World Peace in the Trenches – Why We Need to Recalibrate Democracy

A provocative thought experiment: Would wars still be fought if heads of state had to serve in the frontline trenches themselves?

from Michael Hollister

First published at Manova News on November 20, 2025

2.123 words * 11 minutes readingtime

The Trench

“This is how every war could be prevented: An international agreement stipulating that heads of state, diplomats, and their families from warring powers must lie in the frontmost trenches would result in the outbreak of eternal world peace.”

You hear this sentence—and feel it goes beyond mere irony. It hits a nerve center. Because it speaks a truth that hardly anyone says aloud: War is easy to command when only others must die for it. And it would be infinitely difficult to wage if those who order it had to lie in the mud themselves—with the steel smell of fear in their nostrils.

Of course the sentence is hyperbolic. Of course it’s utopian. But that’s precisely its power. It’s not a political demand, but a moral experiment. An exaggerated truth—the kind satire often delivers: not through facts, but through amplification.

It functions like cold water thrown in the face of a political culture that has learned to delegate responsibility. That leaves the trenches to others, but issues orders from padded conference rooms.

And this sentence brings into brutal clarity what is increasingly forgotten in Western democracies: that power is not just when it’s elected—but when it bears responsibility.

The Problem: Power Without Consequence

What this sentence makes visible in almost brutal fashion is the moral imbalance of modern power architecture: The decision over life and death is decoupled from personal risk. The one who fights doesn’t decide. The one who commands doesn’t die.

The greater this distance, the easier the decision becomes. In an era when wars are fought by joystick and defense ministers cultivate war rhetoric in business suits, this truth is more current than ever.

The delegation of responsibility creates a political hygiene that appears clean but is dangerous: Because it aestheticizes war. Because it abstracts it. Because it decouples it from pain, blood, death.

500,000 dead in a war—that’s a number. A symbol. But a dead son, a killed friend, one’s own child in the trench—that’s reality. And this reality is almost completely filtered out in modern decision-making structures.

The sentence about the trench breaks this decoupling. And that’s exactly why it’s uncomfortable—and necessary.

The Logical Error: Who Would Lead Then?

As clear and stirring as the thought of a “trench agreement” is—it contains a dangerous short circuit: It assumes that the prospect of personal risk constrains power. But that’s only true if those who strive for power fear risk.

But what if they seek it?

History knows such figures in abundance: warlords, conquerors, charismatic men of violence. Whether Blücher, Napoleon, Harald Hardrada, or Genghis Khan—for them, the sound of metal was not a terror signal but a siren call. The battlefield was stage, legitimation, identity.

An agreement that forces leaders into trenches wouldn’t deter such people. On the contrary: It would attract them. The rule wouldn’t prevent war—it would change the leadership personnel.

Those with personal fear of war would avoid such offices. Left behind would be those who feel no fear—or worse: who understand war as proof of strength.

A macabre paradox: The rule meant to prevent wars could ultimately create more of them. Because it reinforces the wrong selection. Because it doesn’t distribute responsibility evenly, but distorts it.

And precisely here begins the actual core of the problem: Not who stands at the top, but how the system selects them.

The Root Cause: Systems Shape Their Leadership

Many discussions about political failures revolve around personnel: Who is incompetent? Who must go? Who was to blame? But these questions only scratch the surface. Because they overlook the central mechanism of any complex structure: Systems don’t randomly select their leadership. They shape it.

A system is like a riverbed. It determines which direction the water flows—not vice versa. And just as a river follows gravity, a system’s personnel follows its incentive structure. It’s not the best who reach the top. It’s those who best navigate through the structures.

When a political system is designed to avoid risks, distribute responsibility, and prioritize loyalty over competence—then it automatically produces leadership personnel that corresponds to these rules. Not because they’re evil. But because they adapt.

And adaptation is the central criterion: Not courage, not clarity, not integrity. But navigational skill in a landscape of party discipline, media staging, coalition logic, and tactical communication.

In such a system, it’s not strategists who rise—but network cultivators. Not visionaries—but administrative artists.

What We Can Learn from Functional Systems

In natural systems, there’s a built-in corrective: Whoever weakens gets replaced. Not from cruelty, but from necessity. The pack wants to survive. Leadership there isn’t a question of image, but of function.

This isn’t a plea to organize politics like a wolf pack. But it shows what we’ve lost: the intuitive corrective of reality. In nature, survival selects by function. In human systems, it can happen that the most incapable lead—not because they imposed themselves, but because the system selects precisely this type.

From my experience as an IT security auditor, I know this principle: Everything that survives has a system for self-examination. Servers without monitoring fail. Machines without maintenance break down. And systems without feedback loops—whether technical or political—run until they block themselves.

A system that rewards weakness and distrusts strength is not morally reprehensible. It’s functionally impractical. And evolutionarily unstable.

Why Now? The Urgency of Our Time

It would be convenient to dismiss the thought of a “democratic audit” as an idealistic hobby topic. Something for quieter times, for philosophical Sunday afternoons. But these times are precisely not that.

We’re writing the year 2025. The world isn’t stumbling toward peace, but toward escalation. Europe is arming. Germany publicly discusses the so-called “Tension Scenario.” Foreign ministers speak of making the country “war-ready.” In Brussels, plans emerge for a coordinated war economy, flanked by ever-new defense budgets.

What used to take years—between political concept and military reality—often takes only months today. The warning time shrinks. The inhibition thresholds lower. The automatism between rhetoric, armament, and deployment becomes faster—not slower.

And that’s precisely why the question of systemic self-examination is no longer an academic game. It’s a survival question.

