Politics & Power Quote by Alva Myrdal

Arms don’t exist in a political vacuum; they arrive preloaded with a relationship. Myrdal’s opening move, “First and foremost,” is a diplomat’s corrective, stripping away the comforting folk story that weapons are primarily about “defense” or “deterrence.” She reframes them as instruments of rivalry, which is to say: they are less about safety than about positioning, signaling, and leverage between states that are already competing. The sentence forces the reader to see armaments not as inert hardware but as active participants in international life.

The key word is “tools.” Tools imply purpose, intention, and users. In Myrdal’s framing, weapons serve policy before they serve soldiers; they are extensions of national strategy. That choice also drains weapons of romantic aura. A tool is mundane, repeatable, built to be used. The subtext is chilly: if you keep buying and upgrading tools designed for killing, you are rehearsing the conditions under which killing becomes thinkable, then plausible, then “necessary.”

“Pointing at the possibility of a future war” does double work. Literally, weapons point. Politically, they point toward a horizon of expectation. Arms become a kind of public prophecy: budgets, deployments, and stockpiles announce what leaders believe is coming, or what they are willing to risk bringing about. Coming from Myrdal - a Swedish diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize-winning disarmament advocate shaped by Cold War escalation - the line reads as a critique of the arms race’s self-fulfilling logic. Rivalry produces weapons; weapons normalize rivalry; and the future they “point at” starts to look less like a warning than a plan.