Well, no, the occupation of India and much of the East African rift valley does not in any way morally justify the Blitz or more generally the whole German war effort, just as the presence of slavery in the Southern states didn’t obviate the evil of Gen. Sherman’s march, and I apologize if my comment gave the impression that I felt that way. However, the existence of the “Empire upon which the Sun never sets” does problematize the standard narrative of an almost preternaturally evil Germany prepared to carry out world conquest fighting against the plucky little islanders of Great Britain who merely wanted tend to their gardens.

For what it’s worth, had I been a foreigner in 1861 I wouldn’t exactly have jumped to aid the Confederate cause, just as I would have been reluctant to assist the UK in 1939.

I don’t mean Britain was innocent in every way; I mean that it was clearly on the right side in this war. How is your argument different from the arguments used to excuse Sherman’s march? (I would assume you oppose the march, and Mr. Larison certainly does.) “Who cares if innocent Southerners had their houses burned down and their crops destroyed? They weren’t really innocent if they owned slaves!” I might also mention that the generation that endured the bombing of Britain was the same generation that ultimately ended the Empire, although, of course, no one could have foreseen this at the time and it was certainly not the policy of Churchill himself.

Furthermore, while I definitely would have been a Little Englander had I been a Victorian Briton, some good things did come out of the British Empire - the end of the Atlantic slave trade (albeit after a lengthy period in which Britain was instead one of the trade’s worst malefactors), a crackdown on barbaric Hindu practices like suttee, the spread of Christianity to Africa (as a Catholic, I have to give even more credit to France, Spain, and Portugal in this regard), Westminster as “the mother of parliaments,” etc. I am unaware of anything good that come of Third Reich or that possibly could have come out of it even if it actually had lasted a thousand years.

What was so bad about Charles Lindbergh?

I have a rather difficult time reconciling the circa 1939 U.K.’s enslavement of 20% of humanity with this supposed “innocence.” There was nothing “innocent” about the U.K. and France carving up almost half the world among them; why should we banish Hitler to the lowest levels of Hell for occupying Bohemia and Poland yet ignore the far more hellish British occupation of India or that of France in Indochina?

Patrick Buchanan was absolutely right in 1999 in “A Republic, not an Empire” and he is still correct today. We should have simply allowed the European and Asian imperial powers to bleed each other white for around a decade; this would have saved the lives of 425,000 American young men and, more importantly, the
U.S. would have avoided the exhausting forty year standoff with the Soviets.

Even from a purely national interest standpoint, I can’t imagine that all of Europe under a genocidal monster would have been something the U.S. could have ignored in the long run, so why not get the fight over with as soon as possible?

Whether it would have been against the national interest isn’t relevant as it wasn’t going to happen anyway - Germany lacked the massive petroleum reserves it needed to project power deep into the USSR on a long term basis and it was inevitable that there would be some contraction of the eastern front regardless of whether America would have entered the war. It would have also been nigh impossible to overrun Britain with (what was left of) the surface fleet of the Kriegsmarine bottled up in the Baltic Sea for the duration of the war. The most likely end state of a Second World War without American involvement would have been a continental Europe split between Moscow and Berlin and an independent Britain, which, to be honest, doesn’t strike me as being that terrible. The Thousand Year Reich and the Great Worker’s Paradise could have fought the Cold War against each other, with America returning to its traditional policy of non-intervention.

World War I was different in neither side was unambiguously in the right. I think the Allies had a better case on the whole, especially after the invasion of Belgium, but the fact that the Serbian government probably had been aware of Princip’s plans makes me have sympathy for the Central Powers as well (despite the genocidal presence of the Ottomans on their side). Of course, in a way this was true of World War II also after monstrous Germany invaded the equally monstrous U.S.S.R, but there was still a clearly innocent party fighting on the Allied side (Britain, of course) and unnumerable crushed innocent parties under Hitler’s thumb, which was a good deal worse than being under Kaiser Wilhelm’s thumb. Even from a purely national interest standpoint, I can’t imagine that all of Europe under a genocidal monster would have been something the U.S. could have ignored in the long run, so why not get the fight over with as soon as possible?

If the West’s suicide in 1914-18 didn’t merit our intervention, and I don’t think it did, what is really any different about WWII?

Where it gets complicated (and there is no evident agreement among libertarians), is in how retaliatory or defensive force applies to distant injustices. Saddam’s regime did pose a huge threat to life and liberty — to many Iraqis, and maybe to some of the neighboring people. But it did not to us.

So, McArdle is right in that libertarians should abhor a state like Saddam’s more than moderates might.

But as to what to do about that… well, that’s where the divide is. The dumber libertarians (dumber IMO), decided to support the state on this one. They’d be greeted as liberators! (hook, line, sinker.) The smarter libertarians will tell you that war is the health of the state, and also, that state-building is a fraught enterprise. Just because you eliminate a regime, even a bad one, does not mean you can do any better. Meanwhile, we always lose liberty when at war. (We turned out to be right thus far.)

Note that non-aggression in the Westphalian sense (non-aggression among states), and non-aggression in the libertarian sense (among individuals), are separate things. Whenever a state aggresses against its subjects (and they all do, at least a little), this divide arises at least in theory.