Cato’s Radley Balko has posted an 8,000-word response over at Tech Central Station to my piece earlier this month on what I termed “libertarian minimalism” in foreign policy.

I’ll have a longer response to Balko’s piece sometime in the near future. I don’t particularly think it does much more than restate the extreme libertarian position that we should withdraw from virtually all overseas engagements — with some nice libertarian I-told-you-so outrage about Iraq and even September 11 thrown in to boot — but, again, I’ll get to that later.

In the meantime, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether Balko blames America for 9/11 — because, apparently, we didn’t listen to Cato — or whether I’m being “unserious”:

If you look at much of what Cato’s foreign policy team wrote prior to 9/11, you could make the case that had U.S. policymakers paid more attention to actual “libertarian minimalist,” “pre-9/11″ thinking, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.

Back in 1999, for example, Cato’s director of defense policy studies at the time, Ivan Eland, wrote “Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism?” In it, Eland laid out a litany of terrorist strikes against U.S. interests that were inspired by unnecessary U.S. interventions in foreign conflicts that posed little threat to our national security. Eland warned — and bin Laden later confirmed — that more recent U.S. interventions, in Kosovo, Somalia, and even Gulf War I, could soon provoke a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland.

Actually, anyone who takes the War on Terror seriously probably wouldn’t mention Somalia while making the case for American retreat. Somalia, after all, as this Time profile recounts, is where bin Laden learned an important lesson:

In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, however, was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were “paper tigers” who “after a few blows ran in defeat.” Bin Laden began to think big.

Interesting. What was that about the virtue of retreat? Or whatever you want to call it?

Now, I enter the Turkey Dome, a place where there will be much sleep and little blogging over this holiday weekend.

I may check in periodically, but mostly I’ll be recuperating from a nasty cough and plotting against my enemies.

I have many.

At the start of this debate on libertarians and foreign policy, I called the current state of libertarian foreign policy “pacifism combined with isolationism.” This was meant as hyperbole, to get under some people’s skin, and was met with a predictable amount of anger.

So, to be more precise, I would call libertarian foreign policy — to the extent it exists — minimalist. As I defined it in my TCS piece, that’s “using the least amount of force possible to respond only to the most imminent of threats.”

That probably sounds awfully appealing to a lot of libertarians, but that’s how Bill Clinton reacted to terrorism in the 1990s, and the terrorists took it as a sign of weakness — one that emboldened them to undertake 9/11.

That, to me, makes it an unacceptable stance. Most of the country has recognized this. The only ones who haven’t are on the far left, the pacifist wing of the libertarian movement and the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party.

Reader B.R. writes in:

I read your article “Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism” at TCS. Excellent work.

I would probably classify myself as a Libertarian if the party would consider a serious foreign policy. Since they do not, I side with Republicans because their view on foreign policy are in line with mine, and I am not threatened by their social policies.

I had the same observations about Cato’s views on Iraq. It is a shame that the party that understands the true meaning of liberty is unwilling to understand that in today’s world, liberty abroad is vital to our security.

A lot of the e-mail has looks like this.

Some more comments from readers on libertarianism and foreign policy on their way (as of 7 p.m.)…

Julian Sanchez has a good response to the arguments I’ve been making this week, posted here.

He makes the pivot that I am trying to encourage libertarians to make as to what they have to offer that’s positive in the War on Terror.

So far his answer seems to be: not much. And that’s fine. I don’t have the answer to that question yet either.

But I’m going to have more thoughts on it in a Tech Central Station piece on Friday. So stay tuned.

Commenter Justin has this to say:

To the extent that you’ve put forth an argument here, it’s a straw man. No one I hear talks of “pacifism” or a refusal to go to war. Cato’s scholars defended the invasion of Afghanistan, which would run against pacifist principles. And “isolationism” is a comfortable epithet for those who want to send other people’s children off to die on a crusade, but I would prefer to label opposition to the Iraq war as prudence. Take a glance at any of the “MSM” these days, and you’ll see what interventionism brings. Freedom, unfortunately, is not on the march.

You can’t pursue our current course of foreign policy without the sorts of anti-libertarian measures at home that you lament. You unfortunately think each can be assessed and conducted in isolation of the other. Curbs on civil liberties, if one insists on inflaming public opinion among one-sixth of the world’s citizens, will necessarily be forthcoming.

And fighting encroachments on U.S. economic strength, I would argue, is not best served by extracting $200 billion for a military occupation in a land that presented no threat to U.S. national security.

Also, I’m not sure whether you derive your libertarianism from an antiseptic consequentialism or if you believe in any conception of rights, but if it’s the latter, I hope your libertarianism would tell you something about the justice in killing ten or twenty thousand innocent people who did nothing to provoke being attacked. I don’t think that necessarily amounts to “pacifism,” as you seem to charge it does.

If you’re a consequentialist, you presumably object to the postal service because you believe that the government is so incompetent that it can’t effectively deliver the mail. Simultaneously, however, you seem to believe that a massive social engineering project to overhaul the social fabric of a millenia-old culture is well within “the West’s” grasp. If you can reconcile those positions, I’d be interested to hear it.

And I’m not sure who or what you’re likening to Michael Moore, but that would also be interesting to hear.

The commenter here makes a number of points. To address just a few…

Firstly, I don’t accept the idea that just because a person, or group of people, supported the war in Afghanistan that that support exempts them from being charged with pacifism (a term I am obviously using loosely, and perhaps too loosely) or isolationism, generally. There is hardly a person alive (though I say hardly because I have met such people) who would say that America should not have — or didn’t have the right to have — invaded Afghanistan. When a terrorist group allied with a country’s government kills 3,000 American civilians, there is not even a question as to whether or not you respond with force.

The question facing America after Afghanistan was what else do we do to confront the threat of global terrorism. Stopping at Afghanistan — whether or not the next step was invading Iraq — would not have been a wise choice.

Secondly, and lastly, the commenter asks me how I can find the federal government too incompetent to deliver the mail, yet trust it to spread democracy. Well, I am all for postal privatization, but, you know what — the mail, ultimately, does get delivered.

Likewise, the federal government has spread democracy in the world quite successfully in the past — and it is one of America’s proudest achievements. Germany and Japan, rebuilt and reborn after World War II. Eastern Europe, now liberated from Communism. And now, Afghanistan, starting down the path toward democracy.

Has the sacrifice in Afghanistan, small in both blood and treasure, not been worth it? Would libertarians prefer a world with the Taliban?

In short, there are other people who can deliver the mail. For now, only we can deliver democracy.

The responses on the future of libertarianism have been great, and I’ll keep posting the interesting ones, along with comment.

Again, you can e-mail: editor@rhsager.com.