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Steering Clear of Foreign Engagements

The guidance is to stay out ookf foreign wars. But staying out isn't the same as looking away. A social-liberty foreign policy keeps its hands off the trigger and its eyes on everything else, and asks more of citizens, not less.

Idan Rednaxus ·
current eventsyemensaudi arabiahouthisiranwargeopoliticsresponsibilityforeign policynon-interventionstrait of hormuzsanctionsblockadewar powerspetrodollarragusathomas painecommittees of correspondenceconsciencejohn woolmanquakersfog of war

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On Saturday a Houthi missile hit Riyadh's international airport for the third time in a week. Saudi Arabia says at least twelve people were killed and about three hundred wounded, the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a decade. One of the dead was an American. Within hours the President said the United States was looking at whether to join the Saudi war on the Houthis: "We may. We're gonna look at it." The same week, Pentagon plans for a new round of bombing in Iran leaked to the press, timed for after the November 3 midterms. Brent crude was above $104. A dozen ships had been attacked around Hormuz in a single week, the most since the war began.

So the question this collection of essays has to answer isn't abstract. What should the position be on the Iran war, on the Yemeni civil war, and on a peninsula that is pulling the economic and political order of the world apart and putting it back together in some new shape?

The short answer is the old one: stay out. The longer answer is that staying out, done properly, is harder work than going in.

It's worth being clear from the start about who is asking. A social libertarian in America isn't in a position to bomb Iran or not bomb it. Nobody in the White House or the Pentagon is waiting for our view, and we have little political power in numbers. What we say below about blockades and sanctions is what we'd ask of the people who do decide. The position that is actually ours to hold is a different kind: a matter of spirit, of how we think and feel and carry ourselves while a war goes on in our name. That turns out to matter more than it sounds, and the essay comes back to it at the end.

Three claims that look incompatible

Try three claims together.

First, we should stay out. No American strikes on Iran, no blockade, no joining the Saudi campaign in Yemen. Liberty at home doesn't survive a government that's permanently at war abroad. War is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne put it in 1918. Every war expands the power to tax, borrow, surveil, conscript, and keep secrets, and none of those powers are ever fully handed back.

Second, we're responsible. The Iran war didn't happen to America. American and Israeli strikes started it on February 28. American taxes pay for the blockade of Iran's ports, the carriers in the Gulf, and the targeting intelligence that has been passing from Central Command to Riyadh. American money and weapons armed the Saudi coalition through seven years of the last Yemen war. You can't call yourself a bystander to something you're paying for.

Third, it reaches us anyway. Nobody is insulated from this war by distance. It shows up at the pump, in the price of fertilizer and diesel, in mortgage rates, in the slow argument over whether oil will keep being priced in dollars. Whatever the United States decides, the peninsula's war is already inside the American economy.

Taken together these look like a trap. If we're responsible, staying out looks like abdication. If it reaches us anyway, staying out looks like a fantasy. And if we accept both of those, the usual conclusion follows: we'd better get in and shape the outcome.

The way out is the third claim. The war reaches us through prices, debt, insurance, and currency, not through armies. Which means the responsibility we carry is mostly exercised at home, through what we pay for, what we subsidize, and what we know. The first two claims only conflict if responsibility means force. Take force off the table and they turn out to describe the same thing.

What the founders actually meant

The non-interventionist tradition in American history is usually quoted in its most familiar lines, Washington's warning against entangling alliances or John Quincy Adams on not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The older source is better, because it's more specific about what to do instead.

Thomas Paine argued in Common Sense that it was "the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions." He didn't mean ignore Europe. In the same pages he argued that America's plan should be commerce: a free port open to everyone, friends with every nation because every nation had an interest in trading with it. Non-intervention, in Paine's version, was a positive program. You stay out of other people's wars so that you can stay in everyone's markets.

And the Continental Congress's first foreign-policy body wasn't an army or a war ministry. In November 1775 it set up a Committee of Secret Correspondence, with Benjamin Franklin among its members, whose job was to find out what was going on abroad: write to friends in Europe, collect intelligence, understand who wanted what. It grew out of the committees of correspondence that had linked the colonies themselves, citizens writing to citizens to make sure nobody was acting on rumor. The founding instinct was that a small, free people should know more about the world than it intends to act on.

