brute is not convinced this is true.
to be honest, brute is torn on foreign policy intuitively he doesn't believe that aggressive war (like the US currently wages, or others Mister Imperceptible has mentioned) are ever justified, necessary, or even net positive.
on the other hand, a lot of humans brute otherwise agrees a lot with (Ben Shapiro, Bret Stephens) are a lot more hawkish and make similar arguments. the US is often brought up as an example of how hawkism is positive/necessary, but there are plenty of periods in US history when the US was very non-inverventionist and still didn't get conquered.
in fact, brute believes that the form of government/army doesn't necessarily have that big an impact on being conquered. in WWII, France got owned pretty quickly BECAUSE they had an extremely centralized government and army - easy to cut the head off and take over. Switzerland, which only has a small army but a big militia culture and a ton of mountains, positioned itself as to not be a valuable target to be conquered.
it could be said that the US has never been conquered because there is a bunch of water in front of it. even if an enemy army landed, it would be impossible to control a population with 300 million guns. that the US also had a military might not make such a big difference for defense.
so brute thinks it depends on what the goal is. is the goal to project power, advance national/economic/political interests? then concentrated military power is necessary. is the goal not be be conquered? hedgehog tactics like Switzerland or pre-WWII USA might be better suited.
the next thing is economics. many wars are won by being richer. this is essentially how the US has won every war since 1900. if not having a centralized, standing army increases GDP growth by 1%, then in the long run, it will become easier and easier to defend versus countries wasting money on armies.
and nothing says that a libertarian society would not have a bigger or better army than the same society with a central government. theoretically, a libertarian society could decide that security is so important to them that they would spend way more money (and they'd have way more) than their state would've. it is hard to imagine maybe, but totally possible.
so brute isn't quite as sure on foreign policy as he is on other libertarian topics that are much easier to figure out. but he's not convinced, from a historical perspective or in principle, that a centralized government/army typically yields better results than no, especially when all else is not equal and it comes at the expense of other strategies.
as such, Mister Imperceptible's statements like "pay taxes to watch Netflix" are non-sequiturs. brute could also say he likes to pull sick wheelies for world peace, but there is simply no sufficient causal relation.
Mister Imperceptible wrote: ↑Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:53 am
I do not know what we are moving toward. If not mutual annihilation as a result of war or species extinction as a result of climate change, the alternative is the entire world becoming one nation-state, likely under some oppressive and horrific hive mind.
brute thinks this is an important point that most humans that are not libertarians get confused on, including most of the modern pro-Euro humans.
Bastiat wrote:If goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.
as mentioned by DLj, economic interdependence or trade leads to peace. this is because trade is a positive-sum game. both parties of a voluntary transaction benefit from it, otherwise it would not happen. it is thus in both parties' egoistic interest not to start a war with the other side.
on the other hand, politics is mostly a zero-sum game. the EU is actually a hugely negative-sum game, because of the massive bureaucratic overhead. many European humans have realized this now, and are voting against it. (in fact, brute believes no European nation has ever held a referendum that ended up voting FOR the EU, but plenty that voted against - he doesn't know too much about this though).
if the EU enacts a law, this takes away freedoms from France's citizens. if the EU takes from Germany and gives to Greece, there are losers to the transaction.
thus the conflation of all things EU is very distracting. brute is very much pro European (or world, for that matter) free trade, but he is very much against a super-national (or any, for that matter) government. government leads to mostly zero-sum thinking. trade leads to positive-sum thinking.
this is why brute thinks Brexit is great IF they manage to establish free trade outside of the EU treaties.
being pro-Europe and pro-EU-political-body are two very different things, but it is in the interest of the EU bureaucracy to conflate the two. just like it is in the interest of US pro-governmentalists to insist that being against forceful taxation is equal to hating poor humans.