Hmmm

I’m not sure where I stand on this one. There appears to be a storm brewing and it did have a silver lining. David Davis at the LA and Patrick at Towards Mutual Benefit have had a disagreement over interventionist/non-interventionist foreign policy, among other things. The silver lining being that I had somehow managed to miss Towards Mutual Benefit, and have now added it to my RSS reader. That’s my silver lining anyway. A larger one is that debates like these are neccesary (in both senses) and they get people’s attention.

Where I stand on the issue at hand, well… As I said several months ago, when I was just getting started, I am not libertarian as simply a principle, but arrived here (through a fairly toturous route) because it is apparent to me that it is simply the most efficient way for a society to function, and progress, and rub along together. While I would love to be all purist about these things, I’m not sure that in the real world it would work. ‘Libertarianism with a big stick’ I can go along with, and would be the main reason why I’m not an anarchist. It’s all very well having no state at all and everything would be lovely until some decidedly unlibertarian Johnny Foreigner took a shine to our green and pleasant land. So some well-trained and well equipped armed force is neccesary. What form it should take, I leave to minds greater than my own.

I also accept that sometimes, in the real world, it is neccesary to strike first. Not attacking a foreign force until the bombs actually start raining down on us might be wonderfully principled, but I would prefer to be a bit ungentlemanly than welcome, for example, EU forces parading through Marble Arch with Tony Blair taking the salute.

For the same reason, I am in favour of Britain holding nuclear weapons, although possibly not for purposes of publicly pointing them at people. I would prefer that guns did not exist, but I am wholeheartedly in favour of gun rights. We can’t uninvent guns, so the safest course of action is to own one ourselves. The same, I believe, holds true for nuclear weapons. They exist, so we need to have some. Some of our own, that is. Not Trident II, which, so far as I understand it would merely involve us holding them for the US, like some gansta’s biatch holding his pistol while he plays basketball. North Korea managed to build one of their very own for chrissakes, so why can’t we?

Fully interventionist foreign policy though? No. Forcing libertariansism down people’s throats at the barrel of a gun sounds too much like the creed of George W. Bush to me, although admittedly, I’m sure that wasn’t really his motive. If a foreign power is threatening us then by all means give them a bloody nose, but invading countries because we don’t like their system leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I was never in favour of the Iraq war, and never will be, no matter how well it turns out. It’s a bad road to travel down, because, above all, it is simply none of our business. Once you start interfering, you have to keep interfering to correct your previous mistakes, all the while adding names to the list of people that want you dead.