“The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there’s a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.” — Tony Gilroy

“I can’t really change my life to accommodate people who are jealous. I don’t see why I should.” — Sting

Nations are like human beings in their age-cycles. When they’re young, they’re bellicose and aggressive. As they age, they become pacifistic and easy to push around. Witness Italy and Egypt.

There was a time when the Romans were known for their military prowess. Only the barbaric Germans could stand up to them. Rome defeated Carthage, the Greek city-states, the barbarians of Western Europe, and more … and yet, by the Middle Ages, the Italian city-states were hiring out mercenaries to wage wars on their behalf. Machiavelli, that great Italian political philosopher, argued that states should recruit from within for their militaries, that it would produce finer fighting men, but no one listened to him.

Egypt likewise has suffered a long downward spiral of military prowess. Because Egypt is a very old nation-state — much older than the nations of Northern Europe — it has been conquered many times. The Greeks took it over in the time of Alexander. The Romans succeeded the Greeks, turning Africa into the breadbasket of the Empire. By the time of the Islamic Explosion of the 7th and 8th centuries, Egypt was rammed into an Arabic worldview and culture, with their very language being replaced. At least Greece under the Ottomans didn’t lose the Greek language.

What is it about the mark of time that debilitates civilized, settled nations? Arguably, it could be the soft living of civilization that does it. In North America, the South always produced the better fighters because Southern boys lived close to the land: hunting, camping, and exploring it. The South was more rural, less urbanized. Even today in the U.S., the military gets few recruits from places like big city New York and more from lesser known burgs.

Softness is a mental state. Paradoxically, women, although they do not fight, can encourage or discourage military valor in a people. Women raise children, and if they raise them to be nonconfrontational and not to play at fighting, they are going to cripple their adult men. Oftentimes, women are unknowing pacifists themselves, abhorring war, abhorring the pretend games of warfare that men like. Women don’t go to internet cafes and play first-person shooters, for example. (They would play a soap-opera-type game if one could be invented; but men aren’t able to think that way and women can’t design games on their own.)

Italy and Egypt and Greece are contrasted by Spain and England and Portugal, nations that aggressively colonized the New World — newer nation-states born of either population migration or younger civilized status. The English are Anglo-Saxons, migrants from the Continent who pushed aside the native Britons and founded a young civilization. But it may be England’s turn to ossify militarily. Its performance during the last two World Wars has not been heartening. Look at England’s royal house: the difference between any of the King Henrys and King Charles of today is stark. The kings have become polite, diffident, unaggressive buffoons. Where the kings go, go the nation. The last reservoir of aggression in England is the soccer hooligans, the yobs who shout and fight at games they love to celebrate. And they’re poor.

America itself has seen a decline in its fighting quality. More and more, kids in the States grow up indoors, not playing far from home as they used to do. America can still kick China’s ass, for China is an ancient, soft civilization (it was easily conquerable by the Mongols, and pushed around by the Europeans during the Age of Colonization, for example) and China requires a master’s firm hand. The Communist Party (Communist in practice no longer) is able to dominate the 1.4 billion Chinese because the Chinese are soft and the CCP is the closest thing to a forceful power China has. During the Beijing protests as the Russian Communists fell, the government sent out the tanks — and retained power.

The practice of brutality is disappearing all around the modern world, though. The world is getting richer, and softer. Wars are more indeterminate, as we can see in Ukraine with the endless stasis of fixed fronts. It is not technological stalemate as in World War I that limits the wars; it is the lack of military valor of both the Ukrainians and the Russians. The men of the East just can’t fight.

Still, men of European blood remain the finest fighters the world has ever seen. If it ever came down to a showdown between the West and the rest of the world, the West would win. Let’s just hope they don’t get much softer; the battlefield can’t take much more of this.