That's the mode this essay is arguing for. Knowledge first. Commerce second. Force not at all, unless someone attacks you.

A republic that outlived its neighbors

There's an older and less familiar example of how far that mode can go. The Republic of Ragusa, the city-state we now call Dubrovnik, survived as an independent merchant republic for about four and a half centuries, squeezed between Venice, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. It had a tiny territory, no real army, and every reason to be swallowed.

It wasn't swallowed because it made itself more useful as a trading partner than it would have been as a conquest, and because it knew more about its neighbors than they knew about each other. Ragusa ran a network of consuls in ports across the Mediterranean and the Balkans, and its merchants and diplomats were among the best-informed people in Europe. It paid tribute to the Sultan, traded with the Christians, stayed formally neutral through wars on every side, and was rich for most of that time. Over the gate of its fortress of Lovrijenac is a motto: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro, liberty isn't well sold for all the gold in the world. It lasted until Napoleon's army abolished it in 1808.

Ragusa wasn't a libertarian society. It was an aristocratic oligarchy with a slave trade in its early history. But as a foreign policy it's close to the one this collection of essays has in mind: know everything, trade with everyone, fight no one, and treat your own independence as the one thing you won't sell.

What staying informed actually requires

Staying analytical about a war is harder than it sounds, because nearly everything written about a war is written to make you feel something about it.

Two kinds of frame dominate. The first is the official one, the daily montage of strikes, the map of targets hit, the war as a story about American capability. The second is the catastrophe frame, written in reaction to the first. A good example is an essay by Jerry van der Laan that ran on Medium in early May, "Everyone Is Watching the Iran War. Nobody Is Watching What It Is Breaking." It's a thoughtful piece, and it gets several things right that the official coverage misses.

Its best observation is about insurance. Hormuz doesn't close when someone announces a closure, it argues. It closes when war-risk underwriters in London and Zurich each decide, one ship at a time, that a passage is no longer worth writing. The strait closes as a sum of private verdicts. Its second good observation is about sanctions. Decades of sanctions on Iran haven't weakened the regime's hard core. They've built it. When ordinary Iranian businesses can't clear a dollar transaction, the business moves to whoever can get around the rules, and in Iran that means the Revolutionary Guard's own companies and the tax-exempt foundations that answer to the Supreme Leader. Sanctions, in the essay's account, worked as an industrial policy for the parallel state. Its third is about who pays. The people who profit from the war continuing, whether defense contractors, the politicians whose careers depend on an enemy, or the bureaucracies whose budgets scale with the threat, aren't the ones who pay for it. The costs go to an Egyptian family buying bread and an Iranian kid whose economy is being strangled.

All three are arguments a libertarian should take seriously, and all three come back below.

But the same essay also put numbers on its fears, and five months later we can check them. It gave a 40 to 55 percent chance of a direct US-Iranian naval exchange within sixty days and put the odds of oil holding above $150 at roughly even; oil is above $100, not $150 or $200. It treated Egypt as one shock away from 2011. Egypt raised fuel prices, rationed electricity, and closed its shops at 9 p.m. for a month, and it's still standing. It wrote about Ali Khamenei as the living Supreme Leader, when he had been killed on the first day of the war and his son Mojtaba named in his place two months before the essay ran.

None of that makes it a bad essay. It makes it an essay. The point is that being well informed doesn't mean picking the frame that frightens you most and calling it the hidden truth. It means keeping score. Write down what you expected, check it later, and adjust. Both the montage and the catastrophe frame make it feel as though the reader has to do something, right now, about a war they can’t see. The discipline of staying analytical is partly a refusal to let either of them decide that for you.

The fog is the ground truth

Keeping score has a limit, though, and it's worth being plain about it. However carefully we read, we won't know enough.

