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Nation Builders, Maintainers, and Destroyers

Admin · March 20, 2026 · 2 min read

Every society at every moment in history contains three categories of citizens and institutions: Builders, who generate net positive value and compound it across time; Maintainers, who preserve and transmit accumulated civilisational value across generations; and Destroyers, who consume more than they create and leave institutions, communities, and social capital diminished in their wake. The relative proportion of each category — and, more critically, which category a given society's institutions, incentives, and culture reward — determines whether that society thrives, endures, or declines. This paper argues that Western democracies are currently experiencing a dangerous shift in this balance. The institutional, cultural, and policy environments that historically produced and protected Builders are under pressure. The Maintainer role — the load-bearing structure of every durable civilisation — is systematically devalued. And Destroyers, at every level from the individual to the institutional, are operating with a confidence and impunity that the architects of liberal democratic order could not have anticipated. The argument is both diagnostic and prescriptive. Drawing on evidence from social capital research, institutional trust surveys, economic mobility data, mental health trends, and comparative national case studies, this paper identifies the mechanisms driving the shift and proposes a framework for policy intervention. The goal is not to assign moral blame but to identify structural conditions — and structural remedies. Societies do not usually collapse. They degrade, gradually and then irreversibly. The question for democratic governments is whether they still possess the institutional capacity and the political will to reverse a trajectory that is, as yet, correctable.

References

1. See, for example, Shane Harris et al., “Road to War: U.S. Struggled to Convince Allies, and Zelensky, of Risk of Invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022; Erin Banco et al., “ ‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine,” Politico, February 24, 2023; and Susan Glasser, “Trial by Combat: Jake Sullivan and the White House’s Battle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight,” New Yorker, October 9, 2023.
2. Ellen Nakashima and Ashley Parker, “Inside the White House Preparations for a Russian Invasion,” Washington Post, February 14, 2022.
3. Joseph R. Biden, “Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing American Foreign Policy after Trump,” Foreign Affairs, January 23, 2020.
4. US Department of State, “On the Extension of the New START Treaty with the Russian Federation,” press release, February 3, 2021, https://www.state.gov/on-the-extension-of-the-new-start-treaty-with-the-russian-federation/.
5. Trevor Hunnicutt, Arshad Mohammed, and Andrew Osborn, “U.S. Imposes Wide Array of Sanctions on Russia for ‘Malign’ Actions,” Reuters, April 15, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-imposes-wide-array-sanctions-russia-malign-actions-2021-04-15/.
6. Harris et al., “Road to War.”
7. Interview with Mark Milley in Banco et al., “ ‘Something Was Badly Wrong.’ ”
8. Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Presidential Administration of Russia, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
9. Peter Feaver and William Inboden, “A Strategic Planning Cell on National Security at the White House,” in Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, ed. Daniel W. Drezner (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 98–109.
10. Kathleen Carroll, “A Tiger Team Plans for the War in Ukraine,” Carnegie Corporation of New York, July 14, 2023, https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/how-scholarship-can-inform-foreign-policy-better-outcomes/.

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