The Committee of Public Safety

Many Rhodes

Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around
,And said beneath his breath:
‘Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’

- Hiliare Belloc

One hundred years ago the world was being carved up by the nations of the West. Much of this conquest was accomplished on the cheap by obscure men following obscure orders in obscure corners of the globe. Technological prowess let small groups of white men easily subdue the spear wielding tribesman and the obsolescent feudal levies of more ancient civilizations. Much of the “New Imperialism” happened because it was so easy. Inertia and a miserly effort could gain you as large an empire as all the frenetic efforts of the conquistadors of history combined were able to achieve.

Then there was a change. The rest of the world gained freedom from imperialism in a cascading wave following the conclusion of World War II. There were many reasons for this. The West, impressed by the impact its weapons and technology had on the natives, decided it would be profitable to use those same weapons and technology on each other not once but twice in twenty years. This left them unwilling to pay the price of lordship and they abandoned their colonies one by one. The United States, conditioned to an imperialism of indirect rule in its own corner of the world, discouraged and in some cases actively fought its own allies over their empires. But a crucial contributor to the creation and maintenance of the liberty of nations comes from the Soviet package of liberty. That the package became a package of liberty was somewhat of an accident, an unintended consequence of the USSR’s own brand of imperialism.

The USSR was proficient in mass producing large numbers of cheap weapons. In order to further the Communist revolution and their own imperial sphere of influence, they exported millions of weapons to the colonial world. This gave incentive to casualty averse colonial powers to hasten their exit and let the rebels outgun any potential local communist resistance in order to seize power. However, in the end, the weapons spread out of the hands of reliable cadres, undermining the imperial efforts of the USSR and hoisting it on its own petard. The USSR crumbled into the dustbin of history. The remnants were left with massive surpluses of weapons and little more than the capacity to manufacture more. The result was a flood of weapons into the developing world and a further arming of the global populace.

The AK-47 and its variants are based on a stolen German design and reduced to a simple rugged weapon that could be repaired by any village blacksmith anywhere in the world and turn any peasant into a praying and spraying Rambo. The RPG-7 is also based on a German design and provides simple and reliable firepower. Both are amenable to simple tactics and simple training. In contrast, Western weapons were often more mechanically complex and assume greater tactical proficiency on the part of its users than can easily be achieved. My brother spent a great deal of time in remote villages in Nicaragua. A former Sandinista he met told the story of how they would wait for US parachute drops, pick off the contras waiting for it, seize the supplies, and discard the flaky M-16s, which they had found to be unsuited to their needs.  Their beloved AK-47s, on the other hand, could fire to the point the barrel started to glow red and melt. Add in a RPG for firepower and you have enough firepower to cause a real ruckus.

Throw in the occasional PK machine gun and you have the Soviet package of liberty. That is liberty for a nation, which means liberty for a local elite, not liberty as in personal liberty. One justification for the Peloponnesian War for Sparta was to “free the Greeks”. This meant freedom from interference from other poleis in a polis’s affairs. More exactly it meant the freedom of local oligarchs from Athenian imposition of tribute and democracy. This is the sort of freedom many local elites sought from their European colonial masters: the freedom to rule and oppress their own people free of meddling from far off white masters.

The Soviet package of liberty helps ensure local oligarchic freedom by denying easy interventions to the West. Intervention by outsiders is likely to trigger resistance by local gunmen that is sufficient enough to cause political headaches back home. Western militaries are more powerful and more proficient but operate under a different cultural, political, and strategic regime. They have less incentive to kill recalcitrant locals than local gunmen.

As a strategy, weapon exports can make a great deal of sense if you’re a spoiler. As a spoiler, you don’t have enough power for hegemonic domination but you do have enough power to frustrate the hegemon’s initiatives. In the case of weapons exports, through the ubiquitous distribution of weapons you can create heavily armed hedgehogs. You can make it difficult for a hegemonic power to intervene or expand itself by making individual states a cause of hegemonic indigestion and making clumps of individual states a cause of hegemonic diarrhea. If, as in the case of the USSR, your weapons are easily duplicated, you will soon have other states replicating your weapons, selling the results, and making the problem worse. This spreads spoilage and counters the hegemon. Hedgehogs may not direct further your own power and you may eventually have to deal with them yourself but the proliferating effort serves to deny easy increases in power to dominant powers. You create a heavily armed world that requires each corner of the globe to be bloodily cleared and patrolled to keep them from having weapons leak back in.

This may accelerate the decline of a hegemon by making them bleed from a thousand paper cuts since they are constantly putting out fires in distant corners of their domain. While they are dispersed, you are focused. You get concentration of force. They get fatally divided. This creates opportunities for the spoiler.