Venture Capital rarely creates trends - it follows them, and arguably amplifies them. In the case of rising conflicts around the world, it makes sense for VCs to allocate parts of their funds towards defense. Does that mean they have an interest in prolonging war like this article claims? No - quite the opposite:
War happens when one party thinks that the other party is weak enough to be attacked. This cannot be stressed enough. It's a lesson that has unfortunately been lost on the isolationist movement around the world that believes that cutting funding for the defense of Ukraine or diplomatic efforts towards the Huthis will create less war.
War is avoided if one party is so strong that an attack is futile. You can add other layers of war avoidance on top of that, such as close trade and political relationships, cultural exchange, open communication and ultimately friendship and alliances, but the backbone always has to be strength. The Romans knew this when they said "Si vis pacem, para bellum", and its just as true today.
Creating this strength happens through cultural readiness and technological innovation - and unfortunately, that's where the West has a massive problem. Almost eighty years without an existential threat, paired with ever growing governments and lobbying has created a defense purchasing situation in which ever more enormous contracts are awarded to ever smaller numbers of giant companies.
And the structure of these contracts, such as Cost-Plus that pay for whatever the contractee spends plus a fixed margin on top creates incentives that discourages innovation and efficiency.
We should be grateful that finally startups and VCs are overcoming their reflexive aversion against anything defense and start innovating. The startup ecosystem has been the best engine for innovation we have and finally turning it towards defense might help strengthen the west's place in the world and be a major contributor to lasting peace.
>War is avoided if one party is so strong that an attack is futile.
Did you mean to write 'if both parties are so strong an attack is futile'? A stronger party can always attack a weaker party if it feels it has more to gain than lose by doing so. The US was briefly the only party in a position to do that, but there's clearly an interest by regional powers to expand their territory. I see the invasion of Ukraine as an excellent example of that.
In that light, supporting an insurgency against economic rivals seems like a pretty decent strategy - done well it can make the cost of invading a weaker rival unpalatable on all sides, without contributing to the praetorian guard problem.
The trouble I think becomes, it's possible to pull the smaller party's backers into a situation where it can be an avenue to wage economic war against them. The petrodollar is essentially over at this point, in large part because of how the Ukraine war shaped out. Supporting the smaller side in an asymmetric war is traditionally more capital efficient than being the larger party, but that isn't obviously the case in Ukraine. I'm definitely watching this space.
I think that's a fair correction - and its true that the Ukraine war has shattered a lot of assumption about western involvement in asymmetric conflict.
On-paper military strength is often not decisive. The Viet-Cong and the Taliban showed they had a stronger will to fight than the US, despite their lopsided military inferiority. Usually that applies more in a defensive context, but not always.
> War happens when one party thinks that the other party is weak enough to be attacked [..]
"in war, truth is the first casualty. It is typically accompanied by a fog of official lies. And no such fog has ever been as thick as in the Ukraine war. While many hundreds of thousands of people have fought and died in Ukraine, the propaganda machines in Brussels, Kyiv, London, Moscow and Washington have worked overtime to ensure that we take passionate sides, believe what we want to believe, and condemn anyone who questions the narrative we have internalised. The consequences for all have been dire. For Ukraine, they have been catastrophic [..]
the war was born in and has been continued due to miscalculations by all sides. The United States calculated that Russian threats to go to war over Ukrainian neutrality were bluffs that might be deterred by outlining and denigrating Russian plans. Russia assumed that the United States would prefer negotiations to war and would wish to avoid the redivision of Europe into hostile blocs. Ukrainians counted on the West protecting their country. When Russia’s performance in the first months of the war proved lacklustre, the West concluded that Ukraine could defeat it. None of these calculations has proved correct"[0]
Hindsight is 20-20 but war is chaotic. The support for Ukraine has been half-assed at best. Strategically it was insane to let Russia build fortifications for six months uncontested.
“The United States calculated that Russian threats to go to war over Ukrainian neutrality were bluff”
I want to push back in that. The war in eukraine is (was?) arguably the desired end result of many years of effort by a number of Ukraine/russia hawks like Nuland. I don’t think she was surprised at all by Russia’s actions. It was on everyone’s bingo card. It had been predicted (described?) by prominent experts like John mearshiemer. It was very much a known risk, and a likely risk as anyone can go and assess from historical records.
