Peace is not an inheritance

I. The anomaly

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

George Santayana, Soliloquies in England, 1922

We were born inside an anomaly.

For most of recorded history, war was not an event. It was the climate. The continent rarely went thirty years without armies crossing a border. Our great-grandparents' generation absorbed two continental wars in thirty-one years. Their parents had known others. Peace, where it existed, was an interval, the time it took the next calculation to mature.

Then the pattern stopped. Since 1945, Western Europe has fought no major war on its own soil. Historians call it the Long Peace. The continent has never recorded a longer one.

Eighty quiet years in a system that produced war for a thousand does not happen by itself. Outliers have causes. The comfortable explanation, that we became peaceful because we became better, does not survive contact with a map. The peace held where deterrence held. It failed where deterrence failed: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, Kyiv in 2022. As this paper goes to print, air-raid sirens sound over Ukrainian cities in the fifth year of the largest war in Europe since 1945.

Peace is not weather, Peace is infrastructure. And infrastructure has a maintenance schedule.

II. How the peace was made

Peace impossible, war improbable.

Raymond Aron, Le Grand Schisme, 1948

The peace of 1945 was not declared, It was built.

Its components are documented: an Atlantic alliance signed in 1949, an American security guarantee, nuclear deterrence, forces stationed forward, and an industrial base standing behind all of it. The generation that assembled this system had seen war up close. They did not trust goodwill, they engineered incentives.

Deterrence is a simple mechanism with an expensive implementation. Raise the cost of aggression above its expected gain. Hold that line every day, visibly, for decades. George Washington stated the principle to the first Congress, in 1790: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Almost a century and a half later, Churchill compressed it to three words: “We arm to parley.” Strength is not the alternative to diplomacy, it is diplomacy's condition.

The mechanism has one structural weakness, and it is not military. It is perceptual. Deterrence produces an invisible output: the war that does not happen. Nobody holds a parade for an invasion that was never launched. No monument lists the names of those who did not die. So every generation born under its protection finds it a little easier to believe the protection was never needed.

That belief is the subject of this paper.

III. The dividend

“There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.”

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved. Europe drew the obvious conclusion, and the wrong one: history was over, and the security budget was now a savings account.

The drawdown was fast. Defense spending in Western Europe fell from 2.4% of GDP in 1990 to 1.6% by 2000, and kept sliding for another fifteen years. Germany bottomed out near 1.1%. France ended conscription in 1997, Germany in 2011. Across much of the alliance, active troops per capita halved. Shipyards closed, munitions lines ran at minimum rates. Measured against even NATO's modest 2% floor, Europe's cumulative underspend since 1992 runs to roughly $1.6 trillion.

Capital went to good things such as health, pensions, research and lower taxes. That was the point of the dividend. But a dividend is paid out of capital, and Europe was not spending returns. It was spending the principal: hulls, stockpiles, design bureaus and above all people.

The culture drew down faster than the budgets. In the leading technology companies, defense moved from civic duty to career risk. In 2018, thousands of Google employees petitioned against a Pentagon AI contract; the company let it happen. This inflection point reached every campus and every engineering school: security is someone else's problem.

It took a war in Europe to name the error. Presenting the EU's €800 billion defense plan in March 2025, the Commission president put it in one line: “The era of the peace dividend is long gone.”

The dividend was real, so is the bill.

IV. The misunderstanding

“A conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed.”

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832

Ask a tier-1 engineer why they will not work in defense. Beneath the hedges, the honest answer is usually a syllogism. Weapons enable war. Fewer weapons, less war. Therefore building weapons makes me complicit.

The syllogism is clean, it is also wrong at the first line.

Wars are not caused by the existence of capability. They are caused by the calculation that aggression will pay. Weakness is not neutral, it is information. Every gap in a defense is read, priced, and eventually tested. Thucydides wrote the rule down twenty-four centuries ago: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Deterrence exists to keep a nation out of the second clause. The disarmament of the peaceful does not remove force from the world. It removes their vote over how force is used.

