Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not view war as an aberration, tragedy, or even policy failure. He sees it as an inevitable by-product of a specific political architecture: the oversized, hyper-centralized nation-state. In his framework, once a polity grows beyond a certain scale, war ceases to be a choice and becomes a functional necessity, the only activity that retroactively justifies the colossal bureaucracy it has spawned.
The intellectual root of the argument reaches back to David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Commerce,” where the Scottish philosopher observed that “small republics have generally been more fond of commerce, and great empires of war.”
Taleb turns this observation into a structural law: large states do not merely wage war because they are evil or stupid; they wage war because war is the only remaining rationale for their own existence.
Scale is the original sin. As organizations (governmental or corporate) grow, the cost of their mistakes does not increase linearly; it explodes convexly. A $5 million public project in Britain overruns budget and schedule by a predictable margin; a $100 billion project overruns by orders of magnitude and often delivers negative value.
Taleb cites the UK’s HS2 rail project, originally budgeted at £33 billion and now projected north of £100 billion with large sections cancelled, as a textbook example of “bigness penalty.”
The larger and more centralized the decision-making unit, the fatter the tail of potential catastrophe.
But the real danger is not mere inefficiency. It is existential dependency. A sprawling central state employs millions, owes trillions, and runs permanent deficits. Peaceful trade and voluntary exchange cannot justify such overhead. Only an external enemy, preferably existential, can transform that bureaucracy from parasite to protector in the public mind. War, in this sense, is the ultimate off-balance-sheet liability that gets moved onto the income statement the moment the first missile is launched.
History, Taleb argues, repeatedly validates the pattern. Germany’s rapid centralization after 1871 under Bismarck was followed almost immediately by an arms race and, within two generations, two world wars. France’s full centralization was completed only after Napoleon’s imperial adventures; before that, it was a loose constellation of provinces that had grown wealthy through trade rather than conquest.
The Roman Empire at its most durable phase was not a unitary nation-state but a network of semi-autonomous cities paying tribute to a distant capital, an arrangement that prioritized commerce over militarism until the late empire’s fatal centralizing reforms.
The modern United States offers the clearest living laboratory. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP has risen almost without interruption since 1913, accelerating sharply after each major war. The national-security apparatus created for World War II never shrank back to pre-war size; instead, it metastasized.
Today the U.S. maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases and a defense budget larger than the next nine countries combined. Taleb’s point is not moralistic but mechanical: no electorate would tolerate this scale of permanent expenditure without the perpetual narrative of imminent threat. Remove the threat, and the apparatus has no remaining justification.
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Small polities, by contrast, exhibit the opposite instinct. From the Hanseatic League to Renaissance Italian city-states to modern Singapore and Switzerland, entities too small to project power over large distances default to trade. Their survival depends on open ports, enforceable contracts, and reputation, not on standing armies. When your GDP is generated by moving goods and services rather than by moving divisions, peace becomes the rational strategy.
Taleb extends the logic to debt. Large centralized states can borrow at scale precisely because creditors believe the state can extract resources through taxation or inflation during crises, and war is the ultimate crisis. The mountain of public debt accumulated in peacetime is therefore not a bug but a feature: it creates a built-in incentive to manufacture the very emergencies that will excuse its repayment or monetization.
The larger the debt, the stronger the structural pull toward conflict.
The conclusion is bleak but elegant: the same forces that make giant states fragile (convexity of errors, loss of optionality, bureaucratic capture) also make them war-prone. War is not what large states do when diplomacy fails; it is what they must eventually do to survive in the form they have chosen. Decentralization, messy and inefficient on paper, is the only known antidote, because only small, competing units lack both the capability and the incentive to gamble with apocalypse.
In Taleb’s world, the most dangerous sentence a citizen can hear is not “we are under attack.” It is “we need a stronger center to keep us safe.”
Author: Slava Vasipenok
Founder and CEO of QUASA (quasa.io) — the world's first remote work platform with payments in cryptocurrency.
Innovative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in IT, fintech, and blockchain. Specializes in decentralized solutions for freelancing, helping to overcome the barriers of traditional finance, especially in developing regions.
