Flags and The Future

What if the number of countries shrank?

I like it when people put salient national flags in their X usernames. A user presenting one Ukrainian flag is quite dull, but a user with a Taiwanese flag followed by a Russian flag is interesting.

What are your flags?

If your flags are Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, you probably support the so-called “rules-based international order.” If you choose Palestine, Ukraine, and Catalonia, then maybe you empathize with independence movements and geopolitical underdogs. If you choose Russia, North Korea, and China, you are probably just a troll. My flags are Ukraine and Taiwan. Why? I believe borders should not change without the consent of the people living within the affected area. Let’s call it Balaam’s Doctrine.

Balaam’s Doctrine says that Russia should stop invading Ukraine and simply use persuasion to capture the Donbas. The United States should just pay each Greenlander or Canadian $1,000,000 to get them into the Union. I think that’s totally fair game. However, I believe there is a serious negative consequence of Balaam’s Doctrine that is impolite to discuss among the Washington elite: there are too many countries.

The number of countries was relatively stable after the First World War and then rapidly increased after the end of the Second World War. We are now in another period of stability. On its face, this makes sense. The pre-WWII world was primarily composed of a handful of European great powers, the nations of the Americas, and several countries in Asia. Europe was diced up after the war - and diced up again with the collapse of the USSR, and decolonization further proliferated the number of countries on Earth

Of course, none of this would’ve happened without Balaam’s Doctrine. At some point in the 20th century, the West decided that conquering was no longer allowed. Territory would not change without the consent of the affected party. In the 1990s, the West made this point very clear to Serbia and Iraq, and I believe that is why the number of new countries has been very stable since 1990. No wars mean no partitions and no consolidation.

This seems like a good thing, right? Peace is good, and war is bad. But Balaam’s Doctrine has helped create an international culture that does not think bigger, and the future is all about bigger.

People who want bigger—those who advocate for abundance—focus on scale and magnitude. More people. More food. More housing. More materials. More water. More tech. More electricity. More chips. More scale. More drones. More schools, better schools. Better medicine. Better laws. More better bigger more. People and technology. That’s how you win the future, but so many countries are ill-prepared to compete.

Take Serbia, a landlocked country of 6 million people. Serbia has a unique currency and unique laws and regulations. Serbia has no plausible path to scale, so how is Serbia supposed to compete? Serbia simply will not be on the cutting edge of technology or social innovation, and the world will lose out on the potential of 6 million people. How do Serbians get more, or better, or bigger? Should Serbia invade its neighbors to grow and achieve scale? Of course not; that would violate Balaam’s Doctrine.

But I believe we are entering the era of scale, and to scale, you need to consolidate. Countries and the elites who run them ought to take this more seriously. It doesn’t need to be all that radical—if you read former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s The Future of European Competitiveness, you would see that he and I mostly agree. He advocates for more European integration, less cross-border friction and red tape, scale.

China understands this. They are building unfathomable amounts of electricity capacity, infrastructure, and manufacturing capacity every year. It seems like the United States is beginning to understand this as well. Joe Biden understood well the virtue of the Doctrine, but he did not understand the flaws. Donald Trump seems like the exact opposite—see Greenland and Canada.

The United States and China will dominate the future. But in a future where access to tools that create abundance is so important, where does that leave any country that is not loaded with natural resources, or size, or a large population? I fear these countries risk being left behind, and humanity risks losing the potential of their citizens.

So yes, I still believe countries should not try to seize their neighbors, and I’ll keep the flags next to my name on X. Balaam’s Doctrine has created a very stable and peaceful international order, but it also risks holding humanity back. We should think more about how we can create a better model for the future through peace and persuasion.