This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard's the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow. and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard's the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow,

here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU,

and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Today we've got a serious topic

as we talk about Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Richard, this show is called the Libertarian.

And when it comes to foreign policy

libertarians run anywhere from completely isolationists to barely interventionists.

So where do you follow as the general matter on that line?

I'm more on the interventionist side but I'm always nervous about it.

Look the first question you always have to ask is how do you think about

international relations and it's much more complicated than ordinary individual cases because inside each country you have elaborate coalitions and they have to figure out what it is they want to do.

Because nations when they go to war have to act collectively whether they like to or not.

So what you do is you stripped away the complexities of international relations with governments

and start looking at individuals.

And then what you do is immediately you start worrying about the

distinction between aggression on the one hand and self-defense on the other. And

it's between two parties, this is never an easy determination because there's always the antecede action that the other

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