Libertarianism Properly Understood Isn’t Isolationist

One structural reason you find so many Jew-hating, isolationist libertarians is that libertarianism is a thin theory. It basically says: coercion is wrong except in self-defense—and not much else.

It doesn’t tell you how to think about the rest of the sociopolitical world. That’s left up to you.

So libertarianism isn’t the cause of the ethical failures we see among today’s Groyper libertarians. But it leaves plenty of room for those failures. And many have taken it.

That said, the deeper ideas behind libertarianism do have broader implications—once you actually understand them.

In particular, utilitarian defenses of libertarianism hinge on appreciating the power of decentralization. The free market isn’t just morally permitted—it’s astonishingly productive, precisely because it enables positive-sum cooperation at scale.

And once you internalize that lesson, it doesn’t stay confined to domestic policy.

Take foreign policy.

A libertarian could, in principle, advocate total isolation—everyone on self-sufficient farms, no interaction, no entanglements. That’s technically consistent with the non-aggression principle. But it completely misses one of the strongest arguments for libertarianism: that free exchange and cooperation are what make societies flourish.

That same logic applies across nations.

Isolationism rejects the enormous positive-sum gains available through international cooperation. And some of that cooperation may include the use of force—when it functions to dismantle tyranny and enable freer systems to emerge.

In this episode, I lay out a more complete framework: still libertarian in spirit, but grounded in a deeper understanding of decentralization, cooperation, and the conditions under which force can be part of a positive-sum world.

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Venezuela, Iran, and the case for decentralized international action. Moment 580