A rough historical model suggests that the chance of a catastrophic domestic conflict over the next 50 years may be closer to 50% than 5%. If that order of magnitude is even roughly right, most of us are managing our lives strangely.

Imagine I offered you an investment with the following terms.

There is a substantial chance that everything works normally for decades.

But there is also a meaningful chance that, sometime during your working life, the system suffers a catastrophic failure.

In that state, you could lose most of your locally held wealth. Your income could disappear. Your property could become inaccessible or worthless. Crime and political violence could rise dramatically. Your ability to move money or leave the country could become restricted.

In the worst version, there is a non-trivial risk of injury or death.

Would you put essentially your entire net worth into it?

Probably not.

Yet this is approximately how most people construct their lives.

Their home, citizenship, career, bank accounts, pension, property, professional network, social network and legal rights all sit inside one country.

We diversify stocks because putting everything into a single company feels obviously reckless.

Then we put almost our entire life portfolio inside one jurisdiction.

The usual response is:

Sure, but developed countries don't collapse.

I used to find that intuitively persuasive.

Then I started looking at the time scale.

Eighty peaceful years feels normal because it is almost all we remember

Western Europe and Japan have now lived through roughly 80 years without another catastrophe comparable to the first half of the twentieth century.

For people alive today, that begins to feel like the natural state of developed societies.

Our parents lived through it.

Our grandparents often lived through most of it.

Institutions survived.

Elections happened.

Markets grew.

Wars happened somewhere else.

That experience creates a powerful intuition:

The country has been stable for my entire life, therefore stability is probably the normal state of the country.

But that conclusion becomes much less obvious when the event you are trying to estimate may occur only once every century or two.

If a catastrophic political event naturally happens on a 100-, 150- or 200-year time scale, then observing 30 or 50 peaceful years tells you almost nothing.

Even 80 years may not tell you very much.

The postwar period could represent a structural break in human history.

Or it could simply be a very long peaceful interval.

Those are radically different interpretations, and we do not yet have enough history to distinguish them confidently.

That is the problem.

So I tried a different question

Instead of asking:

Does America look unstable today?

Or:

Are European institutions healthy?

I wanted a more mechanical question:

Historically, how long have countries broadly similar to today's developed countries actually gone between serious conflicts on their own territory?

I took a rough reference group:

• United States
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• France
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• Denmark
• Norway
• Germany
• Italy
• Spain
• Portugal
• Japan
• Australia
• New Zealand

Then I looked backward roughly 250 years.

The event definition was deliberately simple:

Organized war-level conflict on what is now the country's territory, involving the government or a rival political authority, and reaching roughly the conventional 1,000-battle-death threshold.

This is not an actuarial model.

Borders change. Definitions change. Some countries have unusual histories. A conflict in a remote colony is not psychologically equivalent to tanks entering the capital.

But I was not trying to calculate a probability to four decimal places.

I wanted to know whether the historically sensible baseline looked more like:

1%

10%

or

50%

over a human-scale horizon.

The result surprised me.

The historical peace spells were much shorter than intuition suggests

In the first-pass sample, the historical survival curve looked roughly like this:

Again, these are rough historical reference-class numbers, not forecasts for any particular country.

But they change the prior.

Only about 31% of historical peace spells in this sample reached 100 years.

An 80-year stretch of peace is already unusual.

The current postwar period is not historically ordinary.

That does not mean another conflict is "due."

It means something more important:

We should not casually assume that another 50 peaceful years is the default simply because the last 80 were peaceful.

A baseline around a 50% chance of a catastrophic domestic conflict over the next 50 years no longer strikes me as obviously extreme.

It may be wrong.

But it is at least in the range that the long-run historical record forces us to take seriously.

The working conflict table

The table below is essentially what sat behind the earlier calculation. A † means a pre-1816 episode that had to be manually added rather than coming from COW.

COW's chronology does indeed contain the post-1816 backbone we were using: French insurrections, Belgian independence, Carlist wars, the Italian unification conflicts, U.S. Civil War, Schleswig wars, Meiji Restoration, Satsuma Rebellion, Australian Aboriginal wars, WWI, the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

What I actually did with those rows

The important thing is that I did not count "number of wars per country."

I turned the history into peace spells.

Take the United States as the easiest example:

That final 80-year observation is fundamentally different from the first three.

We know the 29-, 46- and 76-year spells ended.

We do not know how long the current one will ultimately last.

So simply averaging all the numbers would bias the result downward by pretending today's unfinished spells ended in 2025.

That's why I used a survival-analysis concept.

Kaplan-Meier, in plain English

At every duration where one of the historical peace spells ended, you ask:

Among all peace spells that had survived this long, what fraction failed here?

You compound those survival fractions as duration increases.

The resulting function, usually written S(t), just means:

What fraction of peace spells would historically be expected to still be alive after t years?

