The instant outpouring of worldwide sympathy for America, Americans and others from over 60 countries¹¹³ lost in the September 11^th attacks has led many to hope that a new global coalition will form to defeat terrorism, or at least hold it at bay. Unfortunately, this war-on-terrorism formulation fundamentally misconstrues the main problem. These are not Basque separatists or the Irish Republican Army. Fighting them would require the combination of police, military, intelligence and international cooperation assets that President Bush is assembling. But what we face now are increasingly powerful acts of war by many primarily Muslim countries that – wittingly or unwittingly – sponsor anti-American terror in their shadows. The most important weapon for this war is a fierce adherence to the principles of freedom. As this book has described, America is far from perfect in this regard, in spite of its reputation and its historical and rhetorical attachment to the concept. We must be very careful that our efforts to assemble allies do not reflect the socialist priorities that have come to dominate domestic policies. If they do, we will both undermine our own ability to fight and increase the size and strength of the enemy.

The requirements of coalition-building – rewarding friendly regimes and punishing unfriendly ones – are largely responsible for the virulent Muslim extremism we now confront, and especially for its rapid coalescing of otherwise diverse factions around a unified hate-America stance. I should be clear that I am not talking about mutual defense alliances, which are appropriate and can be effective both to fight terrorism and to wage war. But we will run into big problems if we seek to hold any coalition together by dispensing aid, trade agreements, debt relief or other differential treatments of the parties to the coalition, especially if such policies are meant to be pursued on a long term and continuing basis. This, of course, is exactly what we are doing now. As a result, we will find that the policy we are pursuing to contain terrorism is essentially an intensification of that which created the current threat, and will make matters worse.

To understand why this is so it is necessary to recognize that America’s engagement in world affairs is characterized by the same interventionism that is causing so much trouble at home – i.e., by those disastrous redistributionist policies discussed extensively in this book. Just as our professional politicians and other elements of the policy elite are always busy allocating outcomes to promote "fairness" domestically, the same policies are applied globally to achieve "fairness" everywhere, often by the same people. And, just as the Government Fairness Enterprise here fosters the dissension, whining, victimizing, victims and hatred of the war of all against all, the same principles applied internationally also foster vehement claims of victimization, angry demands for "justice" – and terrorism. Moreover, because abroad we are always wading into situations that are none of our business, we immediately become the target of the ethnic, religious or other historical grievances of any previously warring factions. Indeed, our presence causes the local parties to ratchet up any conflicts that already existed, and to create conflicts that weren’t there before. Why? Because, as we saw in the last chapter, attacking rivals – verbally or physically – and complaining of bias by policymakers constitute wise strategy for any party to our ministrations, whether we are allocating economic outcomes at home or distributing aid, trade agreements, sanctions and "peace" abroad. From the time we set ourselves (or the UN) up as arbiter, it becomes good strategy for the antagonists to claim victim status and to back up the claim by angrily demonstrating against and attacking their alleged victimizers. In other words, terrorism becomes a good strategy. This is the international equivalent of the racial animosity and increasingly frequent atrocities provoked by such policies as affirmative action and hate crime laws here at home.

But it is much worse abroad. Even genocide is a good political strategy if your people are to be forced by the UN or US to live in a multi-ethnic or multi-religious democracy with your enemies. It is astounding to me that policymakers have ignored the obvious correlation between their peace processes around the world and ethnic cleansing. Whether we’re on the way in, as in Kosovo during the bombing strikes against Serbian forces in 1999,¹¹⁴ or on the way out, as in Rwanda in 1994,¹¹⁵ the very presence or threat of a peace process imposed by the UN or US gives powerful incentives for the parties to kill off rival populations as quickly as possible whenever the peacekeepers aren’t looking or can’t stop it. Given the difficulties described in the last chapter that even we in America have had keeping our own democracy on a constitutional track, it should hardly be surprising that sworn historical enemies would initiate genocide at the prospect of any superpower-imposed (or UN-imposed) democracy. Why not kill your rivals before they can simply vote away your rights and property?

America and the endless tangle of world agencies it dominates are constantly engaged in applying aid here and sanctions there, redrawing borders here and demanding democracy there, moving US or UN troops this way and that, into and out of the Somalias, Bosnias, Rwandas and Lebanons. And the sad string of useless accords – Dayton, Paris, Camp David, Oslo etc. – leave poignant reminders of the hopes for peace dashed by the realities of the "peace process." These interventions have produced no friends we did not already have, and have caused our enemies to proliferate. If you think about it, this result is inevitable. By aiding a friendly regime that is strong enough or democratically electable on its own, we have not gained anything we would not have had anyway. But by propping up weak or unelectable regimes, we are bound to anger either majorities disenfranchised by our maneuvers or disappointed dictators who would have been strong enough to dominate their populations – or both. In any case we are preventing a natural outcome that cannot but leave strong resentment of our intrusions by those most able to mount threats to them. We claim justification for these interventions on moral grounds, of course. We say we are on "humanitarian" missions to prevent famine, refugee crises, oppression, human rights abuses, genocide and other war crimes. But the United States Government is not a private relief agency. Our help always comes with quid pro quos and strings attached that inevitably anger more people than we help. And any dispassionate observer would conclude that, for all our pious proclamations, the results have almost always been the opposite of what we intended. Our policies are actually causing or accelerating the abuses we seek to prevent, such as genocide, even as our confused policymakers mutter "never again" in reference to the Holocaust. ¹¹⁶

