CALEB POMEROY
CALEB POMEROY é professor assistente no Departamento de Ciência Política e na Escola Munk de Assuntos Globais e Políticas Públicas da Universidade de Toronto.
Foreign Affairs
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| O presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, discursando em uma base da Marinha dos EUA em Yokosuka, Japão, outubro de 2025 Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters |
Uma premissa básica une a maior parte do pensamento em política externa: o poder gera segurança. Como nenhuma força policial global pode responder em tempos de crise, os Estados precisam acumular poder para garantir sua segurança. Eles precisam construir forças armadas fortes para proteger seus territórios e defender interesses internacionais vitais. Eles precisam cultivar economias robustas para financiar seus exércitos e resistir à pressão financeira. Essas noções têm motivado estratégias há séculos, incluindo as políticas dos dois países mais poderosos do mundo atualmente. O presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, está buscando um fortalecimento militar e a autossuficiência econômica para dissuadir adversários, uma política que seus assessores chamam de “paz pela força”. O líder chinês, Xi Jinping, por sua vez, está investindo pesado no Exército de Libertação Popular e no setor manufatureiro para tornar seu país “autossuficiente e forte”.
É verdade que o poder pode reforçar a segurança em termos puramente materiais. Mas a segurança também é um fenômeno psicológico. Líderes e cidadãos desejam grandes forças armadas para se sentirem seguros, não simplesmente por si mesmos. No entanto, quase nenhuma pesquisa psicológica apoia a ideia de que a sensação de segurança esteja alinhada com estatísticas objetivas sobre poder material. Na verdade, as evidências mostram o contrário: o poder torna as pessoas mais céticas em relação às intenções dos outros e, portanto, aumenta a ansiedade. Os fortes, ao que parece, são muito mais propensos do que os fracos a ignorar análises cuidadosas e racionais ao tomar decisões. Em vez disso, avaliam as ameaças instintivamente e agem por impulso. Enquanto os mais fracos sabem que precisam pensar criticamente para navegar em seu ambiente, os mais fortes imaginam que podem confiar em estereótipos e outros atalhos mentais para se safar. Como resultado, os poderosos enxergam o mundo em termos sombrios e simplistas demais, gerando suspeita e ansiedade.
Para verificar se essa descoberta psicológica se aplica às relações internacionais, examinei como as elites da política externa e as pessoas comuns pensam sobre o poder do Estado e a percepção de ameaças. Analisei especificamente o pensamento de tomadores de decisão americanos durante a Guerra Fria, de formuladores de políticas russos antes da invasão da Ucrânia por Moscou em 2022 e do público chinês e americano contemporâneo. Minhas descobertas foram inequívocas. Países mais fortes, assim como pessoas mais poderosas, tendem a ser mais inseguros do que os mais fracos. Seus líderes e cidadãos imaginam ou exageram as ameaças. Pensam impulsivamente. E são facilmente provocados. Como resultado, são mais propensos a apoiar o início e a escalada de guerras do que indivíduos que sentem que seu Estado é frágil.
Essa descoberta tem implicações infelizes. Hoje, o mundo é caracterizado por uma renovada competição entre grandes potências, particularmente entre os Estados Unidos e a China. Cada lado tenta adquirir mais poder que o outro, em grande parte para se sentir mais seguro. Mas essa estratégia provavelmente terá o efeito oposto ao pretendido. Se Washington se fortalecer, ficará mais convencido de que Pequim representa uma ameaça. Se Pequim se tornar mais poderosa, verá as ações de Washington em sua vizinhança como mais ameaçadoras. O resultado poderá ser um ciclo vicioso: à medida que cada país se torna mais capaz, sentir-se-á mais inseguro, o que levará a novos reforços militares que aumentarão ainda mais a ansiedade de ambos os lados.
Para evitar esse desfecho, as autoridades tanto dos Estados Unidos quanto da China — e, na verdade, de qualquer país poderoso — devem tentar neutralizar os efeitos psicológicos do poder. Isso significa que devem refletir antes de tomar decisões. Devem avaliar cuidadosamente todas as evidências disponíveis sobre uma ameaça potencial, em vez de tirar conclusões precipitadas. Em outras palavras, devem raciocinar como se estivessem governando governos fracos, e não fortes.
