The notion that independent states are “equal” is a new phenomenon in geopolitics that the West, in a unique moment of naïve optimism for the future and reckless ignorance of reality, introduced after the Second World War. We have too easily fallen for this dangerous lie.
This relativistic sentiment – that all state governments around the world are perfectly morally interchangeable – is perhaps best exemplified by the pro-Hamas, pro-Russian, pro-mullahs account “Musafir” on X, with these memes:
The irony is lost on Musafir that his memes are correct.
False “equality of states”
It is, in fact, an invasion when Russia aggresses against Ukraine, terrorism when Hamas targets Israeli civilians, and war crimes when Russia and China repress their own people. And it is in fact self-defence when Ukraine and Israel shoot back at those attacking them – even if it leads to (non-targeted) civilian collateral – and it is unfortunate but necessary for countries like the United States to take neutralisation action against the dregs of the world.
Why?
Because Russia is less free than Ukraine, Israel is freer (as a matter of domestic policy, lest someone respond with “but occupation!”) than both the jurisdictions governed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and the United States is freer than Russia and China.
The state is subject to the same rule wherever it may be found: its government is and must be limited to the protection of life, liberty, and property (let’s call this “freedom”). In this, there is absolute equality of states – there exists no exception anywhere on the planet of a government that is allowed to aggress against freedom.
That is where the supposed equality of states ends, because governments that do in fact (on a relative, sliding scale) respect freedom, are not equal to those governments that do not. The former is (again: on a relative, sliding scale) more superior, more moral, and more justified in its conduct, than the latter.
Only by virtue of respecting freedom? Yes, only by virtue of respecting freedom.
This means that we cannot argue that “because state X did Y, we run the risk that state Z might also now do Y”. Y is something that state X gets to do, because it respects freedom more than state Z, which does not get to do Y. (Not that any of this stops state Z from doing what it wants anyway, which is a detail opponent of muscular foreign policy often miss.)
I did not just pluck this principle from the air – we observe it routinely, as a matter of course.
A family’s most responsible child, whether they are the oldest or not, is usually the one who “gets” to be in charge when mom and dad are away. The more knowledgeable and experienced applicant in the realm of accounting is more likely to be appointed to the vacant “accountant” position in a firm.
In the realm of states, the standard is not prudence, knowledge, or experience, but freedom.
Some will find it very tempting to say I have elevated freedom arbitrarily, and that there is no real basis upon which I can claim that only “freedom credentials” gives rise to this principle of differentiated treatment in international affairs.
The problem critics must inevitably run into, however, is that if they deny freedom as the standard, then the legitimacy upon which the modern Westphalian state (found on every inch of the planet but for places like Sentinel Island) irrevocably collapses.
The state may only rightly impose its will on those within its jurisdiction if they are presumed to have consented to its authority, and presumed (as opposed to actual) consent can only logically be premised on the state ensuring a bare-minimum of basic justice that we can reasonably assume every person in the world would consent to.
This, however, is a massive can of worms, which I have thankfully dealt with in great detail elsewhere. Long story short: it is far more radical to claim freedom is not the standard, than to claim that it is, because the former leads to the collapse of the legitimacy of the modern state all around the world.
Human freedom
The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index is, to my mind, the best current measure of this hierarchy. It is a composite index that accounts for various other measurements of civil, political, and economic freedom.
The index shows, clearly, that the United States is a significantly freer state (which also happens to be the only state in the world capable of projecting its power far afield, giving rise to the spontaneous phenomenon of “world police”) than the orders of magnitude less free Iranian and Venezuelan states. To any liberal mind, this must establish a moral hierarchy rather than equivalence.
I take it a step further and submit that it establishes a moral justification for intervention – a just cause – but only in the direction of freer to less free. (Practical and logistical justification is a separate, though no less relevant, factor.)
