Foreign policy

Foreign policy is a government's conduct toward other nations. Objectivism holds that a government's only proper function is the protection of the rights of its own citizens, so the only proper purpose of foreign policy is their defence, and the only justification for war is self-defence against an actual or imminent initiation of force.

“Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Roots of War", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

The derivation

Nothing in this area is a special case. A government exists to protect its citizens from the initiation of force, and it does so with police against domestic criminals, courts for disputes, and armed forces against foreign aggressors. See Government and Rights.

Three consequences follow immediately, and they are the parts of the position Objectivists do not argue about:

No altruistic wars. A government has no authority to spend the wealth or the lives of its citizens on the welfare of foreigners. Wars fought for humanitarian purposes, national prestige, or the improvement of other peoples are sacrifices of the people whose rights the government exists to protect. See Sacrifice and Altruism.
No foreign aid. Money taken from citizens and given to other governments is a transfer with no relation to the protective function, and in practice it subsidises the regimes it reaches.
No conscription. Rand regarded the military draft as among the worst rights violations a mixed economy commits, on the ground that a country cannot defend individual rights by conscripting the individuals whose rights it claims to defend.

Rights, not nations, are the unit

The principle that a government's authority derives from the rights of its citizens has an uncomfortable corollary that Objectivism accepts rather than avoids: a government that systematically violates the rights of its own population has no moral standing of its own. Sovereignty is not a right that attaches to a state as such. A dictatorship has no right to be free of interference that a free country would have.

This is not the same as a licence to invade. That a regime has no moral claim to immunity does not establish that any particular country ought to spend its citizens' lives removing it, since the question of whether to act remains a question about the interests of the people whose government would be doing the acting. Objectivism separates the two questions and answers only the first from principle.

The same reasoning explains the treatment of civilian casualties, which is the most contested part of this subject inside the movement. The Objectivist position is that moral responsibility for deaths in a war of self-defence lies with the aggressor who made the war necessary, and that a defending country is not obliged to raise the risk to its own soldiers in order to lower the risk to the aggressor's population. Whether that principle has been applied correctly in any particular conflict is a separate argument, and it is one the movement has had loudly.

Where Objectivists disagree

The philosophy establishes the standard, which is the protection of the rights of a country's own citizens. It does not establish what a given threat amounts to, whether a given military action would reduce it, or what the second-order consequences of an intervention would be. Those are factual, strategic, and historical questions.

That is why the disagreements on this forum are real disagreements rather than one side misunderstanding the philosophy. The recurring split:

Some hold that ideologically driven aggression, particularly from states sponsoring terrorism, is a standing threat to which the only proportionate answer is military defeat of the states involved. Leonard Peikoff argued this position publicly after the September 2001 attacks in "End States Who Sponsor Terrorism".
Others hold that the same premises support a far narrower posture: that most interventions have not in fact protected American rights, that standing military commitments abroad are themselves a form of statism, and that treating a country as the unit of analysis smuggles in the collectivism the philosophy rejects. Members here have made this case against the Ayn Rand Institute's positions directly.

Rand's own record does not settle it in either direction, and that is worth knowing before assuming the movement has always been hawkish. She held that the United States was the greatest country in history and morally entitled to defend itself, and she opposed American involvement in Vietnam, on the ground that it served no American self-interest and sacrificed American lives for purposes that were not the country's own. She opposed the draft throughout.

Trade

Trade is not a branch of foreign policy on this view. It is the private activity of citizens, and a government's role is to protect their freedom to engage in it rather than to negotiate its terms. Tariffs, embargoes on private trade, and subsidised export financing are restrictions on citizens rather than instruments against foreigners.

The exception is trade with a regime at war with the country, or one arming for it, which falls under the defensive function rather than under commerce.

Rand also treated the connection between trade and peace as causal rather than sentimental. Free countries do not need to loot, and countries that produce their own wealth have nothing to gain from conquering people who produce theirs, which is the argument of "The Roots of War": war is a consequence of statism rather than of human nature. See Capitalism and Statism.

Common misunderstandings

That Objectivism is isolationist. It holds that a government may act only in defence of its own citizens' rights, which is a standard, not a geography.
That Objectivism endorses whatever the United States does. Rand and Peikoff have both been severe critics of American policy, and the criticism has usually been that it was altruistic rather than that it was aggressive.
That "the moral is the practical" settles what to do. It establishes that a rights-respecting policy is in a country's long-term interest. It does not tell anyone whether a particular military operation will work.
That there is an official Objectivist position on a current conflict. There are positions taken by prominent Objectivists, and they conflict.
That treating a dictatorship as having no rights means every dictatorship should be invaded. It means it has no claim against being stopped when it attacks. Whether to stop it is a question about the interests of the country that would pay for it.
That opposing foreign aid means opposing private assistance abroad. Individuals may spend their own money on anything they value. The objection is to being taxed for it.

Discussion

Foreign Policy, Force, and Collectivism (the internal objection)
Why be pro-American Foreign Policy?
Looking for Books, Articles, Essays, Lectures on Foreign Policy
Has American Foreign Policy Contributed...
Foreign Policy (trade and commercial diplomacy)
Why Ron Paul's Foreign Policy is the most beneficial to US

References

Rand, Ayn. "The Roots of War". Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Rand, Ayn. "The Wreckage of the Consensus". Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Contains her argument against the military draft and her assessment of the war in Vietnam.
Rand, Ayn. "The Nature of Government". The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Peikoff, Leonard. "End States Who Sponsor Terrorism". Published as a full-page advertisement, 2001.

External links

War at the Ayn Rand Lexicon