É verdade que o poder pode reforçar a segurança em termos puramente materiais. Mas a segurança também é um fenômeno psicológico. Líderes e cidadãos desejam grandes forças armadas para se sentirem seguros, não simplesmente por si mesmos. No entanto, quase nenhuma pesquisa psicológica apoia a ideia de que a sensação de segurança esteja alinhada com estatísticas objetivas sobre poder material. Na verdade, as evidências mostram o contrário: o poder torna as pessoas mais céticas em relação às intenções dos outros e, portanto, aumenta a ansiedade. Os fortes, ao que parece, são muito mais propensos do que os fracos a ignorar análises cuidadosas e racionais ao tomar decisões. Em vez disso, avaliam as ameaças instintivamente e agem por impulso. Enquanto os mais fracos sabem que precisam pensar criticamente para navegar em seu ambiente, os mais fortes imaginam que podem confiar em estereótipos e outros atalhos mentais para se safar. Como resultado, os poderosos enxergam o mundo em termos sombrios e simplistas demais, gerando suspeita e ansiedade.
Para verificar se essa descoberta psicológica se aplica às relações internacionais, examinei como as elites da política externa e as pessoas comuns pensam sobre o poder do Estado e a percepção de ameaças. Analisei especificamente o pensamento de tomadores de decisão americanos durante a Guerra Fria, de formuladores de políticas russos antes da invasão da Ucrânia por Moscou em 2022 e do público chinês e americano contemporâneo. Minhas descobertas foram inequívocas. Países mais fortes, assim como pessoas mais poderosas, tendem a ser mais inseguros do que os mais fracos. Seus líderes e cidadãos imaginam ou exageram as ameaças. Pensam impulsivamente. E são facilmente provocados. Como resultado, são mais propensos a apoiar o início e a escalada de guerras do que indivíduos que sentem que seu Estado é frágil.
Essa descoberta tem implicações infelizes. Hoje, o mundo é caracterizado por uma renovada competição entre grandes potências, particularmente entre os Estados Unidos e a China. Cada lado tenta adquirir mais poder que o outro, em grande parte para se sentir mais seguro. Mas essa estratégia provavelmente terá o efeito oposto ao pretendido. Se Washington se fortalecer, ficará mais convencido de que Pequim representa uma ameaça. Se Pequim se tornar mais poderosa, verá as ações de Washington em sua vizinhança como mais ameaçadoras. O resultado poderá ser um ciclo vicioso: à medida que cada país se torna mais capaz, sentir-se-á mais inseguro, o que levará a novos reforços militares que aumentarão ainda mais a ansiedade de ambos os lados.
Para evitar esse desfecho, as autoridades tanto dos Estados Unidos quanto da China — e, na verdade, de qualquer país poderoso — devem tentar neutralizar os efeitos psicológicos do poder. Isso significa que devem refletir antes de tomar decisões. Devem avaliar cuidadosamente todas as evidências disponíveis sobre uma ameaça potencial, em vez de tirar conclusões precipitadas. Em outras palavras, devem raciocinar como se estivessem governando governos fracos, e não fortes.
UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS A CROWN
One of the oldest and most dominant ideas in international relations is that power leads to security and weakness to insecurity. This premise anchored Thucydides’s analysis of the Peloponnesian War: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm it inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” But students of individual psychology have long understood that power may not generate rational views and behaviors. Or as Shakespeare’s Henry IV observes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
Psychologists directly studied the effects of strength in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to understand how supposedly normal individuals could commit acts of great cruelty when they felt powerful. In the infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, for example, psychologists assigned study participants to serve either as a hypothetical guard or as a hypothetical prisoner and found that the guards quickly turned abusive. A decade earlier, Stanley Milgram conducted notorious obedience experiments in which participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to another participant. (In reality, that other participant was an actor, simply pretending to get shocked.) Milgram’s subjects continued to administer the supposed shocks when told to do so, even in doses that would have been lethal. These controversial studies provided initial indications that power can have corrupting effects on individual behavior—effects so corrupting that they inspired new protocols for research ethics in academia.