Then:

1 minus that number = probability that the spell has ended in a qualifying conflict by that duration.

The advantage is that Switzerland's current 200+ year spell, America's current spell, Europe's post-1945 spell, etc., still contribute information without us pretending we know when they will end.

I rebuilt the arithmetic explicitly just now

Using the broad working coding above, merging overlapping episodes, I get 48 completed peace spells plus 17 currently censored spells.

So my earlier statement of 47 completed should be treated as a first-pass counting discrepancy, not a sacred number.

The completed spells alone look approximately like this:

And the reconstructed Kaplan-Meier curve gives approximately:

The obvious objection: today's countries are different

This is where most geopolitical analysis moves immediately.

America is rich.

Western Europe is democratic.

Japan has strong institutions.

NATO exists.

Nuclear deterrence exists.

Modern states have enormous administrative capacity.

All true.

And all relevant.

"Strong institutions" is not an operational explanation

When someone tells me:

America has strong institutions.

My brain wants to ask:

Strong against what exact failure mode?

What happens if an election result is not accepted?

What happens if political legitimacy splits across institutions?

What happens if a severe recession coincides with a military confrontation?

What happens if different levels of government refuse to cooperate?

What happens if a financial shock, technological shock and constitutional crisis arrive together?

What happens if today's political coalition is replaced by one that does not respect the same informal constraints?

These are not predictions.

They are stress tests.

In software, nobody serious says:

The architecture looks healthy, therefore failure probability is negligible.

You ask:

• Where are the single points of failure?
• Which systems fail together?
• What happens under load?
• What assumptions are hidden?
• Which dependencies are outside your control?
• What happens when the happy path breaks?

That is how I increasingly think about countries too.

A policy is not capability

This is also where my operator perspective differs from a lot of financial or geopolitical commentary.

A financial analyst may look at:

• capital spending;
• market size;
• valuation;
• supply chains;
• corporate margins.

A geopolitical analyst may look at:

• alliances;
• military budgets;
• elections;
• treaties;
• state capacity.

Those are important.

But building technology teaches you to ask one additional question:

What actually has to happen for this outcome to become real?

That question matters enormously.

A country can announce industrial policy without building industry.

A company can announce an AI strategy without changing a single employee workflow.

A military can spend enormous amounts without building a functioning procurement system.

A government can have emergency plans that nobody knows how to execute.

A country can look institutionally stable until several supposedly independent systems fail at the same time.

The interesting variable is not only what exists on paper.

It is whether the underlying system can execute under stress.

That is much harder to observe from the outside.

And that creates another problem: political fragility is partially hidden

If a country's true probability of breakdown were obvious three years in advance, country risk would be relatively easy to manage.

People would leave.

Capital would move.

Governments would respond.

Allies would intervene.

Political actors would change strategy.

The crisis itself might be prevented.

The fact that many catastrophic political events are not widely anticipated is therefore not surprising.

The system reacts to its own prediction.

And much of the relevant state is hidden.

You can observe elections.

You can observe GDP.

You can observe institutions.

But you cannot directly observe:

• how political elites behave under an unprecedented shock;
• whether the military remains unified;
• how much legitimacy institutions actually retain;
• how quickly social trust can collapse;
• which event suddenly coordinates previously fragmented opposition;
• which apparently stable equilibrium is close to a tipping point.

This looks familiar to anyone who has built complex systems.

The worst failures often do not come from the variable you were watching.

They come from an interaction between several variables you thought were independent.

So I don't want to predict the crisis

I want to remove the single points of failure

This is the part where the startup method becomes useful.

When building a product, I don't start by trying to predict every possible user behavior.

I ask:

What is the cheapest experiment that reveals the biggest unknown?

And:

What is the minimum architecture that prevents one failure from destroying the whole system?

Applied to country risk, the question becomes:

What are the minimum changes that prevent one country's failure from destroying most of my life?

That is a much more useful question than:

Will America have a civil war in 2057?

I have no idea.

Neither does anyone else.

But I can inspect my own architecture.

Run the failure analysis on your own life

Imagine your country enters a catastrophic political or military crisis.

Don't discuss it abstractly.

Walk through the system.

Income

Can you still earn if your domestic economy stops functioning normally?

Can you work legally elsewhere?

Is your earning power portable, or is it dependent on local licensing, customers or institutions?

Money

Where are your assets legally held?

Not what companies do you own.

Where is the account?

Which country's courts govern it?

What currency do you depend on?

What happens if capital controls appear?

Housing

How much of your net worth is concentrated in one physical property market?

If you suddenly needed to leave, could you sell?

Would there be buyers?

Legal mobility

Where can you actually live without asking permission?

Not:

I could probably get a visa.

But:

I have a legal right to enter, stay and work.

Network

If you moved tomorrow, would you know anyone?

