This file is a single argumentative essay/chapter in libertarian political theory. Rothbard’s scope is deliberately strategic: he answers the charge that libertarians evade the most urgent political question—war—by deriving an antiwar position from the same nonaggression principle used in domestic libertarian theory.
Let us construct a libertarian theory of war and peace.
The essay’s central move is to deny that war suspends ordinary moral rules. Rothbard begins with the libertarian axiom against aggression and then presses it into cases where defensive violence is usually thought to justify broader coercion.
The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence (“aggress”) against another man’s person or property.
From this premise he argues that even legitimate defense against an aggressor cannot authorize violence against innocent third parties. His Jones-and-Smith examples establish the conceptual frame: defense is permissible only when directed at the actual criminal. This makes war morally acceptable, if at all, only under an almost impossible condition.
War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals.
Rothbard then turns this principle against modern warfare. Nuclear weapons, aerial bombing, and germ warfare are not merely larger weapons; they are categorically incompatible with discrimination between aggressors and noncombatants. This is why disarmament becomes, for him, not a sentimental pacifist demand but a direct implication of libertarian justice.
These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction.
The essay’s second major movement introduces the State. Rothbard defines it not as a neutral protector but as an institution whose existence rests on coercive monopoly and taxation. This reframes interstate war as violence conducted by organizations already founded on aggression against their own subjects.
The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area.
On this basis, Rothbard distinguishes private defense, revolution, and interstate war. Private conflicts may be limited to actual aggressors; revolutions may legitimately target rulers; but wars between States almost inevitably expand violence geographically, tax domestic subjects, mobilize populations, and attack enemy civilians. Thus the argument reaches its stark conclusion:
The Libertarian must, therefore, conclude that, while some revolutions and some private conflicts may be legitimate, State wars are always to be condemned.
The practical program follows: libertarians should pressure each State to remain within its own territory, avoid intervention, seek cease-fires, respect neutrality, reject foreign aid, and oppose imperialism. Rothbard’s relevance lies in this fusion of anti-statism and antiwar theory: he refuses both conservative nationalism and humanitarian militarism, insisting that good motives cannot redeem coercive means.
The libertarian objective, then, should be, regardless of the specific causes of any conflict, to pressure States not to launch wars against other States and, should a war break out, to pressure them to sue for peace and negotiate a cease-fire and peace treaty as quickly as physically possible.
The final section links foreign war to domestic tyranny. War enlarges the State, militarizes society, suppresses dissent, and converts subjects into instruments of policy. Rothbard’s critique of conscription sharpens the paradox of coerced “defense”: the State claims to protect liberty by destroying it at home.
The root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects.
The essay is therefore not a general meditation on peace but a systematic application of the nonaggression principle to the hardest case for libertarian theory. Its core conceptual moves are the absolutizing of noncombatant immunity, the identification of taxation and conscription as wartime aggression, the distinction between revolution and interstate war, and the elevation of nuclear disarmament into a central libertarian priority.
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