In the decades that followed, researchers such as Susan Fiske and Dacher Keltner started testing these intuitions in a rigorous and scientific fashion. Psychologists provided subjects with greater or fewer resources in a laboratory setting and measured their views, observed their interactions in groups, and watched their behaviors. They surveyed and analyzed the views and actions of bosses and subordinates in corporate settings, as well. The findings were striking: a sense of power appeared to activate impulsive and intuitive thinking writ large. People who felt powerful accepted more risk and exhibited more overconfidence, leading to greater financial losses in laboratory games. They were quicker to dehumanize others, engage in hypocrisy, and rely on racial biases when interacting with members of marginalized groups. They were less empathetic and saw others as threatening. In one study, for instance, subjects played a cooperation game involving the division of a communal pot of money. Subjects who were randomly assigned to a powerful "manager" position were more likely to view their teammates as untrustworthy and thus more likely to feel that teammates should be punished to deter selfish behavior. The study, the experimenters wrote, suggested that power activates “Hobbesian” thinking marked by a tendency “to distrust others and therefore rely more on deterrence as a punishment motive.”
Em vez de se sentir mais seguro com a força, Washington literalmente começou a perseguir fantasmas.
One of the oldest and most dominant ideas in international relations is that power leads to security and weakness to insecurity. This premise anchored Thucydides’s analysis of the Peloponnesian War: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm it inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” But students of individual psychology have long understood that power may not generate rational views and behaviors. Or as Shakespeare’s Henry IV observes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
Psychologists directly studied the effects of strength in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to understand how supposedly normal individuals could commit acts of great cruelty when they felt powerful. In the infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, for example, psychologists assigned study participants to serve either as a hypothetical guard or as a hypothetical prisoner and found that the guards quickly turned abusive. A decade earlier, Stanley Milgram conducted notorious obedience experiments in which participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to another participant. (In reality, that other participant was an actor, simply pretending to get shocked.) Milgram’s subjects continued to administer the supposed shocks when told to do so, even in doses that would have been lethal. These controversial studies provided initial indications that power can have corrupting effects on individual behavior—effects so corrupting that they inspired new protocols for research ethics in academia.
In the decades that followed, researchers such as Susan Fiske and Dacher Keltner started testing these intuitions in a rigorous and scientific fashion. Psychologists provided subjects with greater or fewer resources in a laboratory setting and measured their views, observed their interactions in groups, and watched their behaviors. They surveyed and analyzed the views and actions of bosses and subordinates in corporate settings, as well. The findings were striking: a sense of power appeared to activate impulsive and intuitive thinking writ large. People who felt powerful accepted more risk and exhibited more overconfidence, leading to greater financial losses in laboratory games. They were quicker to dehumanize others, engage in hypocrisy, and rely on racial biases when interacting with members of marginalized groups. They were less empathetic and saw others as threatening. In one study, for instance, subjects played a cooperation game involving the division of a communal pot of money. Subjects who were randomly assigned to a powerful "manager" position were more likely to view their teammates as untrustworthy and thus more likely to feel that teammates should be punished to deter selfish behavior. The study, the experimenters wrote, suggested that power activates “Hobbesian” thinking marked by a tendency “to distrust others and therefore rely more on deterrence as a punishment motive.”
Em vez de se sentir mais seguro com a força, Washington literalmente começou a perseguir fantasmas.
Fiske, Keltner, and their colleagues, of course, were mostly studying how power affects individual thinking in controlled environments—a far cry from the high-stakes world of foreign policy decision-making. In theory, even the research they did in corporate settings shouldn’t neatly apply. States, after all, generally have many institutions and bureaucracies designed to foster deliberation among competing voices. Yet my research found that the psychological literature was in fact highly relevant. Policymakers in powerful states felt more insecure and acted with more aggression than those in weaker ones. One might hope that these effects would be tempered in democracies, where public opinion could constrain a leader’s worst impulses. But in my surveys of American (and Chinese and Russian) citizens, I found that ordinary people who feel their country is stronger also have higher threat assessments and are more supportive of hawkish policies than those who feel their country is weaker. Democracies are therefore just as vulnerable to this kind of thinking.