Worse, playing this game when there are multiple disenfranchised majorities or disappointed dictators all in the same region and sharing a common religion is potentially fatal to America. Not only are we actually causing the humanitarian disasters we seek to prevent, but our intervening and coalition building to that end is forcing the unification of diverse Muslim populations, sects and ethnicities around a common enemy: America. While it may still be true that most Muslims are not anti-American, we could not adopt a better policy to tip them over to the other side than the global us-against-them coalition against terror that we are now building. I know we are trying to make clear that it is terrorists, not Muslims, that we are going after. And I am aware that we are trying to drop wheat on the refugees that our war is starving to prove the point. But such policies have always backfired before and they are bound to backfire now.¹¹⁷  Whether we are talking about soldiers in Pakistan’s army,¹¹⁸ or students in Indonesia¹¹⁹ or, for that matter, in America, almost every Muslim community has some that sympathize with the radical view. The best way to tip the balance of opinion in their favor is for America to lead a global coalition against Muslim terror, especially one endorsed at our insistence by the UN. No matter how we pretend that it’s not just Muslim terrorists that we are going after (as if we would target those Basque separatists or the IRA), and no matter how we try to spin the effort as not an American but a world campaign ("terror can happen to anyone," "it’s an attack on freedom everywhere," "it’s an attack on civilization itself") it will be 100% clear to any Muslims considering the radical view that it is really only Muslim terrorists we are after, and that America is the leader of the coalition chasing them.

The fact is that it is not possible to give the impression that we are going after all terrorism, because we aren’t, nor should we. In this war, it is only Muslim terror that poses the potentially mortal threat to America. And it is also a fact that, while other capitalist countries present targets besides those that are explicitly American, the ones that pose a danger to us now – and to Western Capitalism – are dangerous because they are American targets. Targets such as American embassies, businesses and other symbols of our presence in the world, including the businesses and embassies of our allies and trading partners, are attractive to the Muslim terrorists only in the degree to which they indirectly get at America. And now that terrorism has exploded onto our shores, those indirect means of attacking America have receded in relative attractiveness in the enemy’s eyes, especially now that his suicide fanatics are clearly living amongst us. Therefore, it is not necessary or appropriate to include all the other countries in our coalition. Doing so only hampers our flexibility to respond in our own defense, and generates animosity toward the United States in the Muslim world.

While the Bush administration was very pleased when the UN on September 28 acceded to our request to require all of its 189 member states to cooperate with our war on terror, it is hard to imagine a more dangerous political development for our country. The headline alone probably produced thousands of terrorist recruits. And when has the UN ever demonstrated the power to compel more than rhetorical compliance in such a venture? Worse, by formalizing the coalition approach, we have only locked ourselves in to constraints on the use of our own power to defend ourselves. Only days after the resolution mandating cooperation against terror passed, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was already clarifying it by explaining that it did not authorize changing regimes or moving militarily on any countries that may support terror without certified proof, presumably proof that would satisfy all the 189 legal systems of the UN’s constituent members. It will undoubtedly require a lot of wheeling and dealing on trade, aid, etc to get and keep all those members on our side. In fact, since their interests often conflict in very fundamental ways, this is an impossible task.

All of this international interventionism and coalition building, like its counterpart, domestic socialism, is fraught with unintended consequences. There is not now and never has been any evidence that the international planners are any better at fashioning social arrangements than the domestic ones. While our best and brightest may have the degrees and experience to convince us that they can master all the flows of economic, ethnic, religious, political and other ingredients in the stew of human engagement to keep us on the right side of developments, or shape them favorably for us, they can’t now and never could. But the difference between the socialist doodlers in our domestic economy, such as the antitrust agencies, and their foreign policy counterparts is that the latter are playing with live ammunition. The best current example of the unintended consequences of foreign intervention is in Afghanistan. Somehow the "freedom fighters" we once trained and armed to resist the Soviets have themselves become the trainers of the militant Islamic fundamentalists from around the world who now oppose America – and they’ve still got our stingers!

