Murray Rothbard on collective security and the Middle East crisis

We cannot fully understand the nature of the crisis in the Middle East by just following today’s and yesterday’s headlines.  There are far deeper and longer lasting factors at work than merely who commands the Strait of Tiran or who is responsible for the latest border skirmish in the Gaza Strip.  The first thing that we as Americans should be concerned about is the absurdity of the fundamental foreign policy position of the U.S. government.  This is a doctrine that the United States first adopted, to its woe, in the late 1930s and has clung to ever since: the doctrine of “collective security.”  The collective security thesis assumes that, at whatever moment of time one happens to be in, the territorial distribution of States on the world’s surface is just and proper.  Any forcible disturbances of any governmental boundary anywhere, then, automatically becomes “aggression” which must be combated either by all other nations or by the United States itself, acting as “world policeman.” 

In short, the whole thesis of collective security that has guided American policy for thirty years rests on a ridiculous analogy from private property and the function of police in defending that property.  Mr. Jones owns the property; it is then certainly not absurd to say that he has an absolute moral right to that property and that, therefore, any invasion of that property by force is immoral and unjust.  It is also not absurd, then, to say that it is just for Mr. Jones’s property to be defended by some form of police (whether public or private is not here at issue). 

But surely it is worse than absurd to leap from this concept of just private property to say that a State’s territory is equally just, proper, and sacrosanct, and that therefore any invasion of that State’s self-acclaimed territory is just as wicked as invasion of private property and deserves to be defended by some form of “police.”  All State territory, without exception in history or in any part of the world, was obtained, not by legitimate voluntary productive means such as used by Mr. Jones or his ancestors, but by coercion and violent conquest.  Therefore no one allocation of territory — certainly no allocation of territory that happens to exist at any moment of time — is ipso facto proper and just and deserving of any form of defense. If, in Year 1, Ruritania grabs part of the territory of Waldonia by force, then surely it is nonsensical for the United Sates or some other group to step in with righteous indignation when, in Year 5, Waldonia tries to grab that territory back.  Yet this is precisely what is implied in the whole theory on which the United Nations is grounded, and in the U.S. foreign policy to “guarantee the territorial integrity of all the nations in the Middle East.” 

Basic to the current crisis in the Middle East is the fact that such Israeli territory as the port of Elath, and indeed the entire Negev desert area surrounding Elath, which is now a big bone of contention between Israel and the Arab powers, was grabbed by force from the Arabs by Israel in 1948.  For the US, then, to go to war to “defend the territorial integrity” of Israel in the Negev would be, on this and on many other grounds, the height of folly.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Middle East Crisis," 1967

(As appeared in Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties, pp. 27-28.)

Six-Day War

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.)