In fact, the United States might provide the clearest case study of how an increase in a country’s power drives an uptick in fear. At its founding in the 1780s, the country was materially very weak. Its economy was crippled by war debt. It was surrounded by dozens of capable, sovereign Indian nations. The southeastern Choctaws alone possessed a military force ten times as large as the United States’ standing army. Even the U.S. founders were unsure whether their fledgling nation could survive. But rather than panic, they assessed the strategic environment carefully and adopted diplomacy as the primary tool of statecraft. President George Washington regularly hosted and honored Indian delegations, just as he did European dignitaries, and paid these nations for land cessions. Dreams of enjoying “full security,” warned Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, were “too visionary to be a rule for national conduct.”
Yet as the United States ascended to hegemony in the Western Hemisphere over the course of the nineteenth century, its calculus shifted. Decision-makers concluded that Indian nations were not potential partners but intolerable threats. They relied more heavily on racialized stereotypes that portrayed Indians as warlike and irrational. The government therefore decided it had no choice but to attack them. In 1890, a religious movement known as the “Ghost Dance” sought to reunite participants with their ancestor’s spirits to resist the United States’ westward expansion and cultural assimilation. The Lakota people’s practice of this dance so concerned U.S. elites that President Benjamin Harrison dispatched the largest mobilization of military force since the American Civil War to Pine Ridge Reservation. The result was the Wounded Knee Massacre. Rather than feeling safer with strength, the United States literally began chasing ghosts.
Some of this aggression was driven by opportunity, not fear. With growing power, Washington could simply acquire more land than when it was weaker. But decision-makers made clear that the expansion was also driven by the perceived threat of Indian nations. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians,” the future president Theodore Roosevelt infamously remarked in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” To quote the historian Ned Blackhawk, U.S. officials felt that their “emergent racial order” was “under constant threat” from Indians in the West.
POWER CORRUPTS
The end of World War II brought about another massive increase in American power. Before the war, other governments could at least claim to be Washington’s equals. But afterward, the United States had no true peer. France, Germany, and Japan had been torn apart. The United Kingdom avoided invasion, but it had suffered heavy casualties and German bombings had damaged its cities and industrial centers. The Soviet Union was closer in stature, but it, too, was exhausted: it suffered around 27 million military and civilian deaths, compared with fewer than 500,000 for the United States, and a number of its major cities were left devastated by German advances. Its economy and military paled in comparison with the United States’s industrial might, blue-water navy, and network of overseas bases.
The United States, however, did not act as if it were the most secure country in the world. Instead, leaders in Washington fretted more than they had before the war. From almost the moment Japan surrendered, U.S. officials began worrying about communist governments. In 1950, the Departments of State and Defense drafted NSC-68, a memorandum that called for a massive increase in peacetime defense spending and the development of the hydrogen bomb. “In the ascendancy of their strength,” the document declared, the United States and its citizens “stand in their deepest peril.”
President Harry Truman quickly made the memo the lodestar of American Cold War strategy. Less than three months after its release, Truman had U.S. troops flood the Korean Peninsula in response to North Korea’s invasion of its southern neighbor. Doing so was hardly a security imperative for Washington; the fight was a civil war. But primed for suspicion, American officials interpreted the North’s invasion as an attempt by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to start a chain reaction that would transform government after government into communist regimes (or what policymakers would later call “domino theory”), culminating in a world war aimed at the United States. “If South Korea was allowed to fall,” reflected Truman, “communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. . . . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war.” The far weaker British, by contrast, saw things more clearly. In Washington, “there are too many Puritan avenging angels” who want “to get on with punishing the guilty,” the British ambassador to the United States wrote in 1950. The American invasion, in other words, was an act of U.S. aggression—not one of self-defense. The Canadians, who were even weaker, went further in questioning Washington’s response. The most urgent threat to international security, they assessed, was not Stalin, but rather an American overreaction in Korea.
