Weakness Invites Aggression: Peace is Achieved Through Strength

I know I write a lot about geopolitics. These things are important to understand. What’s going on? Who are our allies and who are our enemies. It affects where we do business and how. Which industries, sectors, companies and countries to invest or work in. Which countries or regions to live in. 

I used to be Libertarian in the way of the “Sovereign Individual” book, which is a classic book worth reading and one ahead of its time in detailing important technology trends. It discusses the concept of escaping high tax and unfree places to lower tax and business friendlier climates. 

However the great flaw in this is what happens when the places that are totally free are crime ridden anarchic hellholes like Somalia or dystopian sci-fi dictatorships like China under the CCP who have exported their surveillance state to their allies. 

As @noahpinion writes libertarians eventually understand the importance of having a strong military and defense to enforce their borders against enemies coming over the hills and raping, killing and pillaging their populace as per the “Tamerlane effect” like Russia invading UKraine in 2022. Or the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on October 7th. The list goes on. 

Unfortunately it seems the West and its complacent & brain dead populace has still not woken up to this. All these governments talk about doing stuff, but the only countries who seem to have stepped up is Poland who have increased their defense spending to a whopping 4-5% of GDP. Japan has truly doubled their defense spending and some of the countries like Finland, Sweden have always punched above their weight. The Baltics and many Eastern European countries who directly face the Russian threat are ramping up. 

For most countries in the West, it is “performative theater as foreign policy” as American geopolitical strategist Eldridge Colby calls it. Weakly-led countries like Canada, Germany, the UK and most of the EU talk a big game but at the same time have let their militaries shrink and their industrial bases get run down. It took 3 years of war in Ukraine and Trump & his admin openly talking about leaving NATO has caused the UK, France and Germany to finally do something. 

Truly unserious people there although this is also the case in America where our so-called leadership from Bush Jr to Obama to Trump and Biden have squandered all of our advantages coming out of the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, we are not in a posturing world anymore but the real world now. I don’t like this at all but reality is a hard teacher. Bullies and criminals only attack the weak. This has always been the case throughout human history in every society. I hope we wake up soon and prepare our countries as the old and much repeated axiom goes: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” 

In the end, countries get whatever they deserve based on the good or bad choices they made decades ago. While the West is behind, maybe the new sense of urgency and action will help us catch up and get strong. You can’t be sovereign if you are not strong. This is the hard truth of human history, now reasserting itself harshly after the unwinding of the Unipolar world of Pax Americana.