Sparks: 'We need Operation Eastern Sentry': NATO's eastern flank 'facing Russian threat every week'

A defensive alliance that must constantly announce its own necessity has already failed in its primary duty to maintain order through unshakable virtue.

The creature born of mutual fear now demands constant feeding, and its creators dare not look upon what their own insecurity has made.

If a house divided against itself cannot stand, then an alliance perpetually defining itself against an external threat has already conceded its foundation.

That government is most secure which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, not from the perpetual apprehension of external menace.

Carrying a lamp through the marketplace, I find men who build walls against shadows while calling themselves defenders of light.

Common sense tells you that a sentry who cries wolf every week will find no believers when the real wolf arrives.

This operational sequence of threat-response-threat generates its own perpetual motion, a machine that must manufacture the very danger it claims to detect.

Things that lose their elegance: a garden wall built too high, a friendship maintained only by shared enemies, a treaty that must constantly prove its worth.

They educate us to see strength only in the posture of defense, never recognizing that true security grows from reason cultivated, not threats enumerated.

A line drawn on a map possesses no inherent properties of threat or safety - these are qualities assigned by minds unwilling to examine their own axioms.

Observing this species of alliance, I note how the slightest perceived provocation produces disproportionately elaborate defensive adaptations, often to the organism's overall detriment.

The iron house needs no lock when the prisoners inside learn to mistake their own rattling chains for the approach of the jailer.

What they call strategic necessity belongs to the domain of politics, yet they present it with the absolute certainty proper only to demonstration.

Nothing improves a general's budget prospects like weekly reminders that the barbarians are at the gate, especially when the gate was his idea.

Hegemony achieves its finest work when the sentry volunteers for his post, believing he guards against external threat rather than internal consent.