And how much does it cost to stay alive?
For a while now, the word defence has been popping up everywhere. In the media, at summits, and even among VCs, some of whom are trying to raise from retail investors what they never managed to raise from institutions. Anyway, let’s not open this issue with Marwan Lahoud, a former Airbus executive, who might well end up with one all to himself.
What’s striking is how strangely euphemistic the word is.
France had a Ministry of War from 1791 to 1946, which then became the Ministry of Defence. In 2017, Macron chose to rename it the Ministry of the Armed Forces. I couldn’t find the exact reason, but the name had already been used in 1958 and again in 1973, which were not exactly golden ages of peace.
Still, it’s a funny word.
Because for a year now, the talk has been of financing this defence, of spending 5% of GDP on defence, and that money isn’t going on walls topped with barbed wire, or on posting Arsenal’s William Saliba and Real Madrid’s Antonio Rüdiger at the border to stop the strikers.
It’s about buying weapons. And a weapon is as good for attacking as it is for defending.
The point, obviously, isn’t to make yet another plea for peace, or some flower-power hippie ode, but to understand the economics of conflict.