Part 2: Beyond Direct Profit — Resources, Power, and Territory
Having traced the direct financial web around war, the chapter widens its lens to three further categories of gain that rarely appear in official justifications for conflict but recur throughout history with striking consistency: economic advantages beyond simple contracts, political power at home, and territory or strategic position abroad. Read together, these sections make an argument that is uncomfortable but ultimately empowering — because gains that are structural and identifiable can also be structurally replaced.
Resources, markets, and debt
The chapter observes a pattern too consistent to be coincidental: military interventions occur far more often in regions rich with oil, minerals, or other valuable resources than in equally troubled regions that happen to lack them. It draws a pointed comparison between a catastrophic genocide that drew no significant international intervention because the country involved had little of strategic economic value, and a different national crisis, in a resource-rich country, that drew swift military action. The chapter is careful to note this is a pattern of correlation and incentive rather than a simple, single-cause conspiracy, but the pattern itself is hard to dismiss once named.
Beyond resource access, the chapter describes how war has historically served to force open markets that would otherwise remain closed to outside trade, and how postwar reconstruction frequently comes bundled with loan conditions that leave a devastated nation indebted to international lenders for decades, often on terms that favor foreign investors over the nation’s own recovery. Even currency arrangements make an appearance: nations whose leaders have proposed alternatives to the dominant global reserve currency have, on more than one occasion, found themselves facing military intervention shortly afterward — a pattern the chapter treats as worth investigating rather than proving outright, since certainty here would overreach the evidence.
Why leaders reach for war at home
The chapter’s discussion of political gains turns from foreign policy to domestic power, and here the pattern is especially well documented. Leaders in political trouble — facing economic hardship, corruption scandals, or falling approval — have repeatedly found that launching or escalating a military conflict produces a rapid, if often temporary, surge in public support. The mechanism is straightforward: national crisis tends to unify a divided public behind its leadership, at least for a while, and criticism of the government during wartime is easily reframed as disloyalty rather than legitimate disagreement. The chapter walks through several historical examples of leaders whose popularity and political survival were meaningfully extended by a well-timed conflict, alongside a few cautionary counterexamples where the strategy backfired badly once a war went poorly.
This dynamic extends into how emergency powers accumulate. Nearly every major conflict in modern history has been accompanied by an expansion of executive authority — enhanced surveillance, reduced oversight, and restrictions on dissent — justified as temporary wartime necessity. The chapter notes, with concern but also with clarity, how rarely those “temporary” powers are ever fully returned once the emergency that justified them has passed. It also examines how open criticism of a war in progress has often carried real professional and social costs for the people who voice it, which tends to produce widespread self-censorship rather than open debate precisely when open debate matters most.
Land, bases, and strategic advantage
The chapter’s final piece here returns to something ancient: the simple, tangible value of territory and position. Control over fertile land, strategic waterways, and forward military bases has motivated conquest for as long as recorded history exists, and the chapter shows this motivation persisting in recognizably similar form today — in territorial disputes, contested maritime claims, and the extensive network of overseas military installations that many powerful nations maintain, largely as a legacy of past conflicts rather than current necessity.
Turning structural gains into structural alternatives
What keeps this section from reading as simply bleak is its consistent insistence that every one of these gains has a viable peaceful substitute, if enough will exists to build it. Resource conflicts recede sharply wherever resources are managed cooperatively and shared fairly rather than fought over — a genuinely working example already exists in the international agreement that keeps an entire, resource-rich continent free of both military bases and competing territorial claims, managed instead through shared scientific cooperation. Reliance on any single scarce resource, particularly fossil fuels, can be reduced through the same renewable energy transition already underway for climate reasons, quietly removing one of history’s most reliable triggers for conflict. Political leaders can build popularity through genuine public service and visible problem-solving rather than manufactured crisis, a path that is admittedly harder and slower but far more durable, and considerably less costly in human life. And territorial security can increasingly be found through collective defense arrangements and strengthened international law, which offer real protection without requiring any single nation to maintain the kind of costly, far-flung military presence that current strategic thinking still assumes is necessary.
None of this is naïve. The chapter is candid that dismantling incentives this deeply woven into international politics and economics will take sustained effort, and that the people currently benefiting from the existing arrangement will not surrender it without resistance. But naming the structure clearly, as this chapter does, is itself the first and necessary step. A system built from identifiable incentives can be redesigned by adjusting those same incentives — which is a far more hopeful proposition than facing down some vague, unchangeable feature of human nature.