The end of World War II brought about another massive increase in American power. Before the war, other governments could at least claim to be Washington’s equals. But afterward, the United States had no true peer. France, Germany, and Japan had been torn apart. The United Kingdom avoided invasion, but it had suffered heavy casualties and German bombings had damaged its cities and industrial centers. The Soviet Union was closer in stature, but it, too, was exhausted: it suffered around 27 million military and civilian deaths, compared with fewer than 500,000 for the United States, and a number of its major cities were left devastated by German advances. Its economy and military paled in comparison with the United States’s industrial might, blue-water navy, and network of overseas bases.
The United States, however, did not act as if it were the most secure country in the world. Instead, leaders in Washington fretted more than they had before the war. From almost the moment Japan surrendered, U.S. officials began worrying about communist governments. In 1950, the Departments of State and Defense drafted NSC-68, a memorandum that called for a massive increase in peacetime defense spending and the development of the hydrogen bomb. “In the ascendancy of their strength,” the document declared, the United States and its citizens “stand in their deepest peril.”
President Harry Truman quickly made the memo the lodestar of American Cold War strategy. Less than three months after its release, Truman had U.S. troops flood the Korean Peninsula in response to North Korea’s invasion of its southern neighbor. Doing so was hardly a security imperative for Washington; the fight was a civil war. But primed for suspicion, American officials interpreted the North’s invasion as an attempt by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to start a chain reaction that would transform government after government into communist regimes (or what policymakers would later call “domino theory”), culminating in a world war aimed at the United States. “If South Korea was allowed to fall,” reflected Truman, “communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. . . . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war.” The far weaker British, by contrast, saw things more clearly. In Washington, “there are too many Puritan avenging angels” who want “to get on with punishing the guilty,” the British ambassador to the United States wrote in 1950. The American invasion, in other words, was an act of U.S. aggression—not one of self-defense. The Canadians, who were even weaker, went further in questioning Washington’s response. The most urgent threat to international security, they assessed, was not Stalin, but rather an American overreaction in Korea.
Xi Jinping em um desfile militar em Pequim, setembro de 2025.
Tingshu Wang / Reuters
When the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing an end to the Cold War, the United States’ power became even more unrivaled. It was no longer merely the world’s most powerful country. It was the first uncontested global superpower in human history. But even this lofty status failed to ease U.S. fears. “We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of,” James Woolsey, the soon-to-be director of the CIA, declared in his 1993 Senate confirmation hearing. Other foreign policy officials issued similar assessments. And as with Korea (and later, Vietnam), they acted on them. A full quarter of all of the United States’ military interventions have taken place in the post–Cold War era.
As in the nineteenth century, these adventures resulted in part from Washington’s substantial capabilities. A country that can deploy special operations forces around the world in 30 minutes and launch a full-scale ground invasion that topples regimes within days is more willing to start wars than one that can’t. The powerful do as they wish.
But these actions are also the unmistakable product of rising anxiety—specifically, the fear of what might result from inaction. Consider the invasion of Iraq. The country’s leader, Saddam Hussein, posed no threat to the United States. Washington’s intelligence reports suggested that he lacked weapons of mass destruction. But that did not assuage the concerns of the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, warned that the costs of awaiting evidence of an Iraqi nuclear capability far outweighed the costs of acting now. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she explained. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put a finer point on it: “no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Bush’s thinking was even less reasoned. “I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act,” the president said in the lead-up to the attack. “I’ve just got to know how I feel.” He was worried about Hussein, and that was enough. The result was innumerable civilian deaths, the radicalization of populations, the production of future terrorists, and a price tag of over $2 trillion.
