Foreign Policy Naïveté

But the Libertarians are so naïve on foreign policy...

Oh really? Really?

Let me tell you about naïveté.

It was the neo-conservatives who were naïve enough to think that nation building in the middle east would actually work. That overthrowing a strongman like Saddam would somehow miraculously end up with a result fundamentally different than Yugoslavia.

It was the neo-conservatives who were naïve enough to think that lines on a map drawn by the British Admiralty actually meant something, and that Iraq was actually a country and not disparate groups of peoples only held together by force.

It was the neo-conservatives who were naïve enough to think that a bombing campaign in Libya would result in anything BUT a giant power vacuum to be filled by psychotic death cultists.

The Libertarian reaction to 9/11? Declare War. No nationbuilding. No "resolution to use force." Certainly no "invading nations that had nothing to do with it". No. The Libertarians wanted a proper declaration of war by the Congress of these United States on Al Queda and nations harboring them. We said "issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal" to private entities and hunt them down like pirates because that is how you deal with non nation state actors.

Because Libertarians are not pacifists. Don't believe me? Go look in their gun closets. No. They simply think that adventurism across the world is neither constitutional, nor actually productive in the long term.

Naïve? You are thinking about the neo-conservative "spread Democracy at the Point of Bayonets" wings of the Republican and Democratic parties.