The fog of war isn't a temporary condition that better intelligence will clear. It's the permanent state of any war, and it's thickest for those furthest away. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, an Aegis cruiser carrying the most advanced radar and combat-information system the US Navy had, was in the Strait of Hormuz in the middle of a skirmish with Iranian gunboats. Its crew identified a climbing civilian Airbus on a scheduled flight as a descending Iranian F-14, and shot it down. Iran Air Flight 655 had 290 people aboard. Nobody killed them out of malice. The best-equipped observers in the world, a few miles from the facts, with every reason to get it right, got it wrong in minutes. If that is what the fog does to the people standing in the strait, it does far more to a think tank in Washington, a newsroom in London, or a reader in California. Even the careful Medium essay, written in May by someone following the war closely, still had the wrong man as Supreme Leader.

This collection of essays treats that as a ground truth rather than a problem to be solved, and it doesn't go away if the country does get involved. Suppose the argument for staying out loses, and the United States joins the Saudi campaign or bombs Iran again. The fog is still there. In the best of circumstances, with the best analysts and the best sources, no expert knows enough about a war between Riyadh and Sanaa, or between Washington and Tehran, to take a side in it with confidence. Who fired first at a given moment, which faction controls which unit, what a government will do with the weapons it's given, who a strike actually killed: these are the facts that decide whether intervention helps or harms, and they're the facts nobody outside has.

That gives a rough order of things a free people shouldn't do in a distant war, from least to most serious. Don't become a partisan, cheering one side's victories as your own when you can't see what those victories cost. Still less, furnish weapons or money, because a weapon or a check is a bet placed on facts you don't have, and it keeps paying out long after the facts change. The Sudanese fighters the Gulf hired for Yemen came home with an army of their own. And least of all, take the role of combatant. Killing people on the strength of a picture that is known to be incomplete is the step that can't be taken back.

None of this rules out the kind of help that doesn't depend on knowing who's right. Feeding a hungry family in Hodeidah or Taiz doesn't require knowing whether the Houthis or the government will win. Taking in a refugee doesn't require a verdict on the war they fled. The fog argues against picking sides. It doesn't argue against decency.

Iran: end the blockade, lift the sanctions, let Congress vote

With that in mind, here's where we stand on Iran. None of it is ours to carry out. It's what we'd ask of those who can, and what we won't lend our voices against.

End the blockade. The US Navy has been blockading Iran's southern ports since mid-July, after a brief pause in the spring. Central Command says it has turned back 135 ships, disabled four, and destroyed ten tankers linked to Iran. A blockade is an act of war under any reading of the law of nations. It's being conducted without a declaration of war and without an authorization from Congress. The House has twice voted to end American involvement in the war. The Senate failed by one vote in September, 49 to 50. A war that a bare majority of one chamber can't stop and a bare majority of the other has voted against isn't a war the country has consented to.

Don't bomb again, before the midterms or after. Whatever the plans say, a second bombing campaign does nothing the first one didn't. The first killed the Supreme Leader and produced a hereditary successor, a regime in consolidation mode, and a closed strait. Bombing a country to stop it from getting a nuclear weapon also teaches every government watching that only governments with nuclear weapons are safe from being bombed. The war is the strongest argument for proliferation anyone has made in thirty years.

Lift the sanctions that feed the Revolutionary Guard. If sanctions have built the parallel state in Iran rather than weakened it, then the libertarian position and the strategic one point the same way. Let ordinary Iranians trade, receive money from relatives abroad, buy medicine, and do business without going through the Guard's networks. Free commerce strengthens the people who aren't the regime. Sanctions strengthen the people who are.

Stop paying for the shipping lanes. For half a century the US Navy has kept the Gulf open at taxpayers' expense, which means every barrel of oil coming out of Hormuz has carried a subsidy paid by people who never chose to pay it. Let shipowners, insurers, and buyers carry that cost. The underwriter's verdict on whether a passage is worth writing is better information than anything the Navy can produce, because the underwriter's own money is on it. If Gulf oil costs more once its protection isn't free, that's the real price, and it's been hidden for fifty years.