PENSE COMO OS FRACOS
Os Estados Unidos não são o único país cujo poder o fez sentir-se menos seguro. Moscou também tem um longo histórico de medo induzido pelo poder. Na década de 1970, a União Soviética desfrutou de uma mudança vantajosa em suas capacidades nucleares e convencionais em relação aos Estados Unidos, que estavam se desmobilizando após a Guerra do Vietnã. Em resposta, começou a se preocupar mais com a influência americana no Afeganistão e, portanto, embarcou em uma invasão incrivelmente custosa do país. Hoje, Moscou não é mais uma superpotência, mas permanece forte e insegura. De fato, uma pesquisa de 2020 com altos funcionários da elite russa e autoridades governamentais — incluindo membros das forças armadas e agências de segurança — constatou que os funcionários que sentiam que o poder russo estava em ascensão eram os mais propensos a ver a Ucrânia, os Estados Unidos e a OTAN como ameaças. O presidente russo, Vladimir Putin, não estava entre os entrevistados, mas parece ter opiniões semelhantes. Sua decisão de invadir a Ucrânia foi, sem dúvida, motivada em parte pelo irredentismo. No entanto, em discursos e tratados que justificam a guerra, ele expressou repetidamente o receio de que Washington use Kiev para ameaçar a segurança russa.
E depois há a China. Nos últimos 50 anos, o país realizou nada menos que um milagre econômico. A exploração ocidental no século XIX, a agressão japonesa no início do século XX e as diversas reformas sob Mao Tsé-Tung nas décadas de 1950 e 1960 deixaram o país materialmente frágil e com bons motivos para se sentir ameaçado. Agora, é o segundo país mais rico do mundo e possui um exército enorme e poderoso. Contudo, a ascensão da China ao status de superpotência no último meio século não parece ter resolvido as preocupações fundamentais de segurança de Pequim. O líder do país, Xi Jinping, expurgou altos funcionários do aparato partidário, ordenou prisões em massa de muçulmanos uigures na região de Xinjiang por medo de terrorismo interno e até restringiu elementos da cultura ocidental na mídia chinesa para conter a influência percebida dos EUA.
O mundo, portanto, pode parecer estar caminhando em uma direção muito perigosa. Afinal, será difícil para os líderes desses vários países poderosos se tornarem menos temerosos. Mas eles podem fazer escolhas melhores tentando ativamente pensar como os fracos — ou seja, de forma deliberada, empática e realista. É algo com que os Estados Unidos, pelo menos, têm alguma experiência. Diante do que considerava um crescente expansionismo soviético e uma política externa americana incoerente, custosa e cada vez mais militarizada, o presidente Dwight Eisenhower iniciou, em 1953, uma revisão ultrassecreta do planejamento da grande estratégia. Nesse exercício, equipes de altos funcionários estudaram três estratégias de política externa que variavam em níveis de agressividade. Após analisar os resultados, Eisenhower decidiu que uma abordagem mais moderada funcionaria bem e optou por uma estratégia de contenção mais eficaz em termos de custos, em vez de uma estratégia mais cara de reduzir ativa e agressivamente a influência de Moscou.
O exercício de Eisenhower não exigiu uma reestruturação dispendiosa das burocracias e instituições. Simplesmente envolvia um pensamento cuidadoso e ponderado. Para evitar envolvimentos perigosos, os Estados fortes deveriam fazer mais isso. Tal exercício, por exemplo, poderia afastar Washington de seu atual aumento da presença militar nas águas ao redor da Venezuela. Segundo Trump, atacar barcos, apreender petroleiros e ameaçar atacar Caracas são medidas necessárias para interromper o fluxo de fentanil ilegal para os Estados Unidos. Mas isso se baseia em um raciocínio falho. O fentanil é talvez a principal causa de mortes por overdose nos Estados Unidos, mas não há evidências de que a Venezuela produza fentanil em níveis significativos. Essas operações, portanto, não reforçam a segurança dos EUA. Em vez disso, correm o risco de iniciar um novo conflito de grandes proporções que consumiria enormes quantidades de recursos americanos, facilmente ultrapassando os gastos previstos no orçamento de defesa de quase US$ 1 trilhão aprovado recentemente. E esse orçamento enorme dificilmente trará paz a Washington. Para pessoas de diferentes partidos, os dólares destinados ao Pentágono servem para reforçar a segurança dos EUA. Mas a lógica psicológica é perversa.
Nada disso significa que os governos não devam investir em suas forças armadas. Certamente não significa que devam abandonar os esforços para expandir suas economias. Mas significa que líderes e analistas devem abandonar a ideia de que, em política externa, o poder reduz a insegurança.
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