It is debatable whether the United States did in fact act against the Venezuelan state at all, though. According to American policy – and the much vaunted “democracy” – the true government of Venezuela is represented by Edmundo González, and that Nicolás Maduro is simply a powerful warlord. There is widespread agreement – except for Maduro’s criminal syndicate and their allies in South Africa’s Government of National Unity – that González won the 2024 election hands-down. President González has implicitly welcomed the limited American intervention.
This is not me being – as I have been accused of being – an uncritical Americophile or “Trump supporter”, because, as you see, Denmark ranks higher than the United States on the Cato index. If the American military invades Danish Greenland, it would be acting illegitimately, for which Trump should be removed from office and imprisoned.
So, none of this means the freer state is incapable of acting immorally.
American troops who tortured and killed noncombatants (including captives) in Iraq and Afghanistan should be dealt with harshly by law. This extends to the destruction of property – tank operators driving over abandoned cars (owned by civilians) “for fun” – just as much as it does to the destruction of life.
What this principle does is allow us to answer, however, is broadly whose side in the intervention per se (not everything that conceivably might happen during the intervention) we should take. This is why – and it is the only reason why – I am on Israel’s side in the Palestinian conflict, on Ukraine’s side in the Russian conflict, on Armenia’s side in the Azerbaijan conflict, and on America’s side in the Venezuelan conflict.
“Might makes right”
When we rally against “might makes right”, we are implicitly saying the law must limit the powerful. This is a notion of what we would today call domestic law, specifically constitutional law.
When Hugo Grotius wrote arguably the first treatise on the law of nations, the principles he enunciated were virtually indistinguishable from the principles of ordinary domestic law.
But we are a long way away from that with today’s international law.
Imagine if domestic law provided that the police may not intervene in an ongoing sexual assault or murder unless the assaulter and his gang provide consent. We would be rightly outraged. And yet, modern international law says that a country, like Venezuela, must invite intervention, and failing that, the United Nations, which is largely made up of similarly tyrannical states, must authorise it.
Calling this a “system of rules” or, worse yet, the “liberal world order”, is perverse. The United Nations and so-called international law are in fact the embodiment of “might makes right”, countenancing tyranny all around the world, and both should be rejected with contempt.
Instead, we must look back to natural law and natural rights – imperfectly quantified in the Cato index – as our yardstick for the “right”.
According to natural rights, the power to act against evil is inviolable. People like Maduro or Ali Khamenei in Iran, or in the past Saddam Hussein in Iraq, do and should have no recourse to any legal standard to protect them or their regimes against intervention.
There never was such a thing as a “rules-based order” separate from the power of the world’s hegemon, the United States of America. It never existed, and to the degree that it was sometimes divorced from the hegemon, it only protected tyrants.
We are in a very fortunate position of having a liberal state as the world’s hegemon (the United States ranks 10th in the Cato index). And, indeed, if the world’s hegemon were Russia or China, I would agree with other authors in these pages entirely about restraint. But it is not, and there is no moral equivalence of states.
It matters, deeply, that the world’s hegemon is the United States in particular – whether under a Republican or Democratic administration – and it is because it is the United States that some of the opportunistic “rules” must yield to the higher purpose of taking tangible and meaningful action against tyranny.
When dealing with tyrants and dictators, in the absence of their surrender, contempt and/or violence should be the only legitimate means of communication.
To tyrants, the answer is “no”
The remedies that others have proposed as alternatives to military action against tyrants – democracy, trade, cooperation, multilateralism, sanctions, and pressure – is their wholesale insufficiency.
We would never abide the Police Service saying they are “applying pressure” on a group of zama zamas that has taken women and children hostage, proposing trade agreements so that “minerals cross boundaries, not cops”, or freezing their bank accounts – we would demand (measured, responsible) police action.
It cannot be that we offhandedly declare that “domestic policy” and “foreign policy” are distinct in response to this. They are unalike in form, but in many ways very alike in substance.
We have erected arbitrary exceptions for state governments that should never have been countenanced, certainly not by liberals. Responding to a regime that mows down protesters in the streets with “pressure” is as morally vile as it would be for the police to respond to a gang mowing down civilians in the streets with “pressure”.
