We live in a world built on invisible scaffolding. It’s not the monuments we notice most, but the quiet, unremarkable stability—the absence of disaster, the daily freedoms that feel so ordinary we no longer remember they were once extraordinary. NATO, feminism, and vaccines belong to this category of “invisible institutions”: they have worked so well, for so long, that their very effectiveness now makes them look optional. This is the paradox of success.
NATO: The Alliance That Did Nothing—On Purpose
NATO has been called “the most successful alliance in history.” It achieved what few coalitions of great powers ever have: it kept the peace. For nearly half a century, the Cold War remained cold in Europe. No tanks crossed the Fulda Gap, no Soviet armies occupied Paris, no nuclear weapons fell on London. It was, in a way, a non-event—a nothingness that stretched for decades.
And yet, this was precisely the point. NATO’s deterrent power meant that war didn’t happen. The irony is that success in deterrence leaves behind no ruins, no scars, no obvious reminders of what was prevented. Younger Europeans, born after 1990, often view NATO as a bureaucratic relic, its relevance being questionable in an era of cyber warfare and globalised trade.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, politicians and commentators openly questioned whether NATO still served a purpose. Was it a Cold War museum piece, too expensive and provocative to justify? Russia itself made this argument repeatedly, claiming NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was unnecessary and destabilising. Even within member states, the critique gained ground: Europeans accused the alliance of being a U.S.-dominated insurance policy; Americans complained that Europeans weren’t pulling their weight.
Then came 2014. Russian troops marched into Crimea, and suddenly, NATO didn’t look so redundant. And in 2022, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s deterrent role snapped back into focus. The very peace people thought was self-sustaining turned out to be fragile. What NATO had done invisibly for decades became starkly visible again.
Feminism: The Victory That Feels Like Normality
Feminism faces the same paradox, though its battleground is not military but social. A century ago, women in most democracies couldn’t vote, own property in their own right, or expect equal access to education or employment. Today, those rights feel so ingrained as to be unremarkable. That is precisely why some argue feminism has already done its job.
This argument has a long history. In the 1970s and 80s, during the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the United States, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly insisted that women already had equality under the Constitution through the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. More rights, she argued, weren’t needed. To her supporters, feminism was a movement that had outlived its purpose—if not become a threat to traditional family structures.
Even in more recent debates, critics point to women’s presence in boardrooms, parliaments, and militaries as proof that feminism has “gone far enough.” Some argue that activism today is an exercise in redundancy, or worse, a push for unfair advantages disguised as equality.
However, the paradox of success also plays out here. Because major victories have been won, the remaining inequalities are often subtle: underrepresentation in leadership roles, the persistence of pay gaps, gendered violence, and the co-opting of feminist language by corporations. To notice these requires more work than simply seeing, for instance, the absence of the right to vote. Success has shifted the battleground from the obvious to the structural, making the fight harder to see.
Vaccines: The Forgotten Triumph
Nowhere is the paradox more apparent than in the story of vaccines. When Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine in 1796, it marked a revolutionary breakthrough in medicine. Yet opposition came almost immediately. Some religious leaders denounced it as an interference with divine will. Others were horrified by the idea of injecting material derived from cows into humans. By the 19th century, anti-vaccination leagues had formed in both Britain and America, protesting mandatory inoculation as a violation of liberty.
Still, the results were extraordinary. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated—the first and only human disease to be eliminated globally. Polio followed, with its prevalence reduced by 99 per cent. Measles, once a near-universal childhood illness, became rare in developed countries. Immunisation campaigns saved millions of lives, quietly, year after year.
Yet this very success has bred forgetfulness. In places where these diseases no longer exist, parents can hardly imagine the horror they once faