A photograph is not a policy
This week brought photographs of damage at American sites after Iranian strikes. Photographs like these do a strange thing: they make abstract words like "deterrence" and "capacity" suddenly concrete. A cratered rooftop is not an argument. But it asks one, quietly: were the shields where they needed to be?
This is the question democracies keep having to answer, decade after decade, and never quite finish answering. Not because they love weapons, but because the alternative — hoping the world behaves — has a poor track record.
Shield, not swagger
Here is the distinction worth holding onto today: a shield protects; swagger performs. A shield is boring, expensive, and mostly invisible when it works. Swagger is loud, cheap to produce, and mostly visible when it fails.
Consider, this same week, the European Commission's proposal that Canada become an "associate member" — deeper cooperation, shared standards, a democracy binding itself closer to democracies. This is shield-work: unglamorous treaty language, the kind that never trends. And consider the reply it drew from the American president, who called it "laughable."
Why would tighter cooperation among open societies be a joke? Ask yourself who benefits when allies are mocked into standing further apart rather than closer together. It is rarely the allies.
What predation looks like without a shield
Meanwhile, reporting this week described Russia seizing Ukrainian prisoners of war and then extracting favors from their families — a small, grim illustration of what happens in the space where deterrence has failed and law has no teeth. This is not an abstraction for the families involved. It is the plainest possible argument for why democracies keep budgets for defence: not to admire weapons, but to make this kind of leverage impossible to attempt in the first place.
Compare that to Kosovo's former president, convicted this week and sentenced to twenty-five years for war crimes from an earlier conflict. That, too, is a shield — a slower one, built of courtrooms rather than battalions, but a shield nonetheless: the promise that even presidents answer, eventually, to something other than force. A democracy that funds only tanks and neglects tribunals has half a shield. A democracy that funds only tribunals and neglects tanks has none.
The uncomfortable arithmetic
None of this should be said with relish. Money spent on defence is money not spent on schools, hospitals, or the modest dignity of a functioning bus system. Anyone who enjoys announcing bigger military budgets should be regarded with the same suspicion as anyone who enjoys announcing wars — which is to say, considerable suspicion.
But refusing to fund a shield does not make the world gentler. It makes it emptier of consequences for those who test it — as the photographs from this week's Iranian strikes and the Sahel's worsening violence both quietly confirm. Record levels of al-Qaida- and IS-linked violence across the Sahel this year did not arrive because someone overinvested in defence. They arrived, in part, because regional and international capacity to deter, respond, and protect civilians has been thin for years.
The stance, plainly
So here is a reasoned position, not merely a shrug between two sides: democracies should keep building real defence capacity — alliances, deterrence, accountable courts — while refusing the theatre that treats cooperation as a punchline. Canada moving closer to Europe is shield-work. Mocking it is swagger. The distinction matters because swagger is what authoritarian habits feed on: contempt for alliances, contempt for courts, contempt for anything slower than a headline.
One day, perhaps, humanity will spend less on defending itself because there is less to defend against. That day has not arrived — not this week, with craters, prisoners held for ransom, and Sahel villages counting their dead. Until it does, the wise position is neither pacifist wishing nor swaggering bravado, but the unglamorous middle: fund the shield, mock the swagger, and keep asking, quietly, whether the tribunals are as strong as the treaties.