When Foreign Liberals Are Generous with American Lives and Money

Before becoming wedded to statism in America, liberalism was a philosophy of liberation. But while leading liberals of the past advocated peace, many foreign (“classical”) liberals today favor war—at least, if conducted by America. For instance, former chess champion Garry Kasparov has taken on the heroic but thankless task of battling for democracy in his Russian homeland. Alas, he also is surprisingly generous with other people’s lives. He recently declared: “Anything less than a major U.S. and NATO-led ground offensive against ISIS will be a guarantee of continued failure and more terror attacks in the West.” Kasparov is confused over cause and effect, since terrorism most often follows intervention, as did the recent Islamic State strikes against France, Hezbollah and Russia. But there is a more basic point. It’s easy for a celebrity Russian living in the West to argue that it is the job of Americans, with maybe a couple Europeans tossed in, to destroy ISIS, save Syria, and more. But there’s actually nothing liberal in pushing a broader, longer war on others. Kasparov is not alone. A number of foreign liberals—Lithuanian, Russian, Slovakian, Swedish, for instance—have criticized American libertarians for advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy. They’ve instead argued that a “compelling” argument can be made for a “globalist” strategy. Actually, that’s true only so long as one isn’t paying the cost of the foreign policy. As foreign...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs