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I want to open a discussion among the members of this forum about international relations. The Peikoff.com podcasts have a category for foreign policy, but it is currently empty. Aside from the published work of John David Lewis in the Objective Standard, I have not seen much about an approach to international relations that reflects the philosophy of Objectivism. Rand elaborated on some current events of the time, and her general attitude toward the UN (similar to her approach to the Libertarian Party, her critique being their philosophically groundless nature) is evident. (A separate forum for "international politics" has more to do with events in other countries than with theory of how a country's government should act in the international system). Most of the contemporary theory I've seen, including that of Lewis, has almost always to do with the right that our government has to protect its citizens or defend it from foreign invasion or attack (an extrapolation, it seems, from the individual's right to self-defense). I am interested, however, as a student of IR, in the other ways in which nations can interact. It seems that an Objectivist theory would be nearer to Liberalism than anything else, although I would like to see this developed further. Thus I would like to incorporate or see incorporated the philosophical grounding of Objectivism in international affairs and diplomacy between nations (by nations, I of course mean governments). In order to do this, I have tried to apply the more fundamental branch of ethics, and have only found a way to do so by comparing countries' governments to relations between individuals. So the central question of this thread is, is it proper to extrapolate relations between individuals to relations between governments?