The “realist” incentives on state governments to only act in their own interests exist as much in the domestic sphere as it does in the international sphere, but we overcome them with countervailing moral imperatives. It is decidedly against the interests of a police officer to rush into harm’s way, but society has in a relatively short space of time made it clear that that is the moral duty of the police officer, a burden the officer accepts.
There was a time – the “Never Again” moment – after the Second World War when we were on the cusp of signalling to tyrants that their time was over and that we had elevated this moral imperative to the international realm. Authoritarian statism won out in the end, however, because liberals did not press their advantage, which is now seemingly a characteristic requirement for being liberal in the modern era.
None of what I have written is an opportunistic seizing of a dubious moment of “winning”, however, in the same way many on the right cheer on illiberal conduct by “their side” just to own the libs. I have long held this position.
In 2022, Nicholas Woode-Smith and I co-wrote a contribution (appropriately titled, “To Tyrants, the Answer is ‘No’”) for the peer-reviewed journal Cosmos + Taxis on this very topic, available to read here. Thereafter I was invited to contribute a chapter expanding on this argument in a peer-reviewed book published in 2024 by Springer Nature, available here.
It is in this latter work that I argue, far from prohibiting it, the “rules-based order” is supposed to bring about a responsibility to protect, decidedly as opposed to an opportunity to protest. I also survey and respond to various objections to interventionism.
Kneejerk doomerism
Over the years I have become more wary of my fellow libertarians’ kneejerk doomerism when characterising the consequences of foreign intervention.
“Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters”, we are confidently told, without even a moment’s thought being spared for the Iraqis who would otherwise have been disappeared by the Hussein regime, or the whole generation of Afghani women who had an opportunity to study at university.
What about the interventionism of the 1950s in the south of the Korean Peninsula, producing one of the world’s freest and most prosperous societies? Or the intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, which saved countless lives from ethnic cleansing? Or the intervention in Grenada in 1983 which toppled a dictator, replaced by a period of stability? Or, of course, the intervention in Germany and Japan in the 1940s which created two flourishing central pillars of the Western global bloc?
The “libertarian” insistence on foreign interventionism inherently being a fool’s errand is a boldfaced lie.
The recent American intervention in Venezuela led directly to the release of political prisoners. The joint American-Israeli strikes on Iran in 2025 fundamentally broke the image of a militarily powerful regime in Tehran, which emboldened a whole movement of Iranians to rise up against oppression, with the American government promising some kind of further help.
At the time of writing, Israel and America are however discrediting themselves by not coming to the assistance of the revolutionaries.
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in particular has much to answer for, after he called on Iranians to “take to the streets” and that Israel would “stand with” them if they did so. As he accused the Iranian regime of “lying through their teeth”, he now stands accused of the same sin.
And do not get me started on US President Donald Trump’s petulant approach to María Corina Machado in Venezuela.
Hopefully this changes soon, because as things stand at this moment, the West is mocking the people of Iran and Venezuela in the same way one mocks a pet by dangling a treat in front of its nose only to pull it away at the last moment.
A botched intervention is condemnable. But leaving tyranny in peace is unforgivable.
Again, I did not just pluck this from the air: we live by it, every day.
If the Special Task Force intervened in the zama zama situation only for the terrorists to kill the hostages, we would be rightly outraged. But if the Police Service, instead, said “No, we will do nothing. Good luck!”, South Africans would not merely be outraged – the state’s legitimacy would simply collapse under the weight of an entire population withdrawing from the social contract.
Freedom is worth fighting for, at home and abroad, and it is only because of a naïve refusal to fight for freedom wherever it may be threatened that tyranny and the toxic ideologies that underlie it creeps ever closer to our free societies. This is as true for the influence of Hamas and Iran in South Africa, as it is for the influence of Russia and China in the United States.
[Image: Khamenei.ir CC BY 4.0]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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