When corporate CEOs talk about “Tension Scenario 2026” on talk shows, when compulsory service, ammunition quotas, and troop deployments are publicly discussed—then it’s too late to just begin the debate.

Then the question must be: Do we even still have a system that recognizes its own pathological developments? Or are we already in an escalation spiral that no one consciously steers anymore?

Missing Maintenance: When Systems Never Get Inspected

We live in a world where every engine must be regularly checked. Cars have maintenance intervals. Airplanes don’t fly without logbooks. Even software gets updates, patches, security reviews. Only states, only political systems—the most complex constructs of all—often run for decades in blind flight.

The notion that a societal system remains permanently stable without regular examination and development is naive. And dangerous.

The Basic Law was written in a time when there was no digital surveillance, no drone warfare, no EU defense union, no social division through algorithmic public spheres. And yet many states behave as if this regulatory framework could apply for all time—without adjustment, without inquiry, without structural self-doubt.

What’s missing is a built-in control loop. A kind of evolutionary self-examination. A democratic “system audit” that regularly checks: Are we still on course? Do the checks and balances still function? Is the population’s trust intact? Are there misalignments that must be corrected before they cause irreversible damage?

Without this mechanism, exactly what every aging system eventually experiences threatens: Entropy. Wear. Stagnation. And eventually—collapse.

Not because anyone wanted it. But because no one prevented it.

The Solution: What Would a Real “System Audit” Look Like?

The term “system audit” is more than a metaphor. It means: A structured, regular, transparent self-examination of the political system—not by elites alone, but with feedback to the sovereign.

But what would that look like concretely?

1. Constitutional Convention Every 20 Years

A mandatory convention of randomly selected citizens, elected representatives, and independent experts. Task: System check at eye level. Do separation of powers, fundamental rights, control instances still function? The results lead to reform proposals—on which the population votes bindingly.

2. Accountability for Campaign Promises

A public dashboard documents promises and implementation. With systematic deviations: mandatory vote of confidence. Not for punishment—but for reconnection to the democratic mandate.

3. Randomly Selected Citizens’ Councils with Decision-Making Power

Randomly selected bodies participate in decisions on substantive issues—for example in foreign policy or fundamental rights questions. Ireland has demonstrated it: This is how ideological blockages can be overcome.

4. Sunset Clauses for Power Laws

Every law that restricts fundamental rights has an expiration date. After five years it must be actively renewed—or it expires. This prevents creeping authoritarianism.

5. Impact Assessment Before Every Military Deployment

Before military participation, a public impact analysis must be presented: casualty numbers, costs, duration, escalation risks. No veto power—but transparency obligation.

All of this is not an attack on democracy. It’s its further development. Its self-correction. A good system has no fear of control—on the contrary: It thrives on it.

The Counter-Argument: “Citizens Don’t Understand Geopolitics”

Those who call for structural self-correction quickly hear the same objection: “That’s naive. Geopolitics is too complex. Citizens are overwhelmed. That’s why experts are needed.”

History is full of decisions made in the name of expertise—that later proved catastrophic. The Iraq War 2003. The Lehman collapse. The Afghanistan deployment. The Eurozone crisis. All of these were not democratic gut decisions. They were expert committees, security advisors, specialist politicians—in shielded rooms, with shielded perception.

It’s not about replacing political expertise—but grounding it again. Mirroring it. Controlling it.

So the real question isn’t: “Are citizens smart enough to participate?”

But: “Is the system built so that even average citizens ultimately arrive at good decisions?”

And that’s possible. Ireland has shown it. Iceland too. Switzerland, Estonia, Canada—everywhere citizens were seriously involved, what emerged was not chaos or populism, but sustainable decisions with high acceptance.

Democracy doesn’t work because everyone understands everything. It works because it makes errors visible—and keeps them correctable.

A Global Problem

The underlying problem knows no flags. It’s not national, not ideological, not historically conditioned—but universal.

Wherever power concentrates without structural feedback, the same pattern emerges:

• Irresponsibility at the top
• Escalation logic instead of de-escalation
• Ideology instead of function
• Narrative instead of reality

Whether in China or Russia, in the USA, in the EU, or in the Global South: Everywhere societies struggle with systems that have fallen out of time. The problems are global, but the systems think nationally. Power structures are centralized, but lived realities are decentralized.

What’s missing is a culture of self-correction. An internal control loop—not just in the engine room of a single state, but in the global governance system.

A crashed imperialism in Washington, an authoritarian reflex in Moscow, a technocratic paralysis in Brussels—all are symptoms of the same disease: systems without self-reflection.

What’s missing is not a new leader. But a new operating system. One that thinks globally, is anchored locally—and regularly asks whether it still serves. And whom.

Conclusion

Systems don’t collapse from opponents—but from lack of self-correction. Those who believe they don’t need to question themselves will eventually be questioned by reality. And reality doesn’t ask questions twice.

I believe in democracy. But I don’t believe in its infallibility. I believe in the principle of responsibility. But I see how it evaporates in daily politics.

And I believe that change is possible—without violence, without rupture, without abyss. But through a reform that comes from within the system itself. Through a “system audit” that doesn’t punish, but heals. That doesn’t smash, but protects.

Perhaps that’s naive. Perhaps it’s too late.

But perhaps—and that’s all it takes—someone still at the wheel will read this text.

Michael Hollister is a former European military professional with experience in Balkans peacekeeping operations. After a career transition into IT security, he now analyzes NATO expansion, European militarization, and Western interventions. His work challenges mainstream narratives on conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond. Published at www.michael-hollister.com

© Michael Hollister — Redistribution, publication or reuse of this text is explicitly welcome. The only requirement is proper source attribution and a link to www.michael-hollister.com (or in printed form the note “Source: www.michael-hollister.com”).

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