Author Archives: David Isenberg

The cheapest, fastest, least politically costly way to do violence — to guard a pipeline, patrol a border, put down a riot, garrison an embassy, run a prison, fly a strike package — was to buy it from someone else, and that someone else had, over a century, gotten very good at selling it. Continue reading →

“The future you’re describing,” Kessler said, “is one where rich countries fight through proxies, where nobody answerable to a voter ever pulls the trigger, and where peace and war blur together until neither word means anything. The politics of that is the death of oversight. The culture of it is treating an armed guard as a permanent fixture of ordinary life. And the economics of it always, somehow, work out fine for the man standing at this podium.” Continue reading →