Isolationism and Environmentalism – the Common Ground

Modern warfare is not eco friendly: massive fuel consumption, burning buildings, heavy metal fragments scattered all over everywhere… And just imagine the mess if we were to get into a bombing war with a nation which has nuclear power plants. Not good!

Conversely, we could use a bit of environmentalism as a substitute for war. Wars are often fought over natural resources. Most of the recent US wars have been connected to oil and gas. Even our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is so connected: conservative elements in Saudi Arabia were offended by women soldiers in their holy land; they used Afghanistan as a base of operations for a terrorist attack on the US…

If you look at green energy as a substitute for war, it doesn’t look so expensive…

The Political Possibilities

Peace and paleoconservatism is a winning combo when it comes to attracting young voters. The experiment has already been done. Ron Paul was able to attract Bernie like crowds. He had hippie supporters. His cause had mass quantities of uncoordinated campaign support which was not astroturf in action. There was even a Ron Paul blimp.

He inspired such youthful support despite the fact that:

Peace, balanced budgets, and dialing down the Drug War were all that it took to make Ron Paul hip.

Now imagine taking out the taint of racism and adding in some market friendly environmentalism. We have a formula for real smaller government conservatism with a future.

Isolationism vs. Non Interventionism

Many libertarians dislike the term Isolationism, preferring Non-Interventionism. Said libertarians generally want less isolation from the world. They want wide open borders and even lower trade barriers.

This is a contradiction.

Income taxation with zero tariffs constitutes Subsidized Outsourcing, not Free Trade. To make zero tariffs work, you need coordination of tax policy with all trading partners. This is the path towards World Government. Look at what happened in Europe.

Likewise, wide open borders lead to military interventions. If we have to deal with the refugee flow from every crisis and injustice around the world, there is going to be calls for libervention. Fix the problem at the source. Authority gravitates towards whoever has responsibility.

Come to think of it, our leaky borders combined with our drug war are the cause of many of the refugee problems to the south. We should either legalize the drugs coming in or stop them at the border. Fighting our drug war in other countries is a recipe for refugee crises.

But..but...Those Evil Dictators!!

Yes, there are some pretty bad governments around the world. And when they try to spread their evil, it may make sense to do something.

But when it comes to meddling in the internal affairs of another country, we run up against two very big obstacles:

  1. Other countries have patriots too. Foreign meddling is generally resented even if it is for the best of intentions.
  2. The Evil Emperor form of government can be superior to democracy when a country is deeply divided on tribal or religious lines. Divide and Rule favors minorities. Note how Roman emperors used German soldiers as their personal guards. Read the stories of Joseph and Daniel in the Bible. Note how Saddam Hussein had a Christian deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.



There is much to be said for focusing on our own affairs and setting good examples for other countries to copy as they see fit.

We have a rather large backlog of work to do in this regard! Given the huge size of our prison population, our calls for human rights ring rather hollow at the moment. And before we go off fighting communists abroad, we might want to deal the the Marxist occupation of our own college campuses...