The Foreign Policy of Objectivists Shows the Folly of Associating Them with Libertarians

        Whenever left-wingers, such as Kyle Kulinksi, critique the ideas of libertarians, they inevitably  

bring up Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire capitalism in a derivative manner. While

they’ve got us on the last point, and there were certainly aspects of Milton Friedman that were

libertarian, the talking point concerning Ayn Rand is mistaken not just for her lack of concern

over gun control, her support of intellectual property laws, or even for her explicit hatred of

libertarians. Still, at face value, one could understand having difficulty understanding how

Objectivists and libertarians are different. Aside from the anarcho-capitalists, of course, we both

tend to agree that a government should be strictly limited to providing courts, police, and a

military for the purposes of protecting the rights to life, liberty, and property. Of course, as

indicated by the non-libertarian positions held by Rand, this distinction between the two

ideologies runs deeper than different names or disagreement on whether the state should exist.

No, the problem runs much deeper on issues of philosophy and on actions that should be taken

by governments, but America’s and Israel’s governments in particular. Just one of the major

problems with associating Ayn Rand and Objectivists in general with libertarianism is the major

disagreements they have had with us concerns what America’s foreign policy should be in both

the past and the present. Indeed, the level of actions proposed to be followed by Western

governments militaries makes one question if Objectivists deserve the association with Night-

watchman state supporters and if they would be better classified with war hawk ideologies.

While Objectivists might not be full-on Wilsonian neoconservatives in their foreign

policy approaches, they have had far too many alarming ideas on how America and Israel should

intervene militarily then is close for comfort. Starting with Ayn Rand herself, she was not just a

major supporter of the Cold War, but even of the patently absurd McCarthyism that was running

wild in the immediate post-war era. Being a screenwriter in 1947, she could not refuse an offer to

testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on the alleged harm that a

few fools in the Communist Party USA in Hollywood were doing, such as injecting pro-Soviet

messages into movie scripts or, at worst, making a single explicitly pro-Soviet movie in the form

of The Song of Russia (1944). All of this wasting of the taxpayers’ time and money has been

later justified on the dubious idea that because she had witnessed the October Revolution in 1917

Russia, that this meant she was qualified to identify signs of an alleged communist takeover of

Hollywood’s ideology that could have eventually caused America to have gone down the same

path as the Soviet Union. No libertarian would have approved of the government witch-hunt in

the first place, let alone actively participated in it.

          One might hope that this was just a minor slipup for someone who had otherwise waxed

eloquently on the evils of government power, but unfortunately, the foolishness only continued

over the remaining decades of her life. In a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine, she used

philosophy that could have been invoked by Lyndon Johnson himself to justify invading

Vietnam to justify invading places like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other totalitarian countries

on the grounds that because their governments were not respecting the rights of their people, that

there would be no moral qualms about America’s military overthrowing them. While certainly

no libertarian would contest the right of people to overthrow their government, it becomes a very

different story when it is suddenly permissible for America’s military to be granted the right to

do this government overthrow on behalf of oppressed people. To her credit, she was just saying

that it would be okay morally for this to happen, but that the logistics and expenses made it

impractical. Of course, as Murray Rothbard famously explained, politicians need intellectuals to

justify their actions and, whether she intended to or not, she provided the perfect intellectual

ammunition for America’s disastrous foreign policy in the 58 years since with just that line in a

magazine interview alone. Now Objectivists might say that in the very next answer, she said that

outright invading the Soviet Union or Cuba was not necessary, but what she proposed instead

were hardly things a libertarian would endorse: an economic boycott of the Soviet Union and a

blockade of Cuba. She then proceeds to say that “both regimes would collapse without the loss

of a single American life”. One could be excused for thinking that that quote was George W.

Bush outlining how easy the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be if they didn’t know the

context. While no libertarian would have denied the desirability of the governments of the USSR

and Castro’s Cuba collapsing, this proposed method presents multiple problems from a

libertarian standpoint, but which can be most simply boiled down to restricting trade between

consenting individuals in different countries is no right that can be allotted to governments, the

human costs to the people in those countries might have still been monumental and they were not

worth less simply for not being Americans, and that this indicates a military policy besides

defense from direct threats of belligerent nations. One can’t help but wonder how such military

adventurism would have been funded in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist world where all taxes were to be

voluntary, but that’s a discussion for another day.

                From there, of course, is what Rand had to say in the wake of the Yom-Kippur War. In

1974, she wrote that while Israel was a "mixed economy inclined towards socialism", they were

still "the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent" and for that they

had her support. Lebanon might have begged to differ regarding that statement, but that is a different 

story. What can be said here is that Ayn Rand was shown to be willing to give up her own economic 

principles if she had a problem with the inhabitants of the region. As we shall see, this tendency

continued with later Objectivists. It cannot be denied that the Yom Kippur War was defensive, 

but what provoked it certainly was not. Israel had seized the Sinai Peninsula after the Six Day War in 

1967 and the whole reason for the 1973 war was to get in back in Egypt's hands. One would think 

that the fighting among socialist nations that she was not a party of would not concern her, but it 

seemed that bigotry towards Arabs transcended philosophy in this instance. This was a trend that 

would continue in a way that would horrify libertarians. 

                This brings us to the man who would succeed Ayn Rand as the head of the Objectivist

 Movement after Rand's death in 1982: Leonard Peikoff. Peikoff famously being the man in 2006 who

went on Fox News and said that he would: "absolutely" not be concerned with civilian casualties 

should the United States go to war with Iran. He openly supports regime change in Iran and says that

any civilian casualties that would result from that would be the fault of their government. Again, one

has to ask how any of this would occur if all taxes were voluntary, like Objectivists proclaim to desire? 

From there, he has said that Israel should not even negotiate with the Palestinians and that prior to the 

state of Israel, Palestine consisted of Arabs "meandering across the terrain". Again, petty racism takes

precedent over the philosophy that Objectivists say they support. Needless to say, there is nothing 

libertarian about advocating for the U.S. federal government to overthrow a government and childish 

name-calling is not how we would recommend sorting out the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. 

          Unfortunately, the next in line for the throne of the Objectivist Movement after Peikoff, 

Yaron Brook, has hardly proved himself better on foreign policy issues. He has embraced

neoconservative rhetoric on the War on Terror, saying it is all about Islamic fundamentalism. But it    

doesn't end there. He has openly criticized Ron Paul's foreign policy approach. He has called for an

embargo against North Korea, which again goes against the libertarian principle of free trade. 

He does seem to at least the ideological contradiction of supporting a country like Israel when it has

such a collectivist welfare state, but repeating a pattern, he decides that Western Civilization makes it

all worth it. 

    So, suffice it to say that the insane foreign policy ideas puts Objectivists squarely out of the 

libertarian camp. We may agree with them on economics, aside from privatizing the police, courts, and 

military in some cases, but the major disagreements on the merits of American interventionism makes

us an irreconcilable pair. One would quickly see that their foreign policy goals would not become a 

reality if the decent goal of making all taxation voluntary were to emerge. No one wants to donate 

money so that bloodshed in Tehran can ensue. The fact that this even needs to be put into words is 

unfortunate. Hopefully, Kyle Kulinski and other leftists will read this and avoid associating Ayn Rand

with libertarians. However much they disagree with our economics, they at least stand with us on 

foreign policy. The extent that Objectivists do is dubious at best.