Murray N. Rothbard, “The Post-Cold War World” (1990)

This file is a single-author polemical foreign-policy essay, dated April 1990 and organized in three sections: “Whither U.S. Foreign Policy,” “The Panama Invasion,” and “The U.S. and the Sinatra Doctrine.” Its scope is the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolutions. Rothbard’s thesis is that the Soviet rationale for American intervention has disappeared, but the institutions and ideology of intervention will seek new pretexts.

With the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, and of Soviet domination of its former satellites, whatever Russian threat that may have existed is now over.

The essay’s first conceptual move is to distinguish the end of the Cold War from the end of the national-security state. Rothbard asks what “cloak” can now legitimate U.S. global power, and he answers through Garet Garrett’s older anti-imperial formula:

The argument for imperialism has always been two-edged, what the great Old Rightist Garet Garrett called (in his classic The People's Pottage) “a complex of fear and vaunting.”

“Fear” is supplied by replacement enemies: narco-terrorism, panic over German reunification, and Irving Kristol’s “Islamic fundamentalist” threat. Rothbard treats these not as neutral strategic assessments but as rhetorical devices for preserving intervention. The matching “vaunting” is Wilsonian democracy promotion, valuable precisely because it is limitless.

A goal that can never be reached but can always be kept shimmering on the distant horizon is perfectly tooled for an endless policy of massive expenditure of money, arms, blood, and manpower in one foreign adventure after another: what the great Charles A. Beard brilliantly termed “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

The Panama invasion becomes Rothbard’s test case for the new era. It is not an exception but a prototype: moralized, improvised, punitive, and no longer dependent on anti-communism.

The U.S. invasion of Panama was the first act of military intervention in the new post-Cold War world—the first act of war since 1945 where the United States has not used Communism or “Marxism–Leninism” as the effective all-purpose alibi.

Rothbard dismantles the administration’s justifications in sequence. “Democracy” cannot be restored where it had not meaningfully existed; Noriega’s indictment cannot turn an invasion into police work; drug charges are compromised by Noriega’s long CIA ties; and lurid exhibits from his possessions become propaganda theater rather than proof. The satire serves a serious point: criminalization of a foreign ruler can replace anti-communism as a casus belli, while concealing civilian death and destruction.

The final section reverses the expected Cold War roles. Rothbard presents Gorbachev’s “Sinatra Doctrine” as a policy of non-intervention in Eastern Europe and relative restraint toward Baltic secessionist pressure.

The Soviets have consistently refused to intervene to prop up the Communist tyrannies in Eastern Europe, if anything, giving the rulers a nudge to quit before the people saw to it that they were forcibly removed.

This allows Rothbard’s sharpest libertarian move: judging states by coercion rather than by ideological camp. He even compares Soviet restraint favorably with a sanctified episode in American state-building.

So far, Gorbachev’s stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.

The essay’s relevance lies in its early diagnosis of the post-Cold War “unipolar” problem: without the Soviet enemy, interventionism does not vanish but rebrands itself through drugs, terrorism, democracy, rogue rulers, and humanitarian order. Its structure is simple and forceful: identify the missing enemy, catalogue substitute fears, test them in Panama, then expose U.S. discomfort with genuine non-intervention. Rothbard’s central claim is that the Cold War’s end revealed how little American imperial thinking had ever depended on communism alone.