Aging & Wisdom Quote by Martin van Creveld

There is a cool, almost bureaucratic menace in the word “assuming.” Van Creveld isn’t forecasting a war; he’s sketching a default setting of statehood. If China stays intact and keeps compounding wealth, the outcome is treated as automatic: military power will scale up the way highways, ports, and universities do. The line works because it drains moral heat from a subject that usually attracts it. No grand theories about ideology, no cultural essentialism, no alarmist “dragon rising” theatrics. Just a stark premise: resources invite organization, and organized wealth invites coercive capacity.

The subtext is aimed as much at Western audiences as at Beijing. “In proportion to its resources” quietly punctures the fantasy that China’s economic ascent could be safely quarantined from strategic consequence. If a country becomes rich and remains politically coherent, it does not politely remain a commercial actor. It buys insurance. It demands perimeter. It modernizes. Van Creveld’s phrasing also implies a kind of structural fairness: expecting restraint from a growing power is like expecting a city to stop building once it gets crowded.

Context matters. Coming from a military historian known for unsentimental views of how states fight and adapt, the sentence reads as a warning against treating China as an exception to historical patterns. The destabilization caveat is the only real “if.” Everything else is gravity.