A state founded on pure power must expand endlessly abroad or collapse.

Evidence

Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from the outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. Hobbes embodies the necessity of power accumulation in the theory of the state of nature, the “condition of perpetual war” of all against all, in which the various single states still remain vis-à-vis each other like their individual subjects before they submitted to the authority of a Commonwealth. This ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 390

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — power accumulation as the sole guarantee of stability, external war as internal glue — anticipates both imperialism (next chapter) and her later analysis of totalitarian expansionism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive claim that security is the greatest threat to a power-based polity, that only perpetual foreign war prevents internal collapse, is a genuinely dense insight worth sitting with.