Missiles, Markets, and the Failure of Duty

The facts as reported are grim and precise. Drones and missiles cross frontiers; hundreds are said to be shot down; others reach their mark. Strikes are launched, we are told, not only against military works, but against energy infrastructure, railways, ports, even a bulk carrier in the estuary of a river. In Kyiv, ballistic missiles hit civilian infrastructure, and the Ukrainian president declares that his country received no early warning from its partners. Meanwhile, merchant ships sink or are damaged in the Black Sea, and neighbouring states protest that such attacks are “absolutely unacceptable.” The words are diplomatic; the reality is simple: the ordinary business of life is being interrupted by violence from which those most exposed had little protection and less foreknowledge.

When I wrote, in the Wealth of Nations, of a small manufactory of pins, I meant to show that from the division of labour there arises a prodigious increase of industry. Yet that division is everywhere limited by the extent of the market, by the ease with which men and goods pass along roads and rivers, across seas and frontiers. What are “logistics centers, railway and port infrastructure,” what is a simple bulk carrier, but the very veins and arteries of this circulation? To strike them is not merely to wound an enemy’s army; it is to narrow markets, to break specialisations, to drive labour and capital from their most productive employments into mere subsistence and repair. In such conditions, opulence does not advance; it struggles to stand still.

The chief sufferers in this contraction are never the gentlemen who debate ceasefires or compose communiqués. They lose reputation perhaps, or change of office, but rarely supper. It is the labouring poor—the sailor on the damaged ship, the porter at the idle station, the worker whose factory has no power—who pay in full. They do not merely endure danger; they endure interruption, uncertainty, and the silent tax that war levies on every loaf and candle. The immediate benefit of a successful strike is visible and concentrated; it is counted in destroyed targets and triumphant dispatches. The cost is diffuse and uncounted, dispersed across higher prices, lost wages, ruined savings. Policy in this matter resembles a merchant’s petition: the gain loudly claimed, the injury to the public artfully concealed.

If, as reported, five ballistic missiles fall upon civilian infrastructure in a capital city without any prior intelligence warning from friendly powers, there is here not only misfortune but a failure of duty. In the Wealth of Nations I assigned to the sovereign, first of all, the duty of defence; in The Theory of Moral Sentiments I described justice as the main pillar that supports the whole edifice of society. Defence is not performed by brave words after the event; it consists in the sober, continuous, and often tedious work of anticipation—of watchfulness, of information, of concerted precaution. When those who have undertaken to share that work with a distressed ally neglect to give timely notice, they trifle with other people’s lives and property in a manner the impartial spectator cannot approve.

One modern statesman, being asked why attacks continued after an announced understanding about energy targets, replied in substance that each side had struck many sites, and that both were “a little off.” This manner of speaking, which places the aggressor and the defender together on a single, slightly crooked bench, is characteristic of a certain political vanity. Men in high station are tempted to imagine that conflicts begin and end in their pronouncements, and that a neat phrase which flatters their own importance alters the moral character of blows already struck or yet to be struck. Yet the shells that fall on an educational institution, the drones that send a merchant ship to the bottom, are indifferent to epigrams. The poor man’s widow does not find her loss softened by the reflection that both parties were only “a little” wrong.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I observed how easily the love of rank and distinction leads men to overvalue power, to chase the applause of the world at the expense of solid tranquillity. Much of what you call geopolitics is only this old deception of ambition on a grander scale. Leaders on all sides imagine themselves the authors of systems, the creators of new orders, moving nations on the great chess-board of human society. Yet, like the man of system, they neglect that every piece has a principle of motion of its own. The merchant who fears to enter the Black Sea, the worker who quits a threatened city, the partner who withholds intelligence after a quarrel—these are not passive objects, but agents with their own fears, resentments, and limited information. Grand designs that ignore such springs of action produce confusion instead of order.

An impartial spectator, looking upon this scene, would not trouble himself chiefly with which camp could claim the nicer legal pretext for bombing a power station or a port. He would first consider the innocence of many sufferers, the long train of economic mischief that follows the shattering of each bridge and harbour, and the corruption of character that attends accustomed indifference to such suffering. He would demand from every sovereign, and from every ally, a performance of the plain duties of defence, justice, and public works: timely intelligence, careful distinction between combatants and civilians, and an earnest endeavour to restore the unity of markets which peace alone can secure. Until those duties are resumed with self-command and without ostentation, the missiles will continue to fly, and the wealth and happiness of the people will continue to fall.