The Arbitrary “Interests of the United States”

Most people and even many serious analysts seem to assume that the concept of “national interest” or “the interests of the United States” has an obviously ascertainable meaning. (“The United States” can be replaced by the name of any country.) This concept is central to the arguments of foreign policy “realists”—for example political scientist William Ruger in his article “Ideals or Interests?” in Law and Liberty (July 26, 2024). Dr. Ruger argues for the importance of the national interest as a realistic guide, as opposed to philosophical ideals, in foreign policy and matters of war and peace.

The meaning of “national interest” may seem obvious. It is the public interest where the public is made of the citizens of a nation. It is the interests of all the citizens. If these interests don’t exactly coincide, the national interest is assumed to be, in some way, their sum. The concept is similar to the interests of two individual partners in a business or an association: it is the sum of their respective interests—in making a profit or (say) advancing some charitable purpose. If the national interest is not a straight sum, addition and subtraction, of all individual interests, it consists in some other form of aggregation.

On second thought, problems become rapidly obvious. How is it possible to add and subtract, or otherwise aggregate, even just conceptually, the interests of two non-identical individuals? In a private cooperative venture, the partners pursue together some common interests. Indeed, this is why they cooperate. If we exclude tribes and “organizations” (in the Hakekian sense), society is the framework into which private individuals and organizations act. Since each individual (or voluntary partnership) has his own interests, speaking of social, public, or national interests is problematic and confusing.

Suppose an Appalachian redneck has “three interests” in national security, and a cosmopolitan New Yorker has “two interests,” or vice versa. If these are the only two nationals, is the national interest 2+3=5? Multiply the problem in a nation of 300 million. And of course, it is not the national interest if the interests of each member of the nation do not count equally.

There is much theory behind the impossibility of aggregating the interests of several individuals. Let’s define the interests of an individual as his utility, meaning how high he judges his condition on the scale of his subjective preferences. Economists have known for more than a century that an external observer cannot simply add and subtract subjective preferences, which are only known to, or experienced by, only their individual possessor. There is no way to say that “social utility” is increased if the individual utility of some goes down while the utility of others is increased. Any observer or philosopher king à la Plato who claims he can do this balancing is just expressing a personal opinions or his personal power. Mainstream welfare economists have proven as much (see, for example, Francis M. Bator, “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization,” American Economic Review [1957]).

A democratic majority does not solve the problem. It cannot determine what the national interest is, even under the sophisticated form of what welfare economists called a “social welfare function.” Furthermore, individuals in the minority are also part of the nation. Who is the majority anyway, given that different voting systems can produce different electoral outcomes (see Gordon Tullock, Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice])?

Discovered by Nicolas de Condorcet in the 18th century and mathematician Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the 19th, the difficulty of aggregating preferences through voting was recognized and formalized by economists in the mid-20th century. Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem mathematically demonstrated that, under realistic conditions, there is no voting procedure that can both reproduce voters’ rationality (notably the transitivity or coherence of preferences) and be non-dictatorial (see Arrow’s 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values). Arrow was awarded the 1972 Nobel prize in economics for his work in this field, launching the whole school of “social choice.”

In his 1982 book Liberalism Against Populism, political scientist William Riker brought these discoveries and their implications to the attention of political scientists. In terms of our interrogation here, a majoritarian vote cannot express a national interest that is both logically coherent and non-dictatorial (“non-dictatorial” refers to the situation where no dictator or dictator group can overrule the preferences of other individuals).

This conclusion seems to leave us in a dead end. If the public interest does not exist, what is the criterion for public policy? If the national interest does not exist, what is the criterion for deciding how a national state will deal with other national states—or force its citizens to behave, for example by regulating their trades or other voluntary relations with individuals of other countries?

There are not many escapes from this cul-de-sac. Two are represented by two great economists and political philosophers of our time. One is to deny that the state has any economic and moral justification, to view it as a mere instrument for political rulers and their clientèles to impose their choices on the rest of society or nation. Anthony de Jasay, who defined himself as a classical liberal and an anarchist, took this exit and defended the ideal of a stateless society with no public policy at all. He did however express some doubts on the possibility that such a society could resist invasion by nation-states or other international armed groups.

Another way of escape was formalized by Nobel economist James Buchanan and his colleagues. If there is no such thing as a social organism that has its own utility and its own interests, the only justification and function of the state is to protect a set of rules that represent the common interest of all society members. This common denominator is necessarily thin as it represents the preferences or values that all members of a society (such as a nation) unanimously agree on. At this level of abstraction, values can easily be added to preferences in an individual’s utility function. The rules consented to by all individuals can only aim at the maintenance of a free society where every individual has an equal liberty to pursue his own interests–his own happiness, as it were.

This novel approach is more revolutionary than it appears. It is rather abstract—as indeed the rule of law is itself—but a coherent abstraction is better than an incoherent and unrealistic recipe such as the “national interest.” In my view, the foreign policy “realists” are rather unrealistic. The idea of a common interest offers very different guidance in matters of foreign policy and defense—for example, regarding conscription, negating liberty to protect it, or bullying individuals in the name of the “national interest.”

One could object that the expression “national interest” is merely a shortcut for a common interest that all individuals presumably share. But it is a dangerous shortcut that personifies “the nation,” that is, a collective. History as well as theory strongly suggests that the “national interest” creates a fictitious “we” that is bound to bulldoze the interests of real individuals. The “common interest” means what it says: the common preferences—including ideals in the sense of common minimum values à la James Buchanan—of all individual members of a free society. This assumes, of course, that the individuals live in a free society or at least one that is becoming so.

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