Samson, the great deterrence destroyer

Deterrence, that grand old doctrine of 'Don't hit me or I'll hit you harder', works beautifully - until it doesn't. Which happens when one side decides it doesn't care if it gets hit at all. As Jedi Master Yoda could have said: Break you cannot broken bottles. And that's the paradox of the Samson strategy: the party with nothing left to lose becomes the most dangerous guest at the dinner table. He's the one who flips the table, smashes the fine china, and announces in that Al Pacino voice from Scarface, 'If I go down, chico, everyone, every #@₹!ing one goes down with me.' Meanwhile, the side with that Upper West Side penthouse, tech stocks to their gills, and a national obsession with avocado toast suddenly realises it has 'everything' to lose. Deterrence collapses, like when trying to scare an atheist with the wages of sin.

The precariousness lies in the imbalance: the prosperous, stable, Sunday brunch side is trapped in a game of chicken against someone who has already lost his job, eats leftover microwave meals, and whose all-time favourite album is Sinead O'Connor's 'I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got'. This extreme asymmetry transforms deterrence - whether verbal, legal or nuclear - from a shield into a boomerang. Something that Samson, ironically an Israelite, knew well when he brought the pillars down on everyone, including himself.