Politics & Power Quote by Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s line lands like a paradox because it flips the usual moral accounting of war. We talk about conflict as a desperate last resort or a tragic inevitability; she reframes it as a status symbol with a bill that scales up fast. “Luxury” is the sting: not pleasure exactly, but something irrationally costly that signals you can burn resources, lives, and legitimacy and still keep the lights on. For small nations, war can be a brutal form of theater and leverage - a way to force recognition, consolidate identity, or redraw terms when there aren’t many other instruments of power. For great powers, by contrast, modern war threatens to become too expensive to “use” in any bounded way.

The subtext is structural, not sentimental. Arendt is pointing at the post-World War II order where industrialized warfare, mass mobilization, and (especially) nuclear escalation turn conflict from a tool of statecraft into a potential act of national self-harm. Big states have more to lose: complex economies, far-flung alliances, global reputations, and an interdependence that makes “victory” indistinguishable from long-term blowback. They also bear the burden of maintaining stability; when they fight, they risk detonating the system that props them up.

Context matters: Arendt wrote in the shadow of total war and the Cold War, when violence was no longer a limited duel between armies but a technology-driven threat to civil society itself. The aphorism captures her broader concern that modern politics can normalize catastrophe - and that the powerful, fearing mutual destruction, outsource “real” war to the periphery while calling it containment, policing, or development.