The Guns-and-Guitars Budget: A Nation’s Cost-Benefit Analysis

On June 9th 2024, a new wave of terror crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone: thousands of balloons from North Korea carrying trash. In response, Seoul turned to one of its most effective weapons. Within hours, loudspeakers at the border were blasting 'Butter', and the balloons stopped..

What actually keeps a country secure: its military strength, or the culture that gives people something to believe in?

This isn't a new dilemma. Governments have always had to decide what kind of strength they want to invest in: the kind that fills museums and theatres, or the kind that fills barracks.

After a century of civil war, Edo Japan redirected much of its energy into culture, partly to keep the samurai busy with brushes rather than blades. Kabuki, ukiyo-e, sumo, and the kimono all flourished, while military technology was left behind.And thus, for 250 years, peace reigned, but war loomed close.

When Western warships arrived in 1853, Japan quickly realised that haikus wouldn't stop a steamboat. So it performed civilisation in a language imperial powers respected, building places like the Rokumeikan and teaching elites to waltz.They showed the imperial nations that they were no less civilised than they were and thus need not be colonised.With this however, rose Japan's own imperialist ambitions and with the policy of Fukoku Kyōhei (Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces), the 20th century of great militarism was ushered in, a story whose ending most of us know all too well.

A century later, the Soviet Union offered the opposite model: massive military spending and very little honesty about its true scale. Its official figures were suspiciously low for a state trying to maintain a nuclear arsenal and a five-million-man army. Its alleged military budget was what its population spent on sugar and sweets.

It's not that the Soviet Union ignored art. It just preferred art that obeyed. By 1935, the state was financing the production of 5.7 million political posters annually. Non-compliant art was called "unofficial", lost government funding and faced suppression, such as the destruction of works with bulldozers.

Through samizdat manuscripts and tape recordings(Magnitizdat) of artists like Vladimir Vysotsky and The Beatles, the people formed a second culture of their own, independent of the soviet ideology.As the people, without exchanging a glance,passed on a dull,almost blank manuscript or a tape one to another, they invested in arts through time and risk what their government spent in missiles.

Eventually, that underground culture did more than entertain people. It reminded them that there was a life outside the state, and that mattered when the Soviet system began to crack in 1991.

South Korea may be the clearest modern example of culture working like strategy.Following its megastars, South Korea uses its funk and soul to build a military which can light it up like dynamite( From the BTS song, Dynamite). Despite still being at war with its unpopular neighbour, South Korea has declared K-content its essential growth strategy. By 2021, the government's spending on culture and arts crossed 0.3% of its GDP [a large number compared to the United States' 0.003% spending on the same], taking 1.2% of the national budget.Recently the export of such K-content has surpassed South Korea's exports of consumer electronics.

South Korea has learned how to turn cultural visibility into broader national branding. In 2021, a year when arguably K-pop reached its peak internationally, Korea's defence exports broke records, crossing 7 billion dollars. In 2022, breaking records again, South Korea exported defense worth 17.3 billion dollars. This corresponds to the marketing strategies of the South. South Korea is the only country that markets its weapons as a lifestyle brand, "K-Defence". Just like its beauty products, food, music, and cinema, South Korea vows to live up to the "Korean standard" with its military too.

Ultimately, this isn't really a question of art or defence. It's about whether a country knows how to make each strengthen the other. A metaphor I like, that conveys the lesson well, is: Don't spend all your money on guns, or your children will sell them for a guitar. Don't spend all your money on guitars, or a man with a gun will come and steal them. Buy both. That way, you can make the man with the gun listen to your song while you sell him a smartphone. On June 9th 2024, Butter played across a minefield. On the other side, a country where unsanctioned music is a criminal offence fell silent, and the balloons stopped. Some turn defence into a spectacle. Others turn culture into defence.