Realpolitik

A libertarian assessment of power and position of foreign players should dwell primarily on a political union’s capability at directing resources efficiently. Whether authoritarian, democratic or in between the primary criteria of American foreign policy should be to support those that more or less distribute efficiently and disentangle from those that don’t.  Disentangling means releasing the bolts on a pressure cooker containing a dysfunctional system sooner rather than later and never never defend to the end a regime that does disservice to our Declaration of Independence, such as Vietnam’s Diem regime.

The pressure cooker of the middle east is currently Egypt. A libertarian realism would assess that the arms we provide, typically aircraft, will be useless in the revolution that is sure to come. The revolution in Iran is the perfect example of the counterproductiveness of our full on support of a corrupt dysfunctional regime.  That a revolution is sure to come is a libertarian conclusion regarding Egypt’s crony capitalist market disfunction and absence of the rule of law. When Egypt does convert we stand to be on the wrong side, again, with another unforgivable tarnishing of our heritage of liberty and adding another implacable enemy to our list.

A libertarian realism is one that does not put the cart before the horse when assessing the power dynamics within a region. The horse required is a political union whose citizens, not outside recruits, are willing to fight to the death for their cause. It appears that the lesson not learned by our foreign policy experts is that an attempt to use the military to change an outcome of a weak political union is doomed to fail.  Currently in Iraq, American policy is to jawbone a political union among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.  Each of the three sects are unions willing to fight to the death for their own, but not for a unified Iraq.  Libertarian realism would recognize that pursuit of this apparently wrongheaded policy is counterproductive. The evidence for this conclusion is that the few successes in Iraq and Syria have come from the Kurdish pesh merga forces of Iraq’s Kurdistan, the most unified and efficient political union of the region.

Finally, taking sides in a rebellion is counterproductive no matter how grotesque the rebels actions. Assad’s Syria suffers from serious political dysfunction.  The public beheadings of western journalists by ISIS was a rational recruiting and fear mongering tool for establishing a Sunni stronghold in Syria and Iraq.  The braggadocio of a caliphate was tempered by overreach in Kobani, a Kurdish city with a strong interest into not submitting to a Sunni reign.  With this and other setbacks ISIS has now morphed into Daesh, a less imperialistic union practicing a more effective distribution of scarce resources so as to gain political credibility among Sunnis. It’s so much better than Iraq’s tainted distribution by Shiites that Sunnis polled today would indicate a preference to Daesh versus Baghdad.  Destroying ISIS as this point is taking sides in a civil war.

Another rebel group is the Turkish Kurds PKK.  We have taken sides by labeling the group terrorists at Turkey’s behest, yet the Kurds are our ally in the fight against ISIS and so it goes throughout the Middle East.  Taking a neutral position such as Switzerland has a pacifying effect.  Ultimately a pacifying effect is what people want in a foreign policy so that more trade and interpersonal contact is made, also pacifying. Yes a strong military is necessary to defend our citizens and borders but one directed by a foreign policy that doesn’t squander its capabilities. One that pacifies rather than provokes.