Yemen: grief is not an authorization

The American killed at Riyadh's airport is going to be used. It always works that way. A citizen killed abroad becomes the reason for a war the country hadn't decided on the week before.

The death is a crime, and it deserves grief. It doesn't authorize anything. Americans live and work in a country at war, and the Houthis are at war with that country. That's a reason for the State Department to warn Americans about travel and to help them leave, not a reason to send the Air Force.

Where we stand on Yemen:

Don't join the Saudi campaign. Saudi Arabia spent seven years and tens of billions of dollars fighting the Houthis from 2015, with American weapons, American refueling, and American targeting help, and it ended up negotiating a truce with the movement it set out to defeat. As Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula argued, the kingdom's problem isn't a shortage of weapons. It's that a state that has never had to ask its own people for anything can buy hardware but not the will to fight. American air power doesn't fix that. It just moves the cost from Riyadh to Washington.

Stop subsidizing the arms trade. Selling weapons to Gulf governments is defended as private commerce. It isn't, or not entirely. It runs through government financing, government approval, and government-to-government deals that make the American taxpayer a guarantor of the outcome. If private companies want to sell arms abroad on their own account and at their own risk, the argument is at least a different one. What should end is the public money and the political commitment that comes attached to it.

Let help come from people, not governments. More than 22 million Yemenis need humanitarian aid. A lot of them are being kept alive by money sent home from relatives working in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The most useful thing an American can do for Yemen is probably not anything the American government does. It's giving to organizations that feed people on the ground, keeping remittance channels open instead of choking them with sanctions, and making it possible for Yemenis who flee to resettle through private sponsorship, families and congregations and towns that choose to take them in.

The peninsula and the new order

The larger question is what to make of the reordering itself. The Gulf states are signing oil contracts outside the dollar. China buys most of what Iran can still export, settling in yuan. The petrodollar arrangement of 1974, oil priced in dollars, surpluses recycled into Treasury bonds, is being worn down from several sides at once. The catastrophe frame treats this as the end of the world. The official frame mostly doesn't mention it.

From the standpoint of liberty, it's mixed news, and some of it is good.

The dollar's position at the center of world trade has let the American government borrow on terms no other government gets. That's what made it possible to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for twenty years without raising a war tax, without asking anyone to pay for them as they happened, and so without the kind of public argument that paying produces. Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula described the Gulf monarchies as rentier states: governments that live on income from the ground rather than from taxing their own people, and so never have to ask anyone's consent. The United States has been running a softer version of the same bargain on its currency. If the world needs fewer dollars, Washington will have to pay for its wars in the open, through taxes people can see, and wars people have to see the bill for are wars that get argued about.

That doesn't make a disorderly unwinding of the dollar desirable. Ordinary savers will pay for it before the government does, as they always do. Separation of Currency and State made the case that money doesn't have to be a government monopoly at all, and a world where the dollar loses some of its privilege is a world in which that case gets more interesting, not less. Either way, an American foreign policy built on the assumption that the rest of the world will always fund it was never going to last, and the peninsula is where that assumption is running out.

The same goes for the security order. For fifty years the Gulf's arrangement rested on American protection, and the shakeup this year has shown how little that protection was ever really about the people living there. A peninsula that has to work out its own balance, with Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Iran, Oman, and the Houthis bargaining among themselves, will be messier than one managed from Tampa. It may also be more stable, because whatever balance it reaches will be one its own powers actually have to defend.

Few in number, strong in spirit

Those positions will mostly lose. That isn't pessimism, just arithmetic. People who hold the view this collection of essays describes are a small minority, and on war they're a minority even among people who call themselves libertarians. If our only power were in votes and lobbying, there would be little point in having a position on Iran at all.

