Geopolitics – Verbal Alchemy

When Help Makes Things Worse

By Martyn Walker
Published in Letters from a Nation in Decline

Dear Reader,

There is a cruel illusion that stalks Western policymaking—an illusion we not only believe, but wrap in moral grandeur. It is the idea that if we lift a handful of people out of poverty, we have changed the world. A hundred million rescued, a headline for the BBC, a documentary narrated by Bono. Job done.

But what if this is the ultimate vanity project of the West? What if our relentless urge to “help” is a gilded form of sabotage?

Someone recently wrote online, with uncharacteristic clarity, that you could take 100 million people living in third-world poverty, move them to the United States, and still—still—billions would remain in that same poverty. The implication is hard to miss: the problem isn’t where the poor live. The problem is why poverty remains the dominant condition of those countries in the first place. And importing the poor to richer nations doesn’t solve the problem—it just relocates it and inflames a host of new ones.

We are encouraged to pity the migrants, not question the migration. Yet every one of those 100 million would cost billions to house, educate, subsidise, and absorb—while their departure does nothing to change the systems, cultures, or kleptocracies that bred their misery. Meanwhile, those left behind—numbering in the billions—are quietly erased from the ledger of Western concern.

And there is the sting: by rescuing the few, we abandon the many.

The road to this absurdity is paved with theological potholes and moral landmines. I recall the story of Pope John Paul II—beloved in the West for standing up to Soviet tyranny—visiting India during a time of desperate national struggle. The Indian government had, with considerable difficulty, built a network of family planning services, attempting to slow a spiralling birth rate in areas already plagued by malnutrition and drought. Charities worked hand in hand with officials to promote responsible contraception. It was not about ideology. It was about rice, water, and survival.

Then came the Pope.

With a few papal words, he condemned birth control in a country battling to feed its children. In an instant, years of careful groundwork were torched. His holiness departed in a plume of incense and rhetoric, leaving the consequences behind. He had the luxury of eternal principles. The people of India did not. The famine doesn’t care about doctrine.

This is what the West does best: it interferes. With speeches. With dogma. With chequebooks and conditions. And always, it leaves the bill with the locals.

Woodcut-style illustration of a Western aid billboard in a crumbling village, with locals ignoring the sign and walking past with broken tools and containers. — A billboard proclaims “Western Solutions Available Here!”—offering solar panels, checklists, gender policy, and injections—while villagers walk past with broken carts and weary expressions.

Let us speak plainly. The developing world does not suffer from a lack of Western help—it suffers from an excess of it. Help that creates dependency. Help that erodes initiative. Help that demands ideological obedience in return. We tie aid to carbon compliance, to gender theory, to imported bureaucracy. The IMF does not give loans—it issues control. The charities do not build capacity—they replace it.

We have reached a point where the so-called “help” from the West has become more dangerous than its absence. We call it development, but it resembles colonisation wearing a rainbow lanyard.

And when the help fails, we blame the locals for “corruption” as if the World Bank is a convent of saints. Or we propose the unthinkable: that a coalition of successful nations should once again assume managerial control of the “failing” ones. We are back to empire, except this time it’s run by NGOs and ESG consultants.

And if not that, we shrug—and let nature take its course.

So what, then? Do we retreat?

Yes, actually.

But not with malice. Not with neglect. With discipline. With humility. With the honest admission that teaching a man to fish is no good if we’ve already leased his lake to China, banned his nets under EU regulation, and filled the water with World Economic Forum pamphlets.

We must learn to get out of the way. Not walk away from the world, but stop trying to run it.

Give tools, not rules. Invest without conditions. Respect local agency. Stop importing problems into Western cities just to feel temporarily virtuous. And never again should we let theology—of any kind—override common sense in a starving country.

Let us finally admit it: we have become too proud of our pity, too in love with the mirror image of our benevolence. The poor do not need our rescue. They need their freedom—from us.

Faithfully yours,
M.W.
Letters from a Nation in Decline

Imagine the sirens sound in London.

Typhoon pilots sprint for cockpits that have flown ten per cent fewer hours this year so their squadrons could meet an emissions cap.

Tankers sit on the apron topped up with scarce Sustainable Aviation Fuel that costs four times more than kerosene, so the wing commander releases just two instead of the required four.

The calculus is brutal, and it is instant: fewer jets in the air, slimmer magazines, thinner margins.

The adversary—be it Russian bombers, Chinese hypersonic glide vehicles, or a swarm of weaponised drones smuggled across Europe’s southern flank—does not care that our bases run on wind power or that our hangars are net‑zero.

All that matters in that moment is whether we can fight and win.

Survival first, stewardship second

Climate policy is a long‑term struggle for habitability; war is an immediate struggle for survival.

Lose the second and the first becomes irrelevant.

An occupied nation has no agency over carbon prices, land‑use policy, or green R & D.

Remember how Ukraine’s grid decarbonisation goals evaporated the instant Russian missiles targeted Kyiv’s substations; the only metric that counted was megawatts restored quickly enough to keep lights on and radars spinning.

The same brutal arithmetic would apply here.

If Portsmouth is cratered or RAF Lossiemouth is reduced to rubble, our gleaming solar arrays and impeccably sorted recycling streams will not defend the Channel, guard data cables in the Atlantic, or shield cash machines from cyber‑extortion.

The illusion of choice

Proponents of the current programme argue the United Kingdom can “walk and chew gum”, greening Defence while preserving deterrence.

That phrase rings hollow when budgets are already stretched between replacing Trident, recapitalising land forces gutted after the last review, and standing up an AUKUS submarine fleet.

Every pound poured into retro‑fitting hangars is a pound not spent on stocks of medium‑range air‑to‑air missiles; every hour an F‑35B sits in a simulator to save carbon is an hour the pilot is not honing instinctive reactions to a real, air‑combat merge.

The hard truth is that Defence cannot buy itself out of physics.

Hydro‑treated plant oils and e‑fuels hold less energy per kilogram than Jet A‑1.
Batteries steal payload and range.

“Do more with less fuel” eventually becomes “do less”.

A realistic hierarchy of need

Win the fight.
Deterrence that fails costs cities, not credit‑rating points. War‑winning mass and readiness must sit at the top of the spending stack.
Harden the force.
Where green technologies also add resilience—micro‑grids that keep a station alive when the national grid is hacked, for example—they should be accelerated. But they serve the war‑fighting aim first.
Cut emissions without cutting capability.
Capitalise on incremental gains already proven in conflict—formation flying software that trims fuel burn, synthetic training that substitutes only the least valuable live sorties—not the most.
Hold ambition to account.
Net‑zero deadlines must carry a readiness‑override clause: if a target compromises deterrence, it slips. Not the other way round.

A closing vision

Picture a different headline five years hence: “RAF repels barrage on UK airspace; combat air wing retains 92 % mission‑capable rate.”

In the footnotes, you learn the bases ran on a hybrid micro‑grid, and the tankers blended 20 % SAF because supply chains allowed it—not because doctrine demanded it.

That is how sustainability should look in a world of peer conflict: a dividend of strength, never a substitute for it.

Climate change may shape the century, but if the Union Flag is replaced over Whitehall, the climate debate—along with every other public good—ends at the barrel of someone else’s gun.

First secure the realm. Then, in the peace our readiness secures, we can afford the luxury of arguing about carbon.

Category: Geopolitics

Letter XVIII: The Poverty Mirage