Murray Rothbard on collective security vs. neutrality

The collective-security concept that so enchanted the old (pre-1965) left sounded pretty good: Each nation-state was viewed as if it were an individual, so that when one state ‘aggressed against’ another, it became the duty of the governments of the world to step in and punish the ‘aggressor.’  In that way, the bitter and lengthy war in Korea became, in President Truman’s famous phrase, a ‘police action,’ needing no declaration of war but simply an executive decision by the world’s chief cop — the president of the United States — to be set into motion.  All other “law-abiding” nations and responsible organs of opinion were supposed to join in. 

The ‘isolationist’ right saw several grave flaws in this notion of collective security and the analogy between states and individuals.  One, of course, is that there is no world government or world cop, as there are national governments and police.  Each state has its own war-making machine, many of which are quite awesome.  When gangs of states wade into a conflict, they inexorably widen it.  Every tinpot controversy, the latest and most blatant being the fracas in the Falkland Islands, invites other nations to decide which of the states is ‘the aggressor’ and then leap in on the virtuous side.  Every local squabble thus threatens to escalate into a global conflagration. 

And since, according to collective security enthusiasts, the United States has apparently been divinely appointed to be the chief world policeman, it is thereby justified in throwing its massive weight into every controversy on the face of the globe. 

The other big problem with the collective-security analogy is that, in contrast to spotting thieves and muggers, it is generally difficult or even impossible to single out uniquely guilty parties in conflicts between states.  For although individuals have well-defined property rights that make someone else’s invasion of that property a culpable act of aggression, the boundary lines of each state have scarcely been arrived at by just and proper means.  Every state is born in, and exists by, coercion and aggression over its citizens and subjects, and its boundaries invariably have been determined by conquest and violence.  But in automatically condemning one state for crossing the borders of another, we are implicitly recognizing the validity of existing boundaries.  Why should the boundaries of a state in 1982 be any more or less just than they were in 1972, 1932, or 1872?  Why must they be automatically enshrined as sacred, so much so that a mere boundary crossing should lead every state in the world to force their citizens to kill or die? 

No, far better and wiser is the old classical liberal foreign policy of neutrality and nonintervention, a foreign policy set forth with great eloquence by Richard Cobden, John Bright, the Manchester school and other ‘little Englanders’ of the nineteenth century, by the Anti-Imperialist classical liberals of the turn of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States, and by the old right from the 1930s to the 1950s.  Neutrality limits conflicts instead of escalating them.  Neutral states cannot swell their power through war and militarism, or murder and plunder the citizens of other states.

~ Murray Rothbard

(Quoted by Lew Rockwell, "Keep US Out of War," February 28, 2022.)