Missiles Over Riyadh, Ruins Underfoot

Rockets over a capital are a very theatrical way of announcing what men too rarely confess: that they would rather rule ruins than share prosperity. We are told that Yemen’s Houthi rebels have attempted to strike Riyadh with a ballistic missile, that drones have been intercepted, that debris has killed a Yemeni resident in Saudi Arabia, and that Saudi forces have in turn sought to hit the rebel-held city of Sanaa. Each side proclaims security, dignity, or some higher cause; the plain fact is that a man going peaceably to work has been torn to pieces by fragments of a machine he did not launch, in a quarrel he did not design.

In the work I called *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*, I asked my reader to consider the impartial spectator, that well-informed and disinterested judge whom we carry, however faintly, within our own breast. What would such a spectator feel upon hearing that projectiles are deliberately directed towards a great city, that “sensitive sites” are boasted of as targets, while civilians walk beneath? He may admit that every sovereign has the duty of defence, and that men under attack may intercept what is sent to destroy them. But to aim at cities as such, to treat crowded habitations as fair play, is not defence; it is the pursuit of power at the expense of innocence, and it deserves not praise but the severest blame.

When I wrote of the sovereign’s duties in *The Wealth of Nations*, I placed defence foremost, and the exact administration of justice next. A government that does not shield its subjects from external violence fails in its first office, and no people can prosper whose houses and markets lie open to the weapons of a neighbouring power. In this limited sense, preparations to intercept missiles or drones are not only permitted but required. Yet the same principle that justifies defence condemns vengeance. If, under the pretext of security, rulers loose hundreds of strikes across a poorer country, scarcely distinguishing combatant from bystander, they discharge cannon where the law of justice demands the scalpel; they protect some lives by making others cheap.

Beyond the immediate horror, there is the slower, colder mischief which such contests work upon the wealth of nations. In that same inquiry, I observed that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. Roads, ports, and peace knit towns and provinces into a single market; fear, blockade, and falling masonry tear them apart. Every missile that closes an airport, every rumour of attack that halts a caravan, narrows that extent. The merchant postpones his shipment, the artisan dismisses his apprentice, the peasant finds no buyer for his surplus. The annual produce of the land and labour declines, not always in a dramatic crash, but in a thousand cancelled bargains and abandoned tools.

The visible gains of this game are reserved for a very narrow circle. Certain commanders enjoy the intoxication of influence; certain ministers discover that in the midst of alarms, the people listen less critically to their management of revenue and expense; perhaps certain great proprietors of oil or arms find their profits conveniently sustained. These benefits are concentrated and loud; the costs are diffuse and silent. They fall upon the labouring poor in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia, upon the displaced family recorded by some distant office, upon the worker whose flight from Riyadh is cancelled without refund, upon the Yemeni resident who dies under debris while the authors of the quarrel sleep behind guards and walls.

I have long argued that self-love, under the restraints of justice and in the ordinary higgling and bargaining of the market, may direct men, as if by an invisible hand, to promote ends far kinder than they intend. But when the rules of justice are relaxed, the same passion degenerates into that vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves, and nothing for other people. Rulers then overrate the satisfaction of command, factions overrate the sweetness of triumph, and both sacrifice years of possible opulence for a moment’s ascendancy. The poor man’s son toils all his life for a greatness that disappoints him; how much more pitiable the poor man’s widow, whose husband’s life is flung away to decorate another’s frustrated ambition.

There will be no want of grave men, whether in robes or uniforms, assuring us that more force, more strikes, more “pressure” will solve the difficulty. They talk of societies as if of a great chess-board, on which they move whole peoples as if they had no principle of motion of their own. Yet Yemen and Arabia are not pieces; they are multitudes of butchers and bakers, of mothers and apprentices, whose industry and affections cannot be arranged by proclamation. Lasting peace will not be built by rockets but by justice: by secure borders, predictable law, and public works that bind villages to towns, ports to hinterlands, so that men find it more profitable to trade with one another than to kill one another. A policy deserves the name of wisdom only when the impartial spectator can look from Riyadh to Sanaa and see, not flames in the sky, but markets and households quietly at work again.