The Hard Drug of Hard Power

Several months ago, while looking up something on Wikipedia, I came across a striking picture.  It is a digital reproduction of a painting made in 1887 by Viktor Vasnetsov titled, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now I know the saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words", and I've just given the link to the picture so that readers can see it for themselves, but I'd still like to indulge myself in using a few words to describe the painting from my point of view.

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. This broad, thick guy 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 some of those who are now seeking to build an overwhelming amount of hard power are doing so 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 as great 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 threatening 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.  Once natural resources and money are turned into war material, these resources can't easily be repurposed for more productive aims.  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.  The reason why that contractor went out of business was because it was unable to make the switch to inexpensively producing things needed by the civilian market.  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. Federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. And this does not even take into account the debt of U.S states, counties, and municipalities.)  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 huge sword.  

The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 1)

Over the last seven or eight months, as I have tried to make sense of the changes (and attempted changes) which major players have wrought in global and American national politics, I have done a lot of reading, in an attempt to see the various major global actors through various lenses. Those who regularly follow this blog know that one of the lenses through which I like to look is the lens of abnormal psychology, as applied to both individuals and nations. So you can imagine how my interest was piqued as I came across a series of blog posts titled, Russia As A Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Ukraine As A Narcissistic Injury, written by a Ukrainian lady named Olga Doroshenko (or, as she writes in her profile, Дорошенко Ольга). Olga had the rather painful fortune to live through the violent counterrevolutionary response to the initially nonviolent 2014 Ukraine revolution which ousted then President Viktor Yanukovych.

Her series of posts on Russia contain, I am sure, some barbs of the sort which arise from the deeply unpleasant history that builds up between people who are related enough to each other to really get on each other's nerves when they live too long near each other. However, her posts also present a thought-provoking analysis which lines up with many aspects of Russia's official "face" which I had observed over the last few years "from the side," as some Russians say. As one can see from her writings, the danger of national narcissism is not limited to certain nations. Any nation can fall into such a derangement if the conditions are right. Her posts also shed a great deal of light on Russia's unhealthy interest in the affairs of non-Russian nations, including the interest which has been "lavished" on the United States during the last major election cycle.

What conditions does she then identify in the case of Russia? First, let's consider her thumbnail sketch of NPD. To me, she seems to be right on in stating that NPD is a compensatory response to feelings of inferiority. As Olga writes,

"Narcissism always starts with an inferiority complex. A narcissist feels his/her insignificance and hates him/herself for this. This hatred causes shame, and in attempt to protect him/herself from this shame the narcissist builds up an ideal person which he/she pretends to be. But any hint of criticism shatters this ideal image, which is intolerable. Therefore, the critic is treated as an enemy.

Any sane person can ask: why so complicated? If you feel shame, you just stop doing what causes this shame and stop feeling shame. Profit! That is true, but not for the narcissist. The narcissistic shame is different from the ordinary shame: there is no particular reason for it, the narcissist is ashamed just of being imperfect. Which means: just of being human."

Dealing with this shame in a truly effective way is quite scary. It is painful work to learn to live gracefully, humbly and honorably within the limits which your Creator has imposed on you, just as it is also painful to for most of us to admit that we have faults and sins to be repented of. Indeed, for the narcissist, choosing to give up the grandiose self and accept one's humanity - one's ordinariness and imperfection - is like experiencing a death. For a narcissist, the only thing worse is the involuntary disintegration of the narcissist's grandiose self in response to external events. That does lead some narcissists to choose physical death.

What then is the source of Russian narcissism as expressed in foreign and domestic governmental policy? What is root of the inferiority complex that the national grandiose self is supposed to cover up? According to Olga, that inferiority complex is the result of perceived historical technological, social and economic underdevelopment in comparison to Europe. And as suggested by Olga, this inferiority complex has historically been felt most keenly by the elites of Russia, including the tsars and other nobility, and the intellectual class (many of whom were also of the nobility). Therefore, the elites, from tsar to nobility to intellectuals in the service of the tsar and the nobles, all collaborated, often consciously, to build a collective identity consisting of a national grandiose self. This grandiose self, bejeweled with the virtues of a soldier (bravery, courage, spirituality, ability to endure hardship for a greater good, reverent submission to authorities, etc.), was meant both to inspire ordinary Russians (many of whom were serfs - that is, slaves - from the 11th century to the mid 19th century) to enthusiastically answer their masters' calls to arms, and to promote meek submission to the hardships under which Russian "commoners" lived. It was also meant to inoculate the populace against the desire for social change - even though, from time to time, some ordinary Russians were able to see how much better off many Europeans were, particularly in being allowed to live as free people.

Thus one of the chief "virtues" of this grandiose self was the ability to meekly submit to suffering - the suffering which must be endured for the sake of achieving the greater good of building a truly "great" nation. This meek submission was summarized in the notion of "the enigmatic Russian soul", the inmost being of a nation that had gladly accepted its calling to suffer as a "collective Christ" in order to bring light and redemption to the world. Never mind that the sufferings borne by the Russian masses were in many cases inflicted by those who held power in Russian society. Never mind also that the redemption which Russia believed itself called to bring to the world was to be brought by violent imperial expansion.

A chief ingredient needed for this grandiose self was the presence of a cast of inferior characters against whom this grandiose self might appear truly grand by comparison. The masters of Russian culture therefore cast Europe as a collection of these inferiors, a bunch of "soft" and "weak" people whose enjoyment of a more pleasant way of life was proof of their "godlessness." (As someone told me a while back, "In Russia, the strong survive! We don't demand soft treatment." His implication was, "like some other people...") Later, the cast of inferior characters expanded to include the entire West - at least, those who are white. As for the rest of us, well, I am sure that not many members of the current Russian elite regard what goes on in our heads as thoughts worth taking seriously. Oddly enough, that does not bother me, for reasons which I will elaborate in a future post.

Thus do we encounter modern Russia as the "collective Christ" pitted against a godless world as it soldiers bravely on in its Messianic mission to bring light and redemption to a world whose desire to be left unmolested is just so much proof of the "godlessness" of that world. Thus has this "mysterious", "enigmatic" nation closed itself off from learning anything from the world which it despises. This is convenient for the present-day Russian elites, for whom the prospect of internal change must be the kind of night terror that can cause cardiac arrest. But I must mention that it has not only been tsar and nobility that have conspired to build such an enduring grandiose self. There has been another agent involved in this project over the last several centuries. I will describe that agent in my next post.

The Inevitable Osmosis

July 2025 Note: I have updated this post to point out that the emergence of many far right movements in the last ten to fifteen years has been financed and facilitated by the Russian government.  And the Russian government is at present a narcissistic wanna-be empire ruled by a thieving little man in a bunker.  For more information on the actual character of Russia, please see the posts linked on the sidebar of this blog - particularly No Strangers to Самовлюбленность.

February 2026 Note: This post may be in the process of being overtaken by events. It appears that those concentrations of wealth which have been built up by white supremacy over the last several decades are now in the process of self-destructing.  I am thinking particularly of the second Trump regime and its fellow-travelers and hangers-on.  From January 2025 onward, they have been making the kinds of self-destructive choices which will ruin them - sooner rather than later.  The flow of human capital and human talent no longer has the nations of the Global Far Right as its destination. 

(First, many thanks to commenters.  I apologize for being slow in posting comments.  I had a gnarly homework assignment to finish, on top of working nearly full time.  Sleep will taste really good tonight...)

Let me start this post with a slightly loopy analogy.  And as we begin, we must define two terms.  Osmosis (as defined by Wikipedia and others is "the spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a semi-permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, in the direction that tends to equalize the solute concentrations of the two sides...Osmotic pressure is defined as the external pressure required to be applied so that there is no net movement of solvent across the membrane."  Let's unpack that definition a little.  Take a glass jar, and divide it into two halves by inserting a watertight semi-permeable membrane down the middle.  Fill one half of the jar with pure water, and the other half with salty water, and wait a while.  What you will eventually see is that the liquid level in the pure half of the jar has gone down and the liquid level in the salty half of the jar has gone up.

Osmosis illustration courtesy of OpenStax College, Anatomy and Physiology.

What you've just witnessed is osmosis.  You started with two liquids, one a pure solvent (water in this case), and one comprised of that same solvent in which a high concentration of impurities was dissolved.  The molecules of the solvent were small enough to flow through the molecular "holes" in the semi-permeable membrane, and they did so, diluting the concentrated salt solution as they flowed into it.  The process continued until the mass of diluted solution grew to an extent that it was able to exert a force on the membrane equal to the osmotic pressure, at which point the flow of water from the pure to the salty side of the jar stopped.  Note that the salt ions could not flow from the salty side to the pure side of the membrane, because they could not fit through the molecular "holes" in the membrane.  Osmosis happens spontaneously whenever there is a pure solvent separated by a semi-permeable membrane from some of that same solvent in which impurities have been dissolved.  When the net concentration of impurities in a solution is equal on either side of a semi-permeable barrier, there is no net natural tendency for osmosis to take place.  Lastly, it takes the input of energy (usually applied through a pump) to use reverse osmosis to extract a pure solvent from a solution in which impurities have been dissolved or suspended.

So it is with nations.  In a world in which everyone had equal access to natural resources and everyone enjoyed the same standard of material wealth, there would be no large-scale tendency for people to emigrate.  After all, if you had everything you needed right where you were, what would be the point of moving?  But alas, that's not the world in which we live.  Quite apart from the situations of wealth or scarcity caused by the vagaries of nature (drought, famine caused by crop failure, bumper crops caused by very good weather, etc.), there is the little matter of our fallen human tendency to rob each other.  Some people are better and more ambitious robbers than others, and some of these people become heads of nations which become really good at robbing other nations.  Thus we see the ever-increasing concentration of wealth in these robber nations and the ever-increasing impoverishment of those nations which are their victims.

This leads to a situation not unlike that which exists in our osmosis jar: a huge concentration of solute on one side of a semi-permeable membrane and a large body of pure solvent on the other side.  Except that in this case, we have a huge concentration of wealth on one side of a national border and a huge mass of people who have been "purified" of their possessions on the other side.  In this respect, the robber nations serve as "reverse osmosis" devices whose components consist of armies to rob other nations with, and border guards and fences and walls to keep those whom they have robbed on the outside.  Of course, all this machinery requires energy and other inputs, because the natural tendency is for good old-fashioned osmosis to occur: if you concentrate all the world's best precious things in the hands of a few nations and leave the rest of the world to either starve or try to find a few crumbs by emigrating to the "favored" nations, you can't grumble if a few of the rest of the world's citizens show up at your doorstep.

The picture of osmosis has thus helped me to see the rise of far-right ultra-nationalist movements (many backed and financed by the Russian government) in the United States and Europe from a different perspective.  And that can be helpful, just as looking at another planet through lenses designed to filter or transmit certain frequencies of light can help us to see things we might have missed if we had viewed the planet through visible light only.  I've been looking at the behavior of nations through the lens of narcissism lately.  Let's try out a different lens tonight.

So we have a bunch of ultra-nationalists and proto-fascists who have become rather well-known lately.  In Europe, there is the Golden Dawn party of Greece, there is UKIP in Britain, and there is the National Front in France, not to mention Russia and the Russian empire historically and at present or the many Eastern European countries which have taken a hard right ultra-nationalist turn recently.  And then there's the Republican Party in the United States, and its Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.  And I'm wondering how it is that those who might in any way have been called "left" or "left-leaning" in any of these nations have been totally eviscerated so that the only "alternative" we have to what some call "the extreme center" is a bunch of people who want to insist that they and their nations are All That And A Bag Of Chips, and that the rest of the world can go to blazes.  And all this bluster and bravado is being built on a history and tradition of having made a home stuffed full of precious things at the expense of the rest of the world. 

Note: Some of these people try to base their nationalism on their interpretation of Christianity.  But the Good Book states clearly in both the Old and New Testaments that the Lord's chosen people are to be hospitable to strangers, and are forbidden from oppressing the stranger, the orphan or the widow.  Now I know that there's not really any such thing as a "Christian nation" in the world, and that expecting nations to model this kind of hospitality is sort of like trying to teach pigs to fly - it wastes your time and annoys the pigs.  But at the least, the nations who consider themselves "special" and "precious" could leave off robbing other nations, don't you think?

And the robbery is what enabled these special nations to make their nations a home of all precious things.  But now, on the far side of Hubbert's peak, not only with regard to shortages of easily extracted oil, but with regard to a host of other natural resources, those precious things are being threatened.  And the machinery of reverse osmosis (or, robbery) is being strained to breaking.  The rise of fascist ultra-nationalism may well be the fearful response on the part of some very wealthy people and their mouthpieces in politics and the media to that breaking, and to the increasing likelihood that they will be forced to share their stash of precious things with the people from whom those things were forcibly taken.

One last thing.  There has been a lot of demonization of the Syrian refugees and others who are fleeing from the destruction of their countries which was engineered by the U.S. and its allies.  One of the latest accusations against these refugees is that they organized a mass rape of "pure," "innocent" European women in the city of Cologne on New Year's Eve.  At first, I was inclined to believe the accusations, but now that it has been reported how systematically the attacks were planned and executed (for instance, the attackers supposedly coordinated their attacks by means of social media like Facebook and Twitter), the story is starting to stink - and I'm not the only one who notices the smell.  Why use attacks like this to seek to demonize and implicate refugees and aliens?  I think the answer is not just narcissism (although it is certainly that), but that there is a much more practical reason.  If you build your nation by robbing other nations, and the people of the nations you robbed emigrate to your nation and become citizens, they may have strong objections to you embarking on future robbery sprees.  Racist uber-nationalism is the perfect ideology for a nation that wants to exalt itself by conquering and plundering other peoples.  (That, by the way, explains a lot of European history and culture.)  Pulling such shenanigans is a lot harder to do when you are the head of a multicultural nation.  Also, excluding others from your stash of loot leaves more of that loot for you to enjoy.

The eventual end of robber empires is that they themselves get robbed, or their machinery of reverse osmosis breaks.  For instance, the reverse osmosis pump consisting of armies to rob other nations starts to cost more than it takes in, and the semi-permeable membrane consisting of border guards, walls, and barbed-wire fences becomes too expensive to maintain on a large scale.  Then everyone gets poor more or less equally, including the citizens of the formerly "special", "precious" robber empire.  Once that happens, there's no further point in fascist ultra-nationalism, is there?