Murray N. Rothbard, “Where Intervene Next?” (1993)

Murray N. Rothbard’s “Where Intervene Next?” is a short September 1993 political polemic and foreign-policy commentary. Its scope is the early post-Cold War map of possible American wars: Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Korea. The essay’s thesis is that U.S. interventionism is an appetite, not a response to exceptional necessity. Humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, anti-Communism, anti-fundamentalism, and nonproliferation become interchangeable warrants for bombing, occupying, and choosing clients in conflicts outsiders scarcely understand.

It must be fun being an interventionist these days. The world is his oyster, and it presents a cornucopia of riches on where to intervene next. So many tempting opportunities to “cure starvation” or impose “democracy,” to kill “warlords” and other bad guys, to bomb and strafe and feed and occupy.

The opening irony sets the essay’s conceptual pattern. Rothbard does not deny famine, civil war, or tyranny; he attacks the conversion of those realities into an imperial menu. Somalia supplies the central case because it had been sold as a limited relief operation. In his account, the mission disrupted local food arrangements, designated General Aidid as the single villain, and then mutated into retaliation once U.S. and UN forces became combatants. His deeper point is epistemological: intervention requires a simplified morality play.

The idea of multi-sided Equally Bad warlords fighting each other is too nuanced for the average Americano to comprehend: besides, multi-faceted warfare can scarcely justify massive American intervention on one side or the other.

This is one of the essay’s core moves: the “Good Guys vs. Bad Guys” frame is not an innocent mistake but a political technology. It produces the enemy needed to authorize force. Somalia therefore reveals how “humanitarian” action passes into armed vengeance: feeding becomes pacification, pacification becomes targeting, and casualties become the rationale for escalation.

Is it too late to stop this senseless escalation? Hey look, this is not New Model intervention; it's the same old Wilsonian baloney, the same crazed crusade to feed and dominate and rule the world. Talk about your quagmires! Out, out before it's too late!

Bosnia shows the same logic before full commitment. Rothbard treats Clinton’s initial restraint as accidentally sensible because military and regional knowledge counsel abstention from Balkan entanglement. He mocks the renewed demand to “bomb the Serbs,” stressing that air power would need ground spotters and thus expose Americans to precisely the risks a “limited” intervention claims to avoid. The essay also notes ideological inconsistency: pundits who cast Muslims as terrorists elsewhere suddenly demand U.S. sacrifice for Bosnian Muslims.

The Tajikistan/Afghanistan section widens the essay from current policy to future temptation. Afghanistan functions as both warning and lure: a country marked by famine, refugees, armed factions, ethnic war, Communists, and Islamists, but also the place where Soviet occupation bled a superpower. Tajikistan, then in civil war, is attractive to Washington precisely because it is confusing.

Indeed, the rebels are a coalition of anti-Communist Democrats and Islamic fundamentalists.

That sentence condenses Rothbard’s criticism of post-Cold War labels. If anti-Communists are “good” but Islamic fundamentalists are “bad,” the category machine jams. His Afghan example adds the argument of blowback: U.S.-armed anti-Soviet fighters can be reclassified overnight from democratic allies into fanatics because Washington’s needs have changed.

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?

The brief Iraq and Korea sections are satirical codas. Iraq represents bombing as presidential theater, while Korea offers an even richer scenario for interventionist imagination: a hard-line Communist regime, a pro-Western South, an unresolved war, nuclear rumors, and the possibility of a conflict lasting far longer than Vietnam. The essay’s relevance lies in its early diagnosis of the post-1991 American role: with the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard sees Washington converting disorder itself into a mandate for global management. Its anti-imperial core is clear: foreign tragedy does not create American jurisdiction; moralized power simplifies local conflicts; and missions of rescue tend toward coercion, retaliation, and permanent war.