So no, the United States (whomever you mean by that) certainly did not calculate that Putin would be unprovokeable. Russia’s red line was clear, we chose to cross it knowing the result ahead of time.
> War happens when one party thinks that the other party is weak enough to be attacked.
Citation needed. Besides what does it even mean? Is weakness on one part a necessary or a sufficient condition for war, or is it meant in some other sense?
It’s a bit tautological. In order for you to prevail you must be stronger than your opponent in one or more critical areas. If you think you can win then you believe to know the weakness of your opponent.
Depending on your morals the causation here could easily be turned: once you see what you believe to be a weak opponent, you go for the win.
I thought meaning was pretty clear in OP but I can't understand what you're saying/asking. Perceived weakness entices aggressors of course, unless you think it's normal that states are picking fights they know they will lose. Rather than asking for citations of simple logical conclusions it might be better to try and throw out your idea of decent counterexamples.
Like, you might say Hamas isn't fighting because of perceived weakness, and in a sense they know they will lose. You can explain this in the perceived weakness framework only if the real war is a PR war where you hope to get allies for the shooting war.
At some level Japan knew it would lose to the US in WW2, but the alternative of effectively surrender was too unpalatable to consider. Here's the analysis by a US Army historian:
I've heard that Yamamoto believed Japan could not win, but felt duty bound to serve anyway after it became clear the fight would happen with or without him. He seemed to also understand Pearl harbor would incite and not crush fighting spirit. First I've heard that leadership in general could have believed they would lose the fight they were starting. But politicians are weird, and I guess many of them would rather lose (elections, wars) rather than lose control (of parties, or countries). This has it's own kind of perverted logic but political thinking isn't military thinking
You can’t really distinguish the two in this case, Tojo ran a military dictatorship and moderate politicians had been murdered to make way. We shouldn’t disregard the role racist ideology played, but that paper shows how the likelihood of honorable defeat was deemed preferable to ignominious surrender in Japan, and how ignorance of Japanese culture led the US to miscalculate when it imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese.
No idea what you're getting at. If you admit this is pure logic and we don't need to look at the world then why ask for citations? If you have no faith in logic and also don't want to look at the world, what could anyone cite anyway? Honestly not sure how you think anyone can know anything
Here is an example of how people in the military making policy decisions think about it[1]. This guy in particular worked as national security advisor.
My take is that it comes from nations avoiding war if they don’t think they can win anything from it. Weakness simply means you cannot stop the enemy from accomplishing their goals. Weakness is definitely not sufficient or necessary. Instead it is the perception of weakness from one party (accurate or not) that may incite violence. A better one liner would be “weakness is provocative”.
War happens for a variety of reasons, the relative strength of the parties involved is just one factor. Plenty of actors have attacked a clearly stronger party. I think this article does a decent job of outlining some of the reasons war can occur.
The level of bias in that article is unreal and I feel hopeful it is more West Point analysts pushing propaganda than being ignorant. That was a lot of ink spilled trying to ignore why Russia might have felt the need to invade Ukraine before the two sentence grudging admission that Ukraine was arming up and aligning with Europe (cough the US) and maybe that was noticed by the Russians. Even though of course that wasn't really a factor, Blattman assures us.
Empathy is a useful offensive tool. He's not wrong that all the other factors were at play, but any analysis really has to admit that there would have to be a lot of fear of whether the US was going to stay peaceful as the noose kept tightening around Russia. Dismissing that without benefit of hindsight on what is going on in the Kremlin right now is foolish.
The Soviet Union was definitely an existential threat - not just to the US but to any country with liberal values.
Germany attacked its largest trading partner, France. More than once. People do not always act rationally or in their best interests. This is why deterrence is important. Rational people don't want to fight wars.
The recent forever wars are driven by neocon thinking. Neocons are statists (people who believe the state has the best interests of the people and are the best solvers of problems) who extend domestic agenda to international agenda. Hence, Iraq limited war (Bush I) gets turned into a project to rebuild Iraq into a western liberal democracy (Bush II). Afghanistan grows from a successful special operation to a futile state rebuilding exercise.
When you're the only super power, the way adversaries beat you is by getting you to punch yourself in the face by over reacting, acting out of pride, or giving in to fear.
