Wealth & Money Quote by Lester B. Pearson

Pearson’s line is a cool Canadian rebuttal to hot-blooded militarism: states don’t arm to satisfy abstract ideals of “security,” they arm to meet what they think they need. Anything beyond that threshold isn’t prudence, it’s appetite. By invoking “aggressive military designs” and naming the Nazi leadership of the 1930s, he doesn’t just supply a historical example; he sets a moral tripwire. If a government is pouring disproportionate “resources and wealth and energy” into defense, the implication is that it may be drifting from deterrence into ambition. Pearson is offering a diagnostic test disguised as common sense.

The phrasing matters. “Divert” frames defense spending as a rerouting from more natural civic uses, not a neutral budget line. The triad of “resources and wealth and energy” widens the cost beyond money to national attention and political oxygen. And “seems necessary” points to perception and politics: leaders can inflate necessity, and publics can be persuaded to accept it, especially under fear.

Contextually, Pearson is writing from the postwar, early Cold War world, when NATO states were trying to justify rearmament without replaying Europe’s recent catastrophe. He’s also defending a liberal internationalist posture: collective security as a way to keep defense bounded, rational, and subordinate to social priorities. The subtext is a warning to allies as much as adversaries: if democracies normalize permanent mobilization, they risk imitating the very logic they claim to oppose.