When I was writing the book on ancap, you could observe the results of the creative search process in real-time. After publication, the material was restructured; as a result of discussions in the comments, personal communication, and simply rereading the text, serious revisions to the wording were introduced, and a couple of chapters were discarded entirely, after which the second part of the book started over in a different vein. And this was while I was navigating relatively familiar territory: libertarian doctrine has long been and repeatedly laid out, and all that was required of me was its reimagining and a brief retelling.

As for the libertarian theory of war, this is uncharted territory, so I am not attempting to write a book right away, but am simply recording separate considerations for now. The only support I currently have are the questions laid out in the first part of the sketches that a libertarian theory of war should answer. These are the points I will go through.

How to determine when it is worth starting a war?

As a reminder, I define war as a class of conflicts in which, for at least one side, the survival of the opponent is not a deterrent factor. That is, to be strictly precise, the party to a conflict that is prepared to kill is waging war, while the party to a conflict that is not prepared to kill is not waging war, even if they are currently being attempted to be killed. Thus, even if someone is attacked with the intent to kill, they do not automatically find themselves in a state of war, but are free to choose for themselves whether to wage war or to evade it in some way.

Evasion can be direct: using passive defense, fleeing, hiding—something along those lines. Or it can be indirect: resorting to someone else’s protection. This immediately raises the problem of fuzzy boundaries. On one hand, even if a subject feeds and equips their protector, as well as pays them a salary and promises to recognize their ownership of captured trophies, they themselves are still not directly fighting. On the other hand, take a drone operator: they might be sitting a thousand kilometers from the target, sipping coffee and having nothing against the target of liquidation in general: should this operator be considered the one waging war—or their client, who feels enough antipathy toward the target of liquidation to shell out for the hire of an operator? How, fundamentally, does a drone operator differ from the drone itself? By the fact that they make the decision to kill? And what if the drone is controlled by AI and makes that decision itself?

In short, in conditions where there is a deep division of labor everywhere, finding someone who wages war completely independently is as easy as finding someone who lives entirely on subsistence farming.

By the way, this circumstance also complicates the precise determination of who started the war and, consequently, who the aggressor—that is, the initiator of violence—is. Parties can spend a long time inventively doing nasty things to each other, primarily through other people’s hands, and then some particular nasty act, for some reason, begins to be interpreted by observers as the start of a war and a legitimate reason to respond to aggression with all their military power.

What is my point in all this? That in the libertarian theory of war, it is not enough to simply say “NAP.” This is an abstract principle that can be applied to any interpersonal interaction to decide: in this specific elementary action, Vasya is the aggressor and Petya is the victim of aggression. And before that was an action in which Petya was the aggressor and Vasya the victim. And even earlier… and so on, until one grows tired. The aggressive IDF bombs Hamas. Well, yes, it bombs. If we take October 8, 2023, as the starting point, then the IDF is the aggressor. If October 7, 2023, then Hamas is the aggressor. Let’s wind further back into the past—and we slide into questions about land property rights, the content of sacred texts, and so on. In other words, the NAP as a criterion for when to start a war is inapplicable, at least in its pure form. At least when it comes to collective conflicts, rather than elementary situations like “you are just walking, someone lunges at you with a knife, and how to determine at what moment to shoot the attacker.”

With that, I conclude the second part of the notes; I didn’t even manage to fully analyze the first question, but it is better for me to post small notes more often, as the overall speed of work will be higher. In addition to sequential numbering and links to previous pieces of text, I will also use the tag LTV (libertarian theory of war) for these notes.

Not long ago, I was listening to one of Vladimir Zolotorev’s Saturday sermons on the Libertarian.site channel (I’m too lazy to search for the specific sermon—the channel’s navigation is very mediocre), and he noted that the theory of war is poorly developed within libertarianism. This observation seemed fair to me, which means it is worth thinking in this direction.

War is a type of conflict in which the necessity of the opponent’s survival is not a deterrent factor for at least one party. If one of the parties to the conflict is destroyed, it means that the conflict, for all intents and purposes, has been resolved. Granted, this may give rise to new conflicts—with those who consider such a manner of resolving conflicts by the winner as a reason to assert claims against them.

To minimize such claims, humanity has developed certain customs of war. For instance, if a reliable casus belli is presented before entering a war, and collateral damage is minimized during the war by attempting to destroy only legitimate military targets, then according to these customs, such a manner of conducting war should not entail any sanctions, and may even help in acquiring allies.

However, this is all empiricism operating with collective subjects such as states, armies, peoples, and so on. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is about methodological subjectivism and individual responsibility. The fact that some collective imaginary entities are in a state of war does not create any moral obligations for a specific person to enter the war on either side. At the same time, libertarian morality suggests entering conflicts on the just side, which means that libertarians may not be foreign to wars, even those where they are not the party subjected to a direct attack.

Vladimir Zolotorev proposes using the standard legal approach of peacetime to describe war within libertarianism: a lawsuit is filed against the party that caused the damage; in the case of collective actions, the lawsuit extends to the entire collective proportionally to their contribution; courts make decisions, the assets of the party that caused the damage are seized and sold on the market, and the proceeds are transferred to the plaintiff—and so on. Unfortunately, this model, which would have worked perfectly for a tribal society from the Icelandic sagas or, adjusted for capitalist realities, in some conditional Wild West, begins to stall heavily in a society where the system of kinship ties and personal obligations has been replaced by a system of formal hierarchy and various group identities, such as religion or nation.

Obviously, in this situation, an obvious solution suggests itself to a libertarian—to simplify the task. In other words, let’s abolish states and all other imaginary collective entities, and then the analysis of conflicts will elegantly be reduced to a simple and clear basis of property disputes. Abolishing these mental parasites in reality is, undoubtedly, a boon for all humanity; however, if we close our eyes to their existence right now and analyze reality as if these entities did not exist, they will not instantly disappear because of it.

This was simply a pointer to some difficulties in considering such a phenomenon as war; naturally, it is far from exhaustive.

A viable theory of war in libertarianism must answer several diverse questions:

1. How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
2. How to determine the just side in a war?
3. How to determine the appropriate degree of one’s own participation in a war?
4. How to determine that a war is being waged against you?
5. How to determine who is waging war against you?
6. How to determine what collateral damage is permissible?
7. How to determine appropriate compensation for direct and collateral damage?
8. How to determine when it is time to end the war?
9. How to determine on what terms the war should be ended?

I do not yet have the sought-after theory; I want to think about the necessary formulations in my spare time. Your comments may prove to be very useful. I hope to be able to share the results of these reflections soon.