In a recent speech, Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström expressed the hope that, by adopting a “feminist foreign policy, Sweden would help rein in Mr. Putin’s “macho aggression.” It is, however, much more likely that the opposite will happen. Directly or indirectly, Putin’s macho aggression will put an end to feminism. In Sweden and abroad, the least it will do is to prevent it from spreading its tentacles more than it already Feminism is, and always has been, a peacetime luxury. Come war, or even the threat of war, and it disappears like raindrops off the back of a duck.

There are several reasons for this. It is not for nothing that, with some rare exceptions most of which merely prove the rule, women have never worn armor or uniform. Physically they are just not suitable for the task. In terms of strength (especially upper-body strength), robustness, aerobic capacity, running speed, endurance, and the ability to throw things only a few of the strongest women can keep up even with the weakest of men. To this must be added the fact that, for obvious anatomical reasons, men’s bodies are much better adapted for leading rough, filthy, unwashed lives in the field.

Here and there attempts have been made to ignore these facts by making women train as hard as men do. The outcome has been a rate of injuries much higher than that which men undergoing similar training sustained. Quite some of the injuries damaged the women’s ability to have children more or less permanently. A few proved deadly.

Partly as a result of this weakness, partly because somebody must look after hearth and children (or else waging war would be pointless to begin with), historically whenever war broke out women have remained at home. Or, else, in case the enemy was near and the opportunity still offered itself, they were evacuated as were the Athenian women in front of the Persian invasion. Staying at home, the last thing they had on their minds was feminism, here understood—and the number of different definitions is as large as, if not greater than, that of feminists—to mean the idea that women should be independent of men.

Again, there are a number of reasons for this. First, women were kept too busy doing all kinds of heavy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work men normally do to get all kinds of ideas into their heads. Second, with the enemy ante portas even the dullest, man-hating women understood well enough that only men could protect them against conquest, subjugation, and rape (sometimes said, in my view wrongly, to be “a fate worse than death”). Third, with the men gone to the front, some never to return, women did much as they pleased in any case.

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Surely it is no accident that Sparta, the most militaristic Greek city-state of all, was also the one where women enjoyed greater freedom and more rights than in any other. Indeed this freedom and those rights may not have been altogether unconnected to the famous Spartan woman order to her son, “come back with your shield of on it.” After all, the more Spartan men were killed in action the richer Spartan women became. Aristotle claims that women ended up by owning most of Sparta’s land. Enough said.

Too, the inverse link between the occurrence of war on one hand and the spread of feminism on the other has other implications. It helps explain why women apparently enjoyed greater rights in the large, massive Hellenistic monarchies than they did during the classical period when all city-states were constantly fighting all the rest. It also explains why the shift from republic to empire was accompanied by an improvement in the status of Roman women. It is no accident that Sweden, as perhaps the world’s leading feminist state, has not engaged in even one war for the last two hundred years.

And the future? Nobody knows. Currently, in spite of intensive efforts to recruit more, only about five percent of Sweden’s uniformed personnel are female. That is considerably less than is the case in the U.K (9 percent), Russia (said to be 10 percent, though the real number may be smaller), and the U.S (15-6 percent). It is much less than the Israeli figure which, counting conscripts only, stands around 25-30 percent. Even some countries where feminism is notoriously weak, such as China (7.5 percent) have more women in their armed forces than Sweden does. From Ms. Wallström down, Swedish women seem to be more inclined to claim their “equality” and “rights” than to defend their country, and of course the rights themselves, weapon in hand, against a “macho” enemy.

Such being the case, not a person in the world, perhaps not even Ms. Wallström herself, knows what a feminist foreign policy could mean. In her speech, all she did was utter some vague phrases about the need to adopt a “soft” foreign policy and put more women in charge of it. Whether doing so will greatly impress Mr. Putin with his 850,000 active troops, ballistic missiles capable of turning much of the world into a radioactive desert, and, last not least, black judo belt, is, to say the least, a little doubtful.

Personally I can only imagine one kind of Swedish feminist foreign policy: it is called appeasement. Not to use less polite terms. I wish it much success.