Violence is the last resort of incompetence
The sentence was coined by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation trilogy. He put it in the mouth of a cool-headed leader facing pressure from external forces wanting total domination through military power.
I've always chosen and read Sci-Fi from the allegoric perspective. Good Sci-Fi transposes current societal problems in remote time and space, in order to help the readers reflect on their own values. That is why all the Sci-Fi that made it to the large screen is so disappointing: images are not the medium for reflection and introspection.
But let's come back to Earth, the current events, and the same kind of events that peppered the lives of many of our ancestors. I am talking about what the powerful do: whom they prey on, why, how.
Nowadays, the how has disempowered the populations from giving feedback to their governments. My great-grand-father was in Verdun, where 1 million men lost their lives on both sides. That means that on each side, there were as many mothers, as many sisters, as many wives, and many more neighbours impacted by the loss of these lives. This amount of collaterals weighted in the decision making of the people in power. The pain caused to the civilians always had two causes: the local government and the other side. There are still a lot of wars that are fought this way around the world, but let's face it: they don't make the headlines in the OCDE countries. And for those wars that make the headlines, they are mainly fought with the weapons of rich countries, independently of any quality in their leadership: they are mainly fought with missiles and anti-missile systems. In these rich countries wars, the pain caused to the civilians are coming from the missiles sent by the other side. Governments have found a way to wage war, that shifts the blame to the other side before being attacked. It's genius.
These wars are fought with billions of Euro or Dollars, that fill up the pockets of the military industry. That was already the game in the second world war, when the gang of antisemitic American captains of industry and influencers – Ford, Edison, Lindbergh ... – armed the Nazis through American-Nazi joint-ventures, then helped liberating Europe: a shameless double win just to make more money. Today's global economy allows to cash in from many more angles. And that is always the why. Money. Money. Money... is the plague of our times.
The whom, the preys, are incidental. There's no hard feelings. It's just the product of the optimisation of economic opportunity and ideological justification. The democratic opportunity is one of the richest arguments of all. Today's democracies are the soil where neo-liberalism can flourish to its full glory. But today's democracies are far from the democratic ideal, and keep getting further away from it every single day.
I can't remember who said that People deserved those who govern them. That remains 100% correct.