Question: Western culture has over millennia created a particularly deadly and effective fighting force (the point you expanded upon in "Carnage and Culture"). Do you think we are likely to meet our match in the near future?
Hanson: Only if someone else follows the Western paradigm better than we do—and thus has a freer society, more transparency, a freer economy, more stable democratic government, a greater devotion to merit and openness of views and ideas, etc.; but I don't see that happening quite yet.
The other scenario that a China or the Arab world, like the Ottomans of old, can cherry-pick Western technology and add its veneer to their own unfree societies to defeat us with our weaponry and their numbers and fanaticism, doesn't have a lot of historical precedent. The key is not 'them,' but us—to what degree will we continue to value freedom, invest rather than merely spend, and pass on stern values not just sensuality to our children?
