The painting is rich in detail, yet what stands out immediately are four men riding four horses. The first is a king with a fierce face who, wielding a bow, is about to shoot someone with an arrow. He is followed by a large, broad, thick burly guy who is wearing nothing except a loincloth (which I first mistook for an old-fashioned diaper). He is swinging a sword. He is followed by a gaunt man with a fierce face who is carrying a pair of scales, holding them in his hand in such a way that one gets the impression that he's about to bash someone (or something) with the scales. He is followed by a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and wielding a sickle. All four characters are fearsome, yet although Vasnetsov made the large burly guy the central feature of his painting, I personally find the skeleton to be the most unnerving - especially since he is painted with eye sockets in the shape of a scowl and a jaw and teeth in the shape of a snarl. (Imagine dreaming about that guy at night!)
Let's consider the large burly guy for a minute or two. He is broad and thick, and he is swinging a sword that looks like it must weigh as much as three or four sledgehammers. One can't help but think that if he went to chop off the head of an opponent, that opponent's head would go flying as if it were a baseball hit by a slugger. Yet in the lower part of the painting, we see that the effect of this big guy's sword-swinging is not to directly kill men, but to induce men to kill each other. For he and his horse (a horse that looks as if it had been scared nearly to death) are the artistic embodiment of a passage in the New Testament that reads, "And when He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men should slay one another; and a great sword was given to him." (Revelation 6:3-4)
Today's post is not about making some predictive prophecy (after all, I'm not a certified prophet ;)), but I must say that the Scriptures which I have quoted, as well as the painting which was inspired by these Scriptures, seem to be an apt embodiment of the thinking of certain rich and powerful people in the present day. For we have a few nations which have recently become fixated on building up their "hard power." And while economic non-cooperation is a key element of both national hard power and of strategic nonviolent resistance, I'd like to focus on the element of hard power that most attracts the attention of nations that want to be bullies: military might.
The point of amassing large amounts of hard power is to be able to say to other nations, "Give us what we want from you or we will ruin you." In the case of the Axis powers prior to World War 2, this statement was usually phrased as, "Give us what we want or we will bash you." The actions of the Axis powers led to a lot of bashing and of counter-bashing as well, and the end result was that the Axis powers that started the bashing got decisively bashed themselves in the end. Yet we can learn much from analyzing the motives which started the Axis powers on their destructive path. For I would argue that the same motives are at work in those nations that are at present fixated on acquiring and building up hard power.
I suggest that those who seek to build an overwhelming amount of hard power do so because they feel an overwhelming sense of injury at the emergence of a world in which they can't instantly get their way, a world in which they are not worshiped as superior to all other humans and their demands are not instantly and abundantly satisfied. In the case of nations, this sense of injury is often felt by a dominant culture which loses or begins to lose its power over peoples or nations over which it had historically exercised domination. Thus, this feeling of injury is expressed in statements like, "We used to be great! We ruled over X and Y and Z! Now behold our humiliation, in that we must politely ask X and Y and Z for the things we want! They're forcing us to say please and thank you and to wait our turn!!!! Such humiliation is utterly unbecoming to a nation with such a great history as ours!"
This sense of injury (an unjust sense, if I may say so) is what motivates the heads of nations which feel thus injured to begin to pursue the building up of hard power. And the hard power they seek is almost always military hard power. This is what motivated the arming of Japan in the early 20th century and the rearmament of Germany after World War 1. This is what motivated the Soviet Union to devote such a large percentage of its GDP to military expenditures after World War 2. And it has been a key motivator of U.S. military expenditures from 1980 onward - especially under Republican presidential administrations. So what does the pursuit of this kind of hard power ultimately gain the pursuers? And what are the risks and costs of the pursuit of this kind of hard power?
First, while it is obvious that hard power deployed in overwhelming force can achieve short-term gains, it is also obvious from the record of history that the continued deployment of such power over a long time loses its effectiveness. In fact, eventually the continued costs of the use of such power begin to exceed any benefits reaped by those who use this power. It can be argued that even if there had been no intervention by the U.S. in the Far East or in Europe, in the long run neither Germany nor Japan could have held onto their territorial gains which they achieved from 1930 to 1941. This is because both nations were so fixated on bullying the people they conquered that they provoked the kind of resistance that would ultimately have destroyed their hard power. This is the lesson of the French (and later U.S.) failure in Vietnam, the Soviet (and later U.S.) failure in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russian failure in Ukraine. Treating people like trash while holding them at gunpoint is hardly the way to "win hearts and minds."
Second, the very process of both building up and deploying hard power is itself expensive in terms of human resources. Fielding an army requires warm bodies to wear uniforms and carry guns. Yet I would argue that equipping people with uniforms and guns and sending them out to try to bash their fellow humans in other countries is going to be increasingly expensive as the 21st Century continues. The reason is that birth rates throughout the world are continuing to decline. Those nations that are most eager to throw their weight around are among the nations whose birth rates are most steeply declining. Thus it makes very little sense to train one's young men and women to invade other countries if it is likely that a significant number of those young men and women will get shot up during the invasion and subsequent military operations. This is especially likely in a fight between nations that are near peers. Once those young men and women have gotten killed, who will be left to do the ongoing work of maintaining their societies at home?
Third, consider the material costs of building up and deploying hard power. In 1983, Seymour Melman wrote a book titled Profits Without Production which accurately diagnosed many of the elements of the disease which is now destroying American industry. He described the pernicious effect of the American military-industrial complex and how ever-increasing expenditures for "defense" were impoverishing other elements of the American economy and of American scientific and technical research. His points were amplified and re-broadcast in a recent paper by Julia Gledhill of the Stimson Center titled, "The Ugly Truth about the Permanent War Economy." The fact is that building war material costs some serious folding money - whether planes (~$100 million each for an F-35 fighter), ships, artillery, drones, tanks, or other instruments of mayhem. What's more, the body of knowledge needed to design and build these items frequently does not transfer well to other sectors of industrial production or of the overall economy. (I should know - I used to work for a defense contractor who went out of business after the Cold War ended. Later I worked for an engineering firm whose client base used to include many military agencies, yet which shrank over the years until it was designing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems for fast food joints and amusement parks.) And the money that is sunk into defense is withdrawn from other necessary elements of national infrastructure such as roads, dams, bridges, and similar civil infrastructure as well as schools and libraries. Of course, here in the USA, the Rethuglican/conservative/libertarian organs of culture have managed to convince most of us over the last 45 years that only "sssssocialistssss!!!" and "lib-ruls!!!" want to use tax money to maintain roads, dams, bridges, wastewater treatment plants, schools, libraries, and other instruments of the public good.
So our carefully cultivated aversion to collectively contributing to the public good means that our infrastructure of the public good is falling apart. Moreover, we can't even seem to find the political will to pay down our national debt by requiring the rich people who call themselves Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. (By the way, the interest on the U.S. national debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year.) Yet Donald Trump wants a $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon in FY 2027. (See also "The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal," Responsible Statecraft, January 2026.) And Trump is not the only fool who wants to use a nation's declining stock of resources in order to build up one last expression of hard power. There are other nations with declining birthrates, a depleting resource base and increasing government debt who also want to project hard power on the global stage of the 21st century. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." It's looking more and more like the burly thick guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post has successfully addled the wits of an increasing number of national leaders by bashing them upside the head with his massive sword.
