by Misty Peñuelas
Given the events that have transpired since January 3, 2026, when the US abducted the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and then, on February 28th, launched an unprovoked attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran, it would appear that the humanitarian cloak shrouding America’s “Empire of Liberty” has finally rent. Surely, these brazen acts finally reveal the moral bankruptcy of American liberalism as a just framework for the international order. Iran’s strategic checkmate of the US signals the emergence of a new civilizational paradigm. Writ large, liberals tend to advocate a social order that guarantees individual freedom and equality under the rule of law. However, discussions on the liberal world order reveal a widespread conceptual ambiguity between “liberalism” and “libertarianism.” Yet, as this grumpy libertarian’s guide to the new world order argues, these two concepts, defined in terms of how each aligns with their mutual, intellectual foundations in natural law, are as far apart as the east is from the west.
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Misty Peñuelas is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Oklahoma. Send her mail: asesina68@gmail.com.
Isonomia Quarterly 