With 20/20 hindsight we can see at least some of the failures of policy, intelligence, vision and attention span that produced this disaster. But it is unlikely that we have learned enough from our mistakes to refashion the situation favorably this time. And it is certain that we have not learned that it is our meddling and intrusive planning for these faraway peoples that is the problem in the first place. Just as the domestic planners are always ready with more planning to address the messes they have caused, the foreign policy experts are now full of new, "improved" plans. While we pray that the new line-up of alliances against the terror emanating from Afghanistan will prove more effective than the old one, the new dangers of deals with the likes of Iran and (irony of ironies) Russia are undoubtedly formidable, though mostly unknown. What effect, for example, will our alliance with the other hated (erstwhile) superpower have on radical Muslim recruitment? Is it even conceivable that Iran is interested in helping reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on the United States, when they still call us the Great Satan? Or are we just helping them retain status for their more fundamentalist Shiite terrorists, who have been eclipsed in the terror pantheon in recent years, first by Saddam’s more secular Sunnis, and now by bin Laden, whose roots are in the "puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Muslims." ¹²⁰

Like many Americans, I have consumed dozens of articles in the three weeks since the attacks to try to gain a better understanding of the various sects, branches, ethnicities, histories, regimes and other divisions of the Muslim world, some part of which is now conducting a holy war against us. Only two things are clear to me at this point. First, the complexities are so mind-boggling that wading in with a friend-or-foe approach is bound in the long run to fail, however necessary it may be to meet the immediate threat. Second, the greatest danger to the United States now is that our actions will give those diverse Muslims a common enemy to unite against. Unfortunately, our coalition building is just the kind of policy that will lock us in to long term alliances engaged in that impossible planning task. And it is also just the kind of intervention that cannot help but convince wavering Muslims that they should unite against us. Just as it is not possible to dispense fairness domestically without igniting the war of all against all, giving out various measures of aid, trade, sanctions, etc, or asking different levels of support for our efforts of different countries is bound to generate resentment, animosity and unity among our enemies. It would be far safer and more effective to defend ourselves unilaterally and to seek as soon as possible to end the interventionism that is creating this threat to America.

The coalition building we are now engaged in is a continuation and intensification of that undertaken under the administration of the current President Bush’s father, President George H. W. Bush. It was not surprising, of course, when the first President Bush was faced with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, that he put together the "Persian Gulf Coalition" to provide political cover for our military response to Saddam. Given his background as a former US ambassador to the UN, and the political capital he had invested in his signature policy of a "New World Order," his instincts were always to seek international consensus, rather than engage in unilateral action. The idea was that, in a sole superpower world, a principled US should not unilaterally bully its way around, but should lead the march of civilization to democracy and freedom. Naturally, the United Nations was the primary vehicle through which the initiatives to forge the New World Order would be vetted and implemented.

While that all sounded good, the reality is that maintaining global coalitions centered around the UN’s interventionist role is an impossible task. Just as there is no way to satisfactorily dispense "justice" (equality of outcome) domestically, there is no way to do so internationally, either. And attempting to do so can only incite anger, hatred and not just Hobbes’s metaphorical war of all against all, but actual war. While the US Government has been losing legitimacy at home because of its redistributionist role, the UN has become hated the world over for the same reason. That we are aggressively pursuing this redistributionist policy, and are visibly aligning ourselves with the hated international organization that is its most powerful symbol, can only harm our interests and, at the extreme, doom our nation. We have tried repeatedly to impress Muslims with our good intentions in recent years by protecting them from oppression or worse, and giving them aid. But in country after country, from Saudia Arabia to Afghanistan and Bosnia, from Somalia to Kosovo and Macedonia, there is no evidence that our stature has risen and much that it has fallen in Muslim communities around the world as a result of these interventions. And although we are trying to use international consensus to avoid the impression of bullying, the effect is exactly the opposite. We tell them that freedom, democracy and capitalism are unassailable virtues for a society, and they send their suicide bombers to attack us. We tell them that the Koran does not allow suicide, killing of civilians or Jihad on foreign soil, and they say who are you to tell us what the Koran says.

We Americans – of all citizens of all countries – should know that socialism and redistribution are contrary to Liberty. Not only do our foreign aid, trade agreements and other US-taxpayer-funded interventions rob US citizens of freedom (because we must fund them and because our businesses are affected by them), but they are disruptive and offensive to the freedom of their intended beneficiaries, too. Given that these policies can only proceed at the expense of Liberty, we should have long since suspected that they are at the root of our international problems. It is now too late to undo much of the damage, and it will be difficult to extract ourselves from the peril in which our inattention to Liberty has placed us. But I believe it can be done. The Rule of Law Amendment proposed in the last chapter can be thought of as a guide to necessary action now. Its purpose, if you will recall, is to prevent an array of harmful policies by preventing Government from reshuffling economic or social outcomes, which is Government’s primary or only means of implementing those policies. The amendment would ban, for example, US participation in the redistributionist exercises of the United Nations, as well as any and all restrictions on trade. Although it would take time to debate and pass the amendment – probably too much time, given our current predicament – it can serve as a useful filter to discover what policies should be implemented and which should be abandoned immediately. Some harmful policies, such as general antitrust, may have to await the amendment’s passage to be eliminated. But others, because they present a clear and present danger to national survival now, could be repealed or dropped right away. UN-based coalition building is one of them. The United States can and should act aggressively to defend itself, either unilaterally or with the help of whatever mutual defense alliances it chooses to call upon, such as NATO. But the US should remove itself from the UN and remove the UN from its soil. This would be a clear signal to the world of two new policies: 1) The United States will not engage in any coercion of any peoples or countries and 2) The United States will move forcefully and swiftly to dispatch its enemies and any other threats to its citizens.