The twentieth century ran this experiment repeatedly.

In 1994, Ukraine held the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. Under the Budapest Memorandum, it gave the warheads up in exchange for written security assurances, from Washington, from London and from Moscow. In 2014, the assurances were tested in Crimea. In 2022, they were torn up on the road to Kyiv. The lesson is not that Ukraine should have kept its missiles, command of that arsenal was never simple. The lesson is more complex and harder. Guarantees without capability are letters of intent. Capability is the only clause that enforces itself. When Washington offered Ukraine's president an evacuation in the first hours of the invasion, his reported answer became the epitaph of the “paper guarantee era”: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

There is a second, quieter error inside the refusal: the belief that abstention is neutral, it is not. The engineer who declines defense work still sleeps under the protection built by those who did not decline. The refusal does not reduce the amount of defense engineering in the world. It reassigns it to other hands, other countries, other systems. Individual moral, is a service that someone else's deterrent is paying for.

None of this makes pacifism contemptible. As a personal ethic it is honorable, and free societies must protect it, don’t tell me wrong. As a security policy it has a precondition: somebody else's arsenal. François Mitterrand, a Socialist, and nobody's militarist, put the asymmetry to the Bundestag in January 1983: the missiles are in the East, the pacifists are in the West. He was defending the deployment of the very missiles the marchers opposed, because the freedom to march was among the things those missiles protected.

So here is the misunderstanding, stated precisely. Those who refuse believe they are refusing war. What they are refusing is deterrence, the mechanism that has prevented it. They have confused the instruments of force with the causes of violence. The firebreak with the fire.

V. The return of the real

“Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

Sir Walter Raleigh, A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, 1615

If the argument sounds theoretical, the last four years have supplied the data.

Start with what the sea carries. Around 80% of world trade by volume moves on water. Beneath it, roughly 600 fiber-optic cables carry an estimated 95 to 99% of intercontinental data, and over $10 trillion in financial transactions every day. The sea is not one theater among others. It is the load-bearing wall of the global economy. Europe, a peninsula that imports its energy and exports its industry, leans on that wall more than anyone.

Now look at what is happening to it.

Baltic. At least eleven cables and pipelines were damaged in roughly fifteen months. On 25 December 2024, the tanker Eagle S, linked to Russia's sanctions-evading shadow fleet, dragged its anchor for nearly 100 kilometers across the seabed, severing the Estlink 2 power cable and telecom links between Finland and Estonia. NATO's answer, operation Baltic Sentry, now keeps frigates, patrol aircraft and naval drones watching infrastructure nobody used to think needed guarding. Sabotage calibrated to stay below the threshold of war has a name, hybrid warfare, and its preferred theatre is water.

Red Sea. From November 2023, Houthi missiles and drones were launched from shore, closing one of the world's primary arteries. Suez transits fell from about 25,900 ships to 20,100 in a single year. Container transits dropped by two-thirds at the worst of it. Canal revenue lost over $2 billion. Thousands of voyages rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, ten or more days longer. A terrorist organisation repriced global shipping.

Black Sea. Ukraine began the war with almost no navy. The Magura that did much of the work costs a few hundred thousand dollars, carries about 250 kilograms of explosive across an 800-kilometer range, and attacks in swarms. The fleet pulled its high-value units out of Sevastopol. The grain corridor reopened. A country without a fleet defeated a fleet, with systems it could afford to build, and afford to lose.

Read the three theaters together and one conclusion falls out. Naval power is being repriced. The decisive variables are no longer tonnage and exquisite platforms alone, but numbers, autonomy, and cost-per-effect. A navy composed only of irreplaceable ships is a navy that hesitates. Hesitation is the one thing deterrence cannot afford.

