Murray N. Rothbard, The Foreign Policy of the Old Right (1978)

Murray N. Rothbard’s historical essay, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1978, reconstructs the noninterventionist tradition of the American Old Right and its displacement by Cold War conservatism. He connects opposition to overseas intervention with resistance to domestic state expansion: foreign policy expresses the same concern for individual liberty that animated hostility to the New Deal. Of the Old Right’s understanding of intervention, he writes:

It held such intervention to be destructive of peace, and as posing a potentially grave menace in fastening Big Government upon Americans at home.

This connection organizes the essay. War threatens liberty not simply through battlefield destruction but through executive power, conscription, bureaucracy, and economic regimentation. Rothbard therefore interprets “isolationism” as a polemical label obscuring a principled preference for neutrality and strictly defensive war.

The first part traces the formation of a heterogeneous coalition that brought radical individualists such as Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken together with conservative Republicans and Democrats. Rothbard distinguishes continuity of conviction from changes in political classification. Critics of imperialism and World War I who had once belonged to the left became identified with the right as liberals embraced Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Their ideological migration reflected a transformation of the surrounding political landscape as much as any change in their own beliefs.

In the course of this mass conversion, gone virtually without a trace was the old insight of the Left into the evils of the Versailles treaty or the urgent need for its revision.

For Rothbard, liberal interventionism entailed abandoning an earlier critique of the international settlement. He follows the consequences through journalism, where opponents of war lost institutional standing and were portrayed as reactionaries or sympathizers with fascism. Oswald Garrison Villard’s experience supplies a pointed example:

For his pains Villard was forced out of the magazine which he had long served as a distinguished editor.

Such episodes explain how political labels hardened through exclusion from influential forums. Rothbard also complicates the identification of business with nonintervention by contrasting interventionist Eastern financial and corporate interests with important Midwestern opponents of war. The Old Right’s consolidation thus involved institutional struggles and regional divisions as well as shared ideas.

The treatment of wartime repression gives this realignment a civil-libertarian dimension. Rothbard then uses John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching to explain how militarism could outlast the emergency that initially justified it. In this account, military spending reconciles constituencies otherwise divided over public expenditure, while overseas commitments sustain demands for debt, bureaucracy, and industrial mobilization. Flynn’s comparison with fascism concerns institutional arrangements—coercive state power and organized economic interests—rather than simply the identities of America’s foreign enemies.

The second part follows Old Right resistance into the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War. Alongside Robert A. Taft, Rothbard emphasizes Howard Buffett and George Bender as particularly consistent opponents of intervention. Fiscal restraint, opposition to conscription, objections to supporting reactionary governments, and resistance to presidential war-making formed an interconnected critique. Taft’s constitutional concerns, Herbert Hoover’s warnings about an Asian land war, and Joseph P. Kennedy’s objections to exhausting American resources illustrate alternative conceptions of security rather than mere indifference to communism.

Garet Garrett’s distinction between republic and empire brings these arguments together. Executive supremacy, military ascendancy, the subordination of domestic affairs to foreign commitments, and dependence on satellite states become signs of structural transformation. Benevolent declarations about freedom and democracy do not, in Rothbard’s presentation, resolve the tension between imperial power and republican liberty.

The unsuccessful Bricker Amendment campaign marks a final constitutional effort to restrain this development. Deaths, retirements, political defeats, and the ascendancy of National Review helped replace Old Right noninterventionism with global anticommunism. Rothbard’s sympathetic recovery challenges any timeless identification of conservatism with military activism. By identifying affinities between older libertarian conservatives and New Left critics of empire, he makes the changing meanings of “left” and “right” central to a larger question: whether freedom at home can survive permanent intervention abroad.