Sermons From Behind the Bodyguard

There is no creature on Earth more comical than the modern respectable person calling power vulgar while enjoying the quiet luxury of being guarded by it. It loves security the way a toddler loves electricity. Completely dependent on it, utterly incurious about how it gets there, and morally offended by the people who keep the lights on. It wants a stable border, safe shipping lanes, reliable deterrence, and streets that don’t resemble an improv workshop for social collapse. It just doesn’t want to discuss the machinery. That would be so coarse. So middle-aged. So unfollowable.

This is the central fraud of our era. The professional class enjoys order the way aristocrats enjoyed servants, as a background condition best left unmentioned. Then suddenly the room is full of patriots, proceduralists, and deeply concerned adults asking where the munitions went, why the asylum backlog is a geological formation, and how it happened that an entire civilization outsourced seriousness to a shrinking pool of people it spends the rest of the year calling primitive.

Look at NATO, that old institution so many people treated like a family heirloom they were hoping never to dust. In 2014, only three allies met the alliance’s benchmark of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. In 2024, 22 did. In 2025, for the first time, all allies reported spending at or above 2 percent. European allies and Canada hit a combined USD 574 billion in defense spending in 2025 after a further 20 percent increase over 2024. Nothing clarifies strategic philosophy like the sound of actual danger kicking in the front door. Suddenly everybody who’d been lecturing the planet on post-national enlightenment found a calculator and a backbone in the same week. Miracles happen.

And yet the numbers tell the joke better than I can. NATO’s 2024 report says the United States accounted for 53 percent of allied GDP but 64 percent of defense spending. That isn’t burden-sharing. That’s one guy bringing the grill, the meat, the charcoal, the folding chairs, and the insurance policy while everybody else arrives with artisanal olives and a speech about community. The alliance worked, yes. But it worked in the way a family dinner works when one competent aunt does all the cooking and the rest of the clan posts about gratitude.

What changed? Not human nature. Human nature remains a sturdy little goblin. What changed was the cost of pretending. NATO’s 2025 Hague declaration now commits allies to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, with at least 3.5 percent for core defense and up to 1.5 percent for related security, resilience, infrastructure, and industrial capacity. Translation: after years of behaving as though security were a mystical byproduct of pronouns and summit photography, the adults have had to reintroduce the shocking idea that peace requires a supply chain. Ammunition is not a mood. Deterrence isn’t an awareness campaign. You can’t defend a continent with a land acknowledgment and a recycled tote bag.

The same species of fraud haunts migration policy. Here too, the pose has been that categories are cruel, enforcement is vulgar, and ambiguity is humane. Which is charming until the paperwork metastasizes and public trust falls through the floorboards. UNHCR says 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2024. That is a colossal human crisis. It is also precisely why serious states need functioning categories instead of moral karaoke. Eurostat says the EU recorded about 912,000 first-time asylum applicants in 2024, down 13 percent from 2023, with Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and Greece taking 82 percent of those claims. It also says EU countries made 754,525 first-instance decisions that year, and 51 percent resulted in protection status. Which means two things can be true at once: many people genuinely need refuge, and many claims are rejected. Only an idiot, a coward, or a consultant billing by the euphemism would pretend those are the same thing.

And now, after years of treating borders like an embarrassing superstition, the European Union’s own Pact on Migration and Asylum has entered into force and is set to apply from mid-2026 after a two-year transition. Amazing. The people who spent a decade acting as though sovereign capacity were basically a skin condition have rediscovered screening, processing, and responsibility-sharing. I’m thrilled for them. It’s like watching a vegan quietly eat a cheeseburger behind the garage because reality finally tackled ideology into the hydrangeas.

So let’s stop pretending the real divide is between hawks and doves, or compassion and cruelty, or whatever else the graduate seminar crowd scribbles on the napkin before dessert. The real divide is between adults and ornamental adults. Between people who understand that institutions must do things and people who think institutions are decorative rings you wear to signal civilization. The first group asks who pays, who enforces, who decides, who returns fraudulent claims, who builds the shells, who protects the grid, who guards the sea lanes, who fills the depots, who shows up at 3 a.m. when the nice ideas fail. The second group writes an op-ed about tone.

That second group has had a magnificent run. It got to enjoy the fortress while sneering at the wall. It got to enjoy the bodyguard while insulting the concept of biceps. It got to enjoy order as a consumer experience while treating the maintenance of order as a low-status pathology practiced by provincial people with bad table manners. Well, the bill is here now, and it turns out civilization is not self-winding. It needs budgets, categories, production, enforcement, and an unsentimental willingness to say no.

Everybody wants the bodyguard. Fine. But spare me the sermon from the people hiding behind him while calling him the problem.

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Tammy Pondsmith is Senior Fellow for Advanced Civic Irritation and has devoted her professional life to watching pampered institutions discover, usually too late and in expensive shoes, that reality doesn’t accept revised mission statements.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.