Europe's prosperity floats. Its data lies on the seabed. Its exposure to this repricing is structural, and for the first time in thirty years, it has both the motive and the budget to answer it.

VI. The objections, head-on

An argument that ignores its best objections is a poor one. Here are the five we hear most.

“More weapons mean more war.” The record shows the opposite correlation where it matters most. Great-power war stayed deterred while the balance held; aggression came where the balance failed. The democracies of the 1930s did not stumble into 1939 by arming too early. They were armed too late. Churchill named the era's reflex in a January 1940 broadcast: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” Imbalance, not armament, is the combustible.

“Autonomous weapons are a moral red line.” Take the concern seriously, we do, it is our daily work. Then notice what it implies. Autonomy at sea is already deployed, including by adversaries who did not wait for our permission or share our scruples. The technology's existence is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is who builds it, and under which constraints: international humanitarian law, human accountability for the use of force, European legal oversight, engineering standards written by people who intend to be bound by them. Constraints only get built into systems by the people building the systems. Abstention does not produce ethical autonomy. It produces dependence on whoever had fewer qualms. And in the naval domain, most of what autonomous systems actually do is watch, patrol, map and clear persistent presence that keeps sailors out of minefields and off sabotage watch.

“The money should go to hospitals and schools.” The strongest version of this objection came from a five-star general. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,” Eisenhower said in 1953. He was right about the cost, and he still built the deterrent, because he had commanded the liberation of a continent that failed to. His argument was proportion, not abstention. Proportion holds: even at the new NATO targets, defense remains a fraction of what European states spend on social protection. And the comparison hides a dependency. Hospitals and schools are downstream of security; the budget that funds them is exactly what deterrence protects. Ask what happened to the hospitals of Mariupol.

“It is an industry that profits from fear.” Every industry that answers a mortal risk earns money on it, pharmaceuticals, food, energy, insurance. The profit motive is a reason for scrutiny: export controls, transparency, democratic oversight. It is not a reason for abstention, because scrutiny requires presence. The surest way to get a defense industry you distrust is for everyone who cares about ethics to leave the room.

“My code shouldn't decide over life and death.” It shouldn't, and you are right. Humans carry accountability for force, by design, by doctrine, and by law. But note what the alternative to well-engineered defense software is. It is not the absence of defense software. It is worse defense software: less discriminate, less controlled, less accountable. Precision is a moral quality. If you believe that, the place to enforce it is the codebase.

VII. The work of peace

At The Hague in June 2025, NATO members committed to 5% of GDP by 2035, at least 3.5% for core defense, up to 1.5% for security infrastructure and resilience. The EU's Readiness 2030 framework mobilizes up to €800 billion, including €150 billion in common defense loans. Capital moved first: European defense, security and resilience startups raised a record $8.7 billion in 2025, four times the level of five years earlier, and the number of specialist defense funds has nearly tripled since 2022.

So the constraint has moved, it is no longer money. It is people, in other words, engineers willing to spend a career on the problem, and industrial capacity able to turn budgets into systems and software at relevant speed. Treaties are signed in an afternoon. Fleets take a decade.

Conviction cannot be procured, it has to be chosen.

This is where the misunderstanding stops being a debate and becomes a decision.

To the engineer weighing that decision, the reframe is simple. The product of defense work is not war. The product is the price of aggression. Set the price high enough, visibly enough, and the product succeeds by never being used. Sun Tzu called breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting the supreme excellence of war. Few engineering disciplines define success as silence, this one does. Our great-grandparents paid for this peace in blood. Our grandparents paid in vigilance and steel. Our generation was asked only for the maintenance, and we very nearly declined the invoice.

To the investor, the same logic reads as a thesis. A structural, treaty-anchored demand curve. A decade of re-industrialization. And a technological discontinuity, autonomy, that favors new entrants building affordable systems at scale over incumbents defending exquisite platforms.

Peace is not an inheritance, it is a discipline.

Time to get back to work.