This file is a single polemical political essay. Written in February 1993, it surveys George H. W. Bush’s final foreign-policy moves—Somalia, Bosnia/Kosovo, and Iraq—as symptoms of post–Cold War interventionism. Rothbard’s thesis is that Bush’s “December surprise” bequeathed Clinton not prudence but imperial entanglement, sanctified by humanitarian rhetoric, UN ambition, media emotion, and bipartisan elite continuity.
Only a George Bush could get us into a war after he has safely lost his election.
The opening frames Bush as the anti-Washington: instead of avoiding “foreign entanglements,” he normalizes them. Rothbard’s deeper conservative move is genealogical: he urges conservatives to abandon Reaganite and Thatcherite global policing and recover the Old Right anti-interventionism of Taft, Bricker, and Wherry. The essay’s first major case is Somalia, which he treats as the purest and therefore most dangerous form of intervention: a war without even the pretext of national interest.
The Somalia intervention is a genuine horror, for it is an intervention that possesses not a single shred of national self-interest: strategic, military, resource, or whatever.
Rothbard’s conceptual attack on “humanitarian” war is twofold. First, he argues that famine is not solved by armed relief but by institutions: labor, capital accumulation, exchange, and secure private property. Second, he insists that altruistic war is especially repellent because it removes even the limiting discipline of self-interest. The image of soldiers combining food aid with coercion becomes his emblem of moralized empire.
The idea of marching out with gun and missile to end starvation in the world, carrying a machine-gun in one hand and CARE package in the other, is perhaps the most repellent vision of foreign policy ever concocted.
Much of the Somalia section turns on the problem of governing a land without settled authority. Rothbard distinguishes his own anarcho-capitalist ideal from what he calls “criminal anarchy,” arguing that an external power cannot rule where there is no local political structure through which commands can be transmitted. Attempts to confiscate armed vehicles, buy weapons, or flood the country with food become examples of intervention producing perverse incentives and disorder.
Typical example of government creating more problems than it solves!
The essay then widens from military policy to the political psychology of humanitarianism. Drawing on Isabel Paterson’s critique of “the humanitarian with the guillotine,” Rothbard argues that compulsory benevolence tends toward domination: the needy become the justification for rule over them. This is also where his media critique enters. Somalia, he claims, shows foreign policy being made by selected images of suffering rather than by prudential reasoning about consequences, costs, or alternatives.
There is no hope for any rational public policy in America so long as we continue to have rule-by-TV camera.
The second half turns to Bosnia and Serbia. Rothbard is not writing as a neutral Balkan historian; he is using the Serbian crisis to expose what he sees as U.S. hypocrisy about democracy and sovereignty. He mocks Washington’s support for Milan Panic, its hostility to Slobodan Milosevic, and its threats against Serbia before an election. When Milosevic wins, Rothbard reads the result as popular defiance of foreign pressure rather than as an occasion for interventionist moralism.
It was as dumb as well as repellently arrogant move by the U.S.; for the Serbs are not the sort of people to cave in to threats of force, even from the mighty United States.
The sanctions discussion sharpens this point. For Rothbard, the prosecution threat against Bobby Fischer for playing chess in Serbia reveals sanctions as vindictive theater rather than military necessity. The absurdity of treating a chess match as material aid to war lets him reduce grand strategy to bureaucratic spite.
How wackily vindictive can the U.S. government get?
The Kosovo discussion closes the geopolitical survey by emphasizing ethnic, religious, and historical entanglements that U.S. policymakers scarcely understand. Rothbard’s central relevance lies in his early post–Cold War critique of humanitarian intervention: he sees the new world order not as peace after communism, but as a more elastic rationale for war. His core moves are to strip humanitarianism of innocence, oppose UN-policed global order, link famine to property institutions rather than relief logistics, and treat media-driven compassion as a mechanism of imperial policy.
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