But small groups have always had another kind of power, and early America has an example of it that's less well known than it should be. John Woolman was a Quaker tailor from Mount Holly, New Jersey. Through the 1740s and 1750s he travelled from meeting to meeting, mostly on foot, visiting Quaker slaveholders one household at a time and asking them, gently and without accusation, to look at what they were doing. He refused to write bills of sale for enslaved people in his own trade. He stopped wearing dyed cloth and gave up sugar because of the slave labor behind them. And when Pennsylvania levied a tax to pay for the French and Indian War in 1755, he and a handful of other Friends refused to pay it, not in defiance of their neighbors but because they couldn't in conscience fund the killing. He had no office, no money, and no following beyond his own meetings. Within twenty years of his travels, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had made slaveholding grounds for disownment, and the Quakers became the first religious body in America to put slavery out of their own communities. They did it decades before any government acted, and the spirit they carried fed the abolition movement that followed.

Woolman's power was entirely spiritual, and that's the kind we have. Working with it well means a few things.

Keep the war out of yourself. A war needs belief more than it needs votes. It needs people at home to feel fear and anger on cue, to see the enemy as a single face, to take pleasure in a strike they saw on a screen. The image at the top of this essay, the grinning madman wiring a bomb in a basement, is the picture every war sells. Some such people exist. But a public that sees a whole country through that picture is a public ready to approve anything. The first thing a small group can do is decline to be recruited inwardly: to hold that picture at arm's length, and to keep in mind the millions of ordinary people living under each government.

Withhold consent quietly and plainly. Woolman didn't denounce his neighbors. He just didn't take part, and said why when asked. Not cheering, not repeating the slogans, and saying calmly what you think when it comes up, is a small act. Multiplied, it's the thing that makes a war hard to sustain, because a war that most people merely tolerate is far more fragile than one they believe in.

Keep goodwill toward everyone the war touches. Iranians under the bombs, Saudis in the airport, Yemenis in Taiz, the sailors on both sides of the strait. Paine's foreign policy was friendship with all nations through commerce. Its root is a disposition: the refusal to count any people as an enemy just because their government is one. A people that keeps few enemies in its heart is a people that is hard to mobilize.

Stay calm. Between the montage and the catastrophe frame, war coverage pulls toward either excitement or dread. Both are forms of capture. The steadiness to keep reading, keep score, and not be swept along is itself a contribution, and it's contagious in a way that panic is not.

Live the alternative. Woolman's most persuasive argument was his own life, a man visibly at peace with what he did and didn't do. The same goes for a foreign policy of commerce and friendship. Each person who trades with, corresponds with, learns from, and helps people abroad without needing their government's permission or their own government's war is a small working model of what the essay is arguing for.

None of this will stop a bombing campaign next month. But spirit is what wars draw on, and what's left when they end, and it's the one front on which the few aren't outnumbered.

What responsibility looks like

So, stated plainly, here is what we'd ask for, knowing we won't be the ones deciding: no American kinetic involvement in the Iran war or the Yemeni civil war. End the blockade. Don't join the Saudi offensive. Lift the sanctions that feed the Revolutionary Guard. Stop paying for the shipping lanes and stop subsidizing the arms trade. Let Congress vote, and treat a war it won't authorize as a war the country hasn't chosen.

But the position isn't only a list of things the government shouldn't do, because that version of non-intervention really would be a way of looking away. The harder part falls on citizens, and it's the part Franklin's committee and Ragusa's consuls understood.

Know the region from the inside out. Read the peninsula's own press, not only the coverage that sorts every event by what it means for Washington or Jerusalem. Learn the difference between a Zaydi and a Twelver, between the Houthis' war with Riyadh and Iran's war with America. Keep a ledger of what you expected and check it against what happened, including against the essays you agreed with.

Put your money where it does the least harm and the most good. Know what your pension fund owns. Give to the people feeding Yemenis rather than to campaigns for more war. Trade, travel, and stay in contact with people in the region whenever it's possible, because commerce and correspondence are how free people stay friends with nations whose governments they disagree with.

And demand that wars be paid for in the open. A war that has to be voted on, and taxed for, and argued about, is a war that will be fought far less often. That's the one thing that would change American foreign policy more than any other, and it's the one the current arrangement is built to avoid.

Paine's advice was to steer clear of other people's contentions. Steering is an active verb. It takes someone at the helm who knows where the rocks are.

Sources

A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is mine. I chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.