Rothbard modified the famous dictum of Marx: he wished both to understand and change the world. He endeavored to apply the ideas he had developed in his theoretical work to current politics and to bring libertarian views to the attention of the general public. One issue for him stood foremost. Like Randolph Bourne, he maintained that “war is the health of the state”; he accordingly opposed an aggressive foreign policy. His support for nonintervention in foreign policy led him to champion the Old Right. John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett and other pre-World War II “isolationists” shared Rothbard’s belief in the close connection between state power and bellicose foreign policy.
The situation was quite otherwise with postwar American conservatism.Although Rothbard was an early contributor to William Buckley’s National Review, he rejected the aggressive pursuit of the Cold War advocated by Buckley and such members of his editorial staff as James Burnham and Frank S. Meyer. He broke with these self-styled conservatives and thereafter became one of their strongest opponents. For similar reasons, he condemned their neoconservative successors. Rothbard made clear the basis of his opposition to National Review foreign policy in an essay, “For a New Isolationism,” written in April 1959; the magazine did not publish it.
To those who favored a policy of “liberation” directed against the Communist bloc, Rothbard raised a devastating objection: In all the reams of material written by the Right in the last decade [1949–1959], there is never any precise spelling-out of what a policy of ultrafirmness or toughness really entails.
» Essential Rothbard, David Gordon, p. 94.
