Individual Liberty and the Responsibility to Protect: Toward a Neolibertarian Foreign Policy

Abstract

This paper develops a distinctly libertarian, or “neolibertarian,” approach to foreign policy grounded in the principle that the State’s core responsibility is to protect individual liberty and self-ownership – the Responsibility to Protect Liberty (R2PL). Martin van Staden argues that libertarianism, being cosmopolitan and focused on the abstract Individual rather than particular nationalities or cultures, must apply its universal principles consistently to international affairs, not merely domestic ones.

Drawing on the contemporary international norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which holds that states forfeiting their duty to shield populations from mass atrocities lose legitimate sovereignty, the author formulates R2PL as its libertarian counterpart. Governments exist to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. When a state fails this duty – or actively violates it – other states, bound by the same universal obligation and unable to discriminate on grounds of nationality, acquire a responsibility to intervene.

The paper defends foreign military intervention as a justifiable, sometimes necessary, element of libertarian foreign policy. It reframes just war theory around defense of persons (self or others), critiques paleolibertarian non-interventionism as inconsistent with cosmopolitan individualism, and rebuts common objections based on taxation, citizenship, moral aversion to violence, historical US misadventures, cultural relativism (“they don’t want freedom”), risks to domestic liberty, and charges of “imperialism”.

While acknowledging pragmatic limits, costs, and the need for non-military measures first, Van Staden contends that allowing tyranny to fester undermines both global security and domestic freedom through spillover effects and exported authoritarian practices. A neolibertarian foreign policy prioritises liberty over peace-at-any-cost or mere national interest, rejecting the notion that borders absolve states of their protective mandate. Libertarians must confidently apply their principles abroad as at home: to tyrants who violate individual rights, the answer is intervention when necessary.