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...

For more than two decades, Washington labored to bring India closer—easing sanctions, opening high-tech trade, recognizing India as a responsible nuclear power, and embedding it in U.S.-led Indo-Pacific strategy. From President George W. Bush’s civil nuclear deal and Barack Obama’s endorsement of a United Nations Security Council seat, to the Quad revival under Donald Trump’s first term and the technology initiatives of the Joe Biden years, U.S. policy showed remarkable bipartisan continuity. The goal was clear: position India as a democratic counterweight to China. Yet, since January 2025,...

So sick of liberal hegemony, critics of Washington’s foreign policy have long been apt to seize at anything that promises something, anything, different. Hence the vigorous applause directed towards anyone who doesn’t mindlessly embrace every single one of the blob’s wars. One of the most prominent in the second Donald Trump administration is Elbridge Colby, current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who has drawn the predictable beltway ire for reviews of Ukraine aid and AUKUS, among other things. But here’s the problem with Elbridge Colby, and everyone else like him, from the...