is tied to the notion that states may act only when their vital security interests are threatened. To lift these constraints, and grant liberal governments the authority to engage in military action when vital interests are not at risk, ultimately would erode the very notion of a democratic peace that is at the core of the global libertarian utopian vision.

This is not to say that freedom-loving people must sit idly by while half the world's population struggles under autocracy. Libertarians know what works best to promote positive change in the domestic realm: political and economic freedom. Men and women advance the cause of liberty every day not by government edict but out of self-interest. We should be no less optimistic about the power of economic activity, trade, voluntary exchange, and person-to-person cultural contact to change even the most illiberal and autocratic countries in the world. Peaceful, voluntary exchange is far more in keeping with classical liberal principles than an empire of force, dedicated to the principles of compelling "illiberal" nations to heel. Liberal governments can best promote democracy not at the point of a bayonet but rather at the point of sale.

Liberal, free market democracy spreads naturally, from free states to unfree states, from dynamic societies to stagnant ones. And we all know why. Classical liberalism encourages intellectual inquiry; autocracy stifles it. Free markets reward entrepreneurial spirit; the state punishes it. Growing, vibrant liberal states combine the traits of political and economic freedom to defeat their autocratic neighbors not by killing their soldiers, bombing their cities, and jailing their leaders, but by luring away the most ambitious, intelligent, and gifted individuals. Faced with this exodus of talent, illiberal governments have only two choices: isolation or reform. Isolation leads to collapse -- not immediately, but eventually. In the meantime, for individuals living in free countries, the threat posed by the self-isolated states is typically quite small; when and if these unfree states actually do pose an imminent danger, the free states are in a far stronger position to prevail militarily.

Aside from these rare instances, however, we should be far more fearful of the state's insatiable appetite for power, and we should avoid inviting government to pursue illiberal ends abroad under the guise of promoting freedom at home.

Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Ivan Eland

Ronald Bailey's argument essentially is, "Let's fight wars, with their concomitant requirement for bigger government, now so that we will have peace and reduced government later." This tack is similar to Woodrow Wilson's often-parodied slogan about "the war to end all wars" or historian Charles Beard's astute and sarcastic aphorism about waging "perpetual war for perpetual peace."

Even if the United States spent the trillions of dollars needed to depose -- directly or indirectly -- the remaining tyrants in the world (and there are a lot of them left), the voracious security bureaucracies would think up new threats to justify an interventionist foreign policy and to maintain defense spending at levels exceeding Cold War averages. Deposing the world's tyrants is only the first of many difficult steps to utopia. As the United States keeps rediscovering in the developing world -- for example, in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq -- even after the despots' rule has been removed, rebuilding societies that have little experience with freedom into republics has not been very successful. The accomplishments in Japan and Germany were achieved by industrial societies with much human capital, a strong sense of national identity, and (in the case of Germany) some experience with representative government.

More important, although an argument can be made that World War II had to be fought to safeguard U.S. security (U.S. intervention in World War I, by contrast, tipped the balance toward the Allies and created the conditions leading to the rise of authoritarianism and World War II), wars usually stifle rather than expand liberty. Despite the liberation of some peoples during each world war, the net outcome of each global conflict, and the civil wars spawned or aggravated by it (major conflagrations often lead to civil unrest in the belligerents, such as the Russian revolution during World War I and the Chinese civil war after World War II), was that far more people were under the yoke of oppression than ever before.

Furthermore, the hypothesis that no war would exist in a world of democracies is a theory based on flawed logic and twisted historical evidence (as the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World War I illustrate). Thus, Gulf War II and other future brush-fire wars championed by Bailey to democratize the planet have little to do with ensuring U.S. security, and will most likely undermine it. Bailey believes that petty despots of small, relatively poor rogue states -- for example, Saddam Hussein -- are a threat to a superpower. But rogue states, which have known addresses, have no incentive to give -- or track record of giving -- weapons of mass destruction to radical groups who could get them in big trouble with the nuclear powers. Even if a rogue state (North Korea, for example) obtains a few nuclear warheads, it can be deterred from attacking the United States by the world-dominant U.S. nuclear arsenal.