The Soviet gift of freedom

Add in a RPG for firepower, throw in an occasional PK machine gun, and you have the Soviet gift of freedom. This is the gift the Spartans sought to bestow in Peloponnesian War II : to “free the Greeks”. This wasn’t a gift of freedom to each individual Greek man, woman, or goat. It was a gift of freedom to each Greek polis: each polis would be freed of interference from other poleis who wanted to intervene in its affairs. This is the freedom local elites sought after World War II: the freedom to oppress their own people without fear of meddling from far off European colonial masters.

The Soviet gift of freedom ensures local oligarchic freedom by denying the option of easy intervention to the West. It allows enough resistance from local gunmen to cause serious political headaches back home. Western militaries have more military power and proficiency but operate under a more restrictive cultural, political, and strategic regime. They have less incentive to keep killing recalcitrant locals than local gunmen.

Spoilers don’t have enough power for hegemonic domination. But they may have enough power to frustrate and attrit a hegemonic power’s freedom to intervene or expand. To do this, gratuitous weapon exports can be a sensible stratagem for spoilers. Ubiquitous modern weaponry helps create heavily armed hedgehogs, turning each individual state into a potential case of hegemonic indigestion and each clump of states int a potential case of hegemonic diarrhea. If, like the USSR, a spoiler’s weapon designs are easily duplicated, others will copy them and spread them further, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of hegemonic frustration and attrition.

Hedgehogs may not directly further the spoiler’s power. Indeed, a spoiler may eventually have to deal with the hedgehogs it created. However, the proliferating effort can deny easy victories to the incumbent hegemons. A heavily armed world requires an expansive and interventionist hegemonic power to expensively and bloodily clear each corner of the globe and then expensively and bloodily patrolled to keep weapons from leaking back in. This Whack-A-Mole can accelerate hegemonic decline by bleeding them of lives, treasure, and, even more precious, attention, since they are constantly putting out fires in distant corners of their domain. While they are dispersed, the spoiler is focused. While their effort is fatally divided, the spoiler gets concentration of force. This creates opportunities for the spoiler.

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