LOCKE AT HOME, HOBBES ABROAD

A dear and brilliant friend sent me the following, which pretty much summarizes my view on the war:

And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.
-- Thomas Hobbes

Is it possible for one to be libertarian about policies at home and neo-conservative about policies abroad? After all, isn't the principle of non-coercion incompatible with the interventionist policies of the current Administration? Simply put: is there such an animal as a libertarian hawk and if he exists, why do we so seldom hear from him?

There is a reticence among many libertarians to speak out about their bellicosity. You might say they're doves at the dinner table, perhaps worried they'll be shunned by their peers. But I think it's time we give some substance to what, at the moment, may be little more than an intuition, and speak up about our support for foreign policies that require armed conflicts - even preemptive ones.

Most libertarians fall in line behind the superficial notion that domestic and foreign policies should be mirror images of each other, each reflecting classical liberal principles where self-defense is applied universally like some scriptural edict. Alas, were the threats of the twenty first century so simple to counter, the complexities of world so easily distilled.

The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke, as the spaces mostly untouched by globalization are, in her view, like a state-of-nature. She sees threats that organize themselves in the shadows beyond civilization; operating, no less, in an age of deadly weapons proliferation. She fears the world's great, but nimble powers coalescing into a slothful and ineffectual global body -- where the toughest decisions of life and limb must be made in committee. She understands that freedom does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.

Read the whole thing.