Does Opposing Intervention Mean Ignoring the Plight of Protesters in Foreign Countries?

Increasing violence in Ukraine
and Venezuela has the usual interventionist suspects pushing for
more “American leadership” in the crises abroad. President Obama
warned of “consequences”
if the violence in Ukraine escalated. That wasn’t enough for the
likes of Peggy Noonan,
who argued for the U.S. government to voice “full-throated
support” for protesters in Ukraine, and called the president’s
statements “meaningless, crouching and process-driven.” Joe Biden,
as he is sometimes wont to do,
went further than Obama, warning Ukraine’s president that the
U.S. could impose sanctions on Ukrainian officials. Though not as
significant as economic sanctions against a whole country, even
such limited sanctions can
serve as a propaganda tool for embattled political leaders.

A principled opposition to sanctions or even military action,
however, is not needed to understand why such actions can have the
opposite of the intended effect. Not only can U.S. action be used
to shore up domestic support and demonize the opposition, it can
also distort priorities on the ground, which ought to be driven by
the grievances of protesters, not what might please the U.S.
government. U.S. national security interests do not necessarily
align with principles of democracy, self-determination or even
human rights. Indeed, they seldom do. Anyone who’s done any kind of
travel abroad is likely to have been exposed to the sentiment of
foreigners that they “love Americans but hate their government.”
For protesters in Ukraine, or Venezuela, or anywhere else to
succeed, it’s paramount that the U.S. stay out of the political
conflict.

That, however, shouldn’t preclude Americans themselves from
having an opinion on the unrest overseas, or even from providing
financial and material support for foreign opposition groups
(though fears of running afoul of federal law might preclude that),
so long as they do it as private citizens free from government
encouragement. The American Conservative argues
it’s difficult to tell who the good guys and the bad guys are in a
place like Ukraine, and question whether protesters share any of
the values Americans do. Yet it’s not difficult for Americans to
sympathize with the side that’s being shot at by government forces,
even if some on that side shoot back. The “right to rebel,” after
all, is one of the reasons the U.S. has a Second
Amendment. 

As Todd Seavey
wrote in the Libertarian Republic earlier this month while
explaining that libertarians and neo-conservatives may be more
“feuding cousins” than “ideological oppositioes,” the suggestion
“that libertarian rights apply inside the (presumably arbitrary)
geographic boundary of the U.S. but do not apply to the (equally
human) Albanians or Cubans or Iraqis overseas would be a bizarre
relapse into leftist, geographically-arbitrary relativism” and that
“the libertarian default should be in favor of those who recognize
no government-drawn borders, those who recognize that the same laws
of economics apply in Albania and in Texas and that written law
everywhere should reflect that fact.” At the very least,
libertarians should not excuse the actions of tin-pot dictators
abroad because they’ve positioned themselves as anti-American, nor
because of tin-pot dictators at home, and ought to understand that
making a judgment on the struggle of people abroad to change their
governments doesn’t translate to support for action by the U.S.
government.