Could you find work?

Could your family function there?

Do you understand the institutions?

Timing

How much of this can be done after the crisis becomes obvious?

That last question may be the most important one.

The option becomes valuable before everyone knows they need it

Suppose country risk becomes obvious.

Suddenly millions of people want the same things:

• foreign residency;
• foreign bank accounts;
• foreign currency;
• liquid assets;
• flights;
• housing abroad;
• safe jurisdictions.

The price of escape rises precisely when you need it.

Some escape routes simply disappear.

This is why waiting for obvious evidence may be irrational.

The value of the option comes from possessing it before the state of the world is revealed.

That is the same logic behind redundancy in engineering.

You do not install the backup generator after the electricity goes out.

Is an 80% downside realistic?

Not for the average war.

That distinction matters.

A normal recession is not an 80% loss.

Even many wars do not destroy 80% of national wealth.

But I am not interested in the average bad year.

I am interested in the catastrophic branch.

The branch where several things happen together:

• physical conflict;
• currency destruction;
• expropriation;
• capital controls;
• forced displacement;
• loss of income;
• property destruction;
• collapse in public safety.

If most of your economic life sits inside the affected country, an 80% personal loss is not difficult to imagine.

And financial wealth is only part of the damage.

There is also:

• physical injury;
• death risk;
• family disruption;
• lost years of education;
• destroyed careers;
• psychological trauma;
• political humiliation;
• loss of national status;
• decades of reduced opportunity after defeat.

Countries can rebuild GDP.

People do not necessarily get those years back.

Now the expected-value problem becomes uncomfortable

Suppose your rough long-horizon probability of a catastrophic country event is around 50%.

Suppose the catastrophic personal downside is around 80%.

I am not claiming those are exact numbers.

Use your own.

The important point is simply that if both numbers are large, then the expected exposure is large.

Yet many intelligent people devote almost no effort to reducing it.

Operationally, their life looks like:

• one citizenship;
• one country of residence;
• one property market;
• one banking system;
• one currency;
• one local career;
• one domestic professional network;
• one pension regime.

Then they buy an international ETF and call themselves diversified.

Their securities portfolio may be diversified.

Their life architecture is not.

The correct response is not a bunker

It is redundancy

This distinction matters.

If I believed the rational response was spending every Sunday stockpiling canned food, I would not find the idea particularly interesting.

The better strategy looks much more like designing a fault-tolerant system.

Build a second legal option.

Have assets outside one jurisdiction.

Develop income that can travel.

Know another city well enough that moving there is operationally possible.

Maintain relationships outside your home country.

Keep enough liquidity that you do not need to sell everything during the panic.

Understand which decisions become impossible once a crisis begins.

The objective is not to live as though catastrophe is imminent.

The objective is to make sure catastrophe in one location does not automatically become catastrophe everywhere in your life.

The best hedges are productive in the normal world too

This is where the economics become especially attractive.

A second-country professional network can create business opportunities even if nothing goes wrong.

A second language can increase your earnings.

International assets can improve ordinary portfolio diversification.

A second citizenship can create employment, travel and educational options.

Portable skills increase negotiating leverage.

Living in multiple countries improves information.

So these are not necessarily dead insurance expenditures.

They can produce upside in the normal world and become extraordinarily valuable in the catastrophic world.

That is exactly the kind of option I like.

Low carrying cost.

Useful under ordinary conditions.

Massive payoff in a rare bad state.

This is really an engineering problem

The more I think about country risk, the less useful I find the usual political question:

Is my country safe?

"Safe" is too binary.

A better question is:

How many independent things have to go wrong before my life becomes unrecoverable?

If the answer is one, you have a fragile system.

If one government, one banking system, one property market or one legal jurisdiction can simultaneously destroy most of your wealth, income and mobility, then you have an architectural problem.

In software, I would never design an important system that way.

I am increasingly unconvinced that I should design my life that way either.

The postwar world may continue for another century

I hope it does.

Maybe modern democracy permanently reduced internal war.

Maybe nuclear weapons permanently reduced great-power conflict.

Maybe economic integration changed the process.

Maybe the next 80 years look just like the last 80.

But the historical record does not give me enough confidence to treat that outcome as virtually guaranteed.

That is the important distinction.

You do not need to predict catastrophe.

You do not need to believe catastrophe is the most likely outcome.

You only need to believe that:

the probability is meaningful,

the downside is enormous,

and

the cost of reducing your exposure is reasonable.

Once those three conditions hold, doing nothing becomes the strange decision.

Don't spend your time arguing endlessly about whether the system will fail.

Identify the failure modes.

Find the single points of failure.

Test your assumptions.

Build redundancy where it is cheap.

Then keep operating.

Because country diversification is not fundamentally about pessimism.

It is about refusing to let one system determine every important outcome in your life.