The first duty of the sovereign is not a metaphor

According to CNBC, Lithuania is seeking to bolster its security amid growing concerns over Russia, and is backing a push to lift a ban on nuclear weapons — a move that has prompted an outcry from Moscow. I shall not pretend to know the precise military geometry of the Baltic in 2026; those are matters of modern technical knowledge I do not possess. But the moral and institutional question is one I argued at length in The Wealth of Nations, and it remains as sharp as ever.

The first and most fundamental duty of the sovereign, as I argued, is the defense of the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies. This is not a market function. It is the precondition of every market function. No exchange is possible where property cannot be secured, and property cannot be secured where the boundary of the sovereign's authority is dissolved by a stronger neighbor's cannon. Lithuania understands this with an immediacy that a comfortable theorist sitting far from the Russian frontier might not.

The difficulty is that defense is a public good in the strictest sense: its benefits, once provided, cannot easily be withheld from those who refuse to pay for them. This is precisely why private merchants, however ingenious, will not provide it voluntarily. Collective arrangements — alliances, treaties, shared guarantees — are the institutional answer. When one member of such an alliance feels exposed, the question is not merely whether it is frightened, but whether the collective framework is functioning as it should. A small nation pushing at the edges of established agreements is a signal that the framework is under strain. That signal deserves attention from the larger parties, not dismissal.

Moscow's outcry is itself instructive. A sovereign that objects loudly to a neighbor's defensive arrangements is, in effect, announcing that it prefers that neighbor to remain vulnerable. This is the logic of the monopolist applied to geopolitics: keep the counterparty weak so that the terms of any future negotiation favor you. I spent a great deal of The Wealth of Nations showing how mercantile monopolists used exactly this logic against consumers and colonies. The principle is the same; only the stakes are higher.

The institutional lesson I would draw is this: the credibility of collective security arrangements is itself a public good, and like all public goods it requires active maintenance. If smaller members of an alliance feel compelled to seek unilateral remedies — whether nuclear or otherwise — the proper response is to ask what failure in the collective framework produced that pressure. Demanding silence from the nervous party is not an answer. Strengthening the shared institution is. The cost of maintaining a credible defensive alliance is real, but it is, as I argued of defense generally, the most necessary of all public expenditures, even when it is not the most profitable.