The population of Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined is less than the population of the San Francisco metropolitan area (and—bonus—doesn’t include a single person who lives in San Francisco).
Under a system of “direct” election by popular vote this would leave 1,058,000 square miles of America with less influence over who becomes president than 14.4 square inches of the iPhone invented by San Francisco native Steve Jobs, and he’s dead.
Steve Jobs liked to pay lip service to the “environment.” So do the people of the San Francisco metropolitan area.
And yet when it comes to allowing that environment to have any voice in national politics . . .
According to the Census Bureau, 62.7 percent of Americans live in urban areas, on only 3.5 percent of the country’s land. They don’t live in the American environment, they live indoors in the American “in-vironment.”
I’m concerned about the safety and well-being of these people. City folks do go outdoors. But they go outdoors only in order to annoy the place—with their overly revealing bathing suits, skimpy shorts in all seasons, rattletrap mountain bikes, smelly hiking boots, unwieldy backpacks, ugly running shoes, overpriced skis, dim bulb surfer slag, and noisy skateboard antics.
This is why city folks are so often painfully sunburned, afflicted with hypothermia, chased by cougars, eaten by bears, medivaced from nature reserves, bitten by snakes, buried in avalanches, attacked by sharks, and hit by cars.
It’s interesting how rarely these things happen to people who work and live outdoors. Perhaps that’s because they’ve been to Electoral College.
Is a Reasonable, Sensible, Moderate Foreign Policy Even Possible?
As I’ve mentioned, I consider myself to be a libertarian—to a reasonable, sensible, moderate degree. That is, I believe in individual freedom, individual dignity, and individual responsibility as long as I get to be an irresponsible undignified freeloader at least every so often.
Anyway, as a person who subscribes to the principles of libertarianism somewhat, I have somewhat of a problem with foreign policy. Libertarian philosophy is based on free individuals. Many of the world’s individuals aren’t free and, in foreign policy terms, none of us are individuals. We’re little bits and pieces of a nation.
Nations can’t be regarded in the same way as individuals. Nations don’t have equal rights before the law because . . . there is no law. (Oh, supposedly, there’s such a thing as “international law,” but really? Nice try, world court in The Hague.)
Foreign policy is ruled by force. Matthew 11:12, “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”
Foreign policy is never an individual enterprise. “I’m going to invade Ukraine” is a harmless statement—at most a plea for help from mental health professionals. “Russia is going to invade Ukraine” is a different kind of statement, especially if it’s made by the Kremlin.
Foreign policy is always a collective enterprise. Even the freest nations bind their citizens into collective enterprises, particularly when it comes to international relations. In fact international relations are worse than actual relations. As Grandfather O’Rourke said to me, “I don’t care if all the kids next door won Nobel Peace Prizes and all your cousins are in jail, family is family.”
Collective enterprise undercuts individual enterprise. Inside a free nation, individual interests are balanced through democracy and rule of law. Therefore individual enterprise can be assumed to be—over the long term, on average, in aggregate—rational.
Collective enterprise can be assumed to be no such thing. The interests of collective enterprises, such as foreign policy, have no balancing mechanism with the interests of other collective enterprises, such as foreigners’ foreign policy.
Collective enterprises may be inert and benign like coral reefs. But even then they’re thoughtless and lack individual freedom and dignity.
When humans are involved, collective enterprises are more often busy and active and fraught with potential for, at best, amoral conduct and, at worst, outright evils such as dictatorship, oligarchy, or mob rule.
The dictators and oligarchs might be, individually, nice enough people. (I have it on good authority that even Bashar al-Assad is personable around the house.) But they will give in to the temptations of their collective power. And collective power, unlike individual freedom, is not constrained by reason. Likewise mob rule is extremely dangerous no matter whether the mob is wearing slogan T-shirts and carrying hand-lettered placards or wearing bedsheets and carrying flaming crosses.
In other words, collective enterprises suck, and foreign policy is one.
This is the problem. What’s the solution? We’ve tried having no foreign policy at all. Pearl Harbor. Isolationism didn’t work. We’ve tried aggressive internationalism. Vietnam. Didn’t work. We’ve tried apologizing for our aggressive internationalism. Obama. Arab Spring. Didn’t work. We’ve tried sanctions. Putin persists. Kim Jong-un endures. Ayatollah Khamenei abides. Didn’t work. And we’ve tried electing a loudmouth commander in chief and having him go CAPS LOCK on Twitter . . .
Probably there’s no such thing as a foreign policy that “works” in the sense of making problems with foreigners go away. It’s like an endless road trip with kids in the backseat of the car. Sooner or later we’re going to have to turn around and say, “Don’t make me come back there!”
So let’s limit the consideration of foreign policy to America’s use of military force. That’s the crux of the matter, the realpolitik equivalent of parents who spank.
Use of military force is definitionally a collective enterprise. And it’s the part of foreign policy that’s much more dangerous than, for example, trade agreements. I’d rather pay lots for high tariff goods at Target than shoot people, not to mention have them shooting back.
One of the clearest thinkers about American use of military force is former national security adviser, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former secretary of state Colin Powell.
General Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Gulf War. (Did work.) He proposed eight questions that should be answered “yes” before America uses military force. These became known as the Powell
