Globalised weaponry has collapsed the Third World’s military weakness

Evidence

In the current period, the two most militarily developed states, the United States and the Soviet Union, have built a bipolar system of military alliances of truly global scope. The countries involved in these alliances necessarily accept limitations over their opportunities to forge independent military strategies externally. They may also forfeit complete monopoly of military control within their own territories, in so far as American or Soviet forces stationed there take their orders from abroad. Yet, as a result of the massive destructive power of modern weaponry, almost all states possess military strength far in excess of that of even the largest of pre-modern civilisations. Many economically weak Third World countries are militarily powerful. In an important sense there is no “Third World” in respect of weaponry, only a “First World,” since most countries maintain stocks of technologically advanced armaments and have modernised the military in a thoroughgoing way. Even the possession of nuclear weaponry is not confined to the economically advanced states. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Bipolar alliance structure as faceless commitment — states placing confidence in a global system rather than face-level military self-reliance, mirroring the reader’s Giddens reading of institutional trust. — connects to: Third World peoples powered the critique Western Marxism could not sustain; Wright aimed to interpret Third World transformation beyond Western ideological bounds.
• SHARE: Would send to a colleague working on IR or postcolonial security studies — the provocative ‘no Third World in weaponry’ claim is exactly their sort of counterintuitive hook.

Broader Connections

• Third World peoples powered the critique Western Marxism could not sustain #corroborates (0.40)
• Wright aimed to interpret Third World transformation beyond Western ideological bounds. #corroborates (0.40)