To be fair, in WW2 Germany did not attack France - it attacked Poland, and expected that France would not keep its alliance and give it up just as they folded on Sudatenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia, but France did attack Germany over that; and arguably if the German expectations about French/British reaction turned out to be true, then annexing Poland would be in their best interest according to what was beneficial for states in early 20th century (now the economic incentives have substantially changed).
"[..] gets turned into a project to rebuild Iraq into a western liberal democracy [..]"
It's like the third time in a week that I read this nonsense somewhere.
Obviously,Iraq was not invaded "to bring democracy".
Also there is the assumption that the people that make this decisions care at all about democracy, you get to kill half a million people and still be the good guys:
"See? we bombed them because we wanted to bring democracy, too bad they were not ready for it. Maybe it was a mistake but done with the best of intentions!"
Sun Tzu has the right idea, he recommends only attacking if you're 6 times the strength of the other side. Less than that and it's too risky (defenders have a lot of inherent advantages).
So if the different sides are somewhat evenly balanced, it's not in anyone's interests to to on the offensive. Offensives only happen if one side (perceives themselves to be) much stronger than their opponent.
Nice explanation, and the contradiction kind of blows away. Or does it? Strength everywhere seems to guarantee peace, but only on certain time scales. It's like playing go, where one should not throw oneself at strength. Yet turn by turn, the board shrinks, and conflict is inevitable. Perhaps strength does kind of tend to minimize the total amount and duration of conflict though
Does the real world have this "shrinking turn-by-turn" mechanic though? It seems to keep expanding, if anything. There are more people, more things, more resources, more complexity each year. That's where the risk is coming from: new sources of power supplanting the old ones.
There's not more territory in any meaningful sense though, and without territory there are no resources. Consider the WW2 era German interest in lebensraum, the Japanese interest in the northern resource region of Siberia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantokuen ). Since WW2, in theory borders are supposed to be basically frozen and war is technically illegal, but clearly Russia would like to annex something extra. More subtly there are all the soft-power machinations or straight up proxy wars that are energy/resource related, and typically wherever one great power has influence they'll try to freeze out others. Looking forward further, there's only one moon, one solar system..
> ...turning it towards defense might help strengthen the west's place in the world and be a major contributor to lasting peace.
Power differential doesn't lead to peace but more oppression and injustice; or rather, might is right based world order. The West isn't immune to corruption from power, nor its democratic institutions immune to consenting to atrocious crimes in their name. You'd appreciate that such power has often meant peace at home and mayhem abroad.
> Almost eighty years without an existential threat
Unsure why everything has to be viewed through a dystopian lens; presume the far worse from others but think of themselves as holier than Jesus Christ. Drumming up threats feels almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The new globalised world order demands co-existence and not pursuing the next Loch Ness monster.
> War is avoided if one party is so strong that an attack is futile.
Not really. You avoid true wars when both parties could inflict disproportionate damage on each other (exceptions exist, but they're not the rule). Guerrilla warfare and terrorism is a response to that power imbalance.
> Does that mean they have an interest in prolonging war like this article claims?
Anyone part of the military industrial complex has every incentive to agitate for war. Those 100x returns won't show up if there's no use for all that tech.
> Venture Capital rarely creates trends - it follows them, and arguably amplifies them
Re: "War happens when one party thinks that the other party is weak enough to be attacked."
You're almost there.
Now just integrate 1) industrial complexes that form via a handful of greedy-psychopathic individuals who lobby politicians into "power" to help with regulatory capture, and 2) authoritarian types who become or are groomed to become politicians in positions of "power" - of control of policy decisions - which are the two sides of the fascism coin.
Next integrate theatre, manufactured consent, propaganda and manufactured war - where bad actors on "both sides" simply want to maintain control and be able to pillage the resources (and rape and murder as they please) of their land - and so they come to a "gentlemen's" agreement behind closed doors where they promise to leave their upper hierarchy alone - but destroy
It's divide and conquer, distract and conquer; perhaps with a sprinkling of cloak and dagger, bait and switch, and other idioms may be fitting.
Who benefits in this scenario? The military industrial complex, most certainly, other industrial complexes, but more so the tyrants and tyrant wannabes.
The tyrants want a sick and weakened population so that they can't be held accountable, are less of a resistance against their blindly indoctrinated militaries - or outright genocidal militaries who over many decades to many generations have fomented a hate for a specific group - where they see them as less than human, and therefore anything against them is justified; such falsehoods always being believed by a very thin veil of many shallow-thin threads of propaganda narrative talking points - manifesting into reality simply by repeating the points, keeping the mind's attention enough and filling in enough logic to make most undeveloped-stunted minds feel like it's solid enough, and therefore a truthful reality; with the indoctrinated ideologue not critically thinking through each point, rather they are emotionally knee-jerk reactive and already have been trained what the counterargument to blurt out, to parrot, is - quick, easily memorable one liners.
There of course will be useful targets that the dominant cohort-coalition of tyrants - the establishment division as I call them, globalist elites as others do - perhaps obvious dictators or tyrants in their land, however they aren't toeing the line of the dominant group - and therefore that tyrant going it alone is a threat to the "power" - of the coalition's wet dream of world domination and a global totalitarian state;
Russia is likely being used as a wedge, and Palestine now as well - both with the potential to ignite WW3. However fear mongering with climate alarmism appears to be their fallback plan they're moving forward with in parallel if they can't get the systems moving towards WW3. If successful then can draft and force anyone strong remaining into the meat grinder, so they are no longer a threat to local control and corruption.
Re: "... and unfortunately, that's where the West has a massive problem. Almost eighty years without an existential threat."
Once again almost there. A weakened population is easier to control, which is perhaps just a coincidence of industrial complexes maximizing profits - but it helps accelerate towards a fascist state. Placating the population, distracting them with entertainment, with low quality numbing foods, while squeezing as much quality of life out of them as possible by indoctrinating them into narrow educational channels; see book "The Unsettling of America: Culture “& Agriculture to understand what well-rounded, highly competent development and intelligence looks like.
“Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat” - The Unsettling of America book.
Capture the means of production, the economic-monetary system, and then simply economically suffocate any resistance by via Social Credit score system and mechanisms, to turn off the tap down low enough for political dissidents-opposition-resistance to the tyranny; or for example only allow government positions say in a “free” public health care system, education, and military institutions — where you’re only given a salary from the government — cranking up costs of living for all of society, but if you have a government job — they can continue to print as much money as they need to fund and keep those toeing their line afloat while the general population is allowed to, if not pushed under faster, to drown.
It’s party to 5th generation - psychological - warfare where you want to do the most subtle things in order to not spook the herd, so that it doesn’t react and flee from you - or come after you for the valid threat that “you” are.
To add to your comment, I'll just note that critics of VCs (and capitalism in general) are unique in being dissatisfied with either outcome.
When they build businesses with presences in various countries, they claim that they are weakening a country by diffusing their power, making them reliant on other countries - which, if you think about it, reduces the possibility of war. At the same time, when they invest in a country's defense sector so that a country can defend itself against aggressors, they are simultaneously accused of inciting wars.
War happens when one party thinks that the other party is weak enough to be attacked. This cannot be stressed enough. It's a lesson that has unfortunately been lost on the isolationist movement around the world that believes that cutting funding for the defense of Ukraine or diplomatic efforts towards the Huthis will create less war.
War is avoided if one party is so strong that an attack is futile. You can add other layers of war avoidance on top of that, such as close trade and political relationships, cultural exchange, open communication and ultimately friendship and alliances, but the backbone always has to be strength. The Romans knew this when they said "Si vis pacem, para bellum", and its just as true today.
Creating this strength happens through cultural readiness and technological innovation - and unfortunately, that's where the West has a massive problem. Almost eighty years without an existential threat, paired with ever growing governments and lobbying has created a defense purchasing situation in which ever more enormous contracts are awarded to ever smaller numbers of giant companies.
And the structure of these contracts, such as Cost-Plus that pay for whatever the contractee spends plus a fixed margin on top creates incentives that discourages innovation and efficiency.
We should be grateful that finally startups and VCs are overcoming their reflexive aversion against anything defense and start innovating. The startup ecosystem has been the best engine for innovation we have and finally turning it towards defense might help strengthen the west's place in the world and be a major contributor to lasting peace.