In the sweltering heat of a second Trump term, the ghosts of interventionist folly are stirring once more. On October 31, 2025, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare Nigeria a "country of particular concern" for religious freedom violations, alleging an "existential threat" to Christianity there. By November 1, the rhetoric had escalated: Trump threatened to halt all U.S. aid to Africa's most populous nation and ordered the Pentagon—now rebranded by the president as the "Department of War"—to prepare for "fast, vicious" military action. "If we attack," he wrote, "it will be...

When the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder and longtime editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote in 2011 that the anti-interventionist movement needed a “big picture” framework, he was attempting to distill decades of polemic into a theory of international relations. In his essay “Looking at the ‘Big Picture,’” he dubbed this framework “Libertarian Realism.” Though Raimondo never set down a book-length treatise, his insights remain an invitation for libertarians to articulate a systematic foreign policy rooted in their own intellectual traditions. At its core, libertarian realism rests on two...

For several years and in a variety of works at the Libertarian and Mises Institutes, I have argued that Washington’s bipartisan consensus about Beijing as an aggressive, revisionist challenger to U.S. global supremacy was deeply misguided. Far from seeking global hegemony, I have maintained that China’s ambitions are modest, largely defensive, and overwhelmingly focused on domestic stability and development. Now, new peer-reviewed research published in International Security under the title “What Does China Want?” provides powerful empirical backing for those claims, dismantling much of the...