There is no way a country can have hundreds of bases and thousands of troops overseas without a substantial and onerous bureaucracy at home. Cold warrior William F. Buckley admitted as much in his 1952 article in The Commonweal, "A Young Republican View": "We have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged given our present government skills except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Buckley went on to recommend that we support "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington." It is no wonder that the "conservative" Buckley was branded by Murray Rothbard as "a totalitarian socialist," and rightly so, for intervention abroad cannot but follow intervention at home. The practice of "national greatness" conservativism abroad and "leave us alone" conservatism at home, as espoused by Michael Barone, Andrew Sullivan, and assorted neoconservatives, is an impossibility. As Justin Raimondo explains: "It doesn’t work that way. We can’t have an Empire abroad, and a Republic at home (except in name only) for the simple reason that the tax monies it takes to build mighty fleets and bases all around the world, to police the earth and humble the wicked, must be enormous. Furthermore, the sheer power it takes to direct these armies, to say whether there shall be war or peace on a global scale, is necessarily imperial, and cannot be republican in any meaningful sense of the word. For this sort of power, i.e. military power, must be highly centralized in order to be effectively wielded: an interventionist foreign policy necessarily turns the President into an Emperor, as Congress has learned partly to its relief and often to its sorrow."
