A government that pursues empire abroad will have to stifle liberty at home. From Sheldon Richman at antiwar.com:
In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn’t matter to other people too – just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They’re cut from the same cloth.
This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that “war is the health of the state,” he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.
I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, “No foreign politics.” He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water’s edge only when policy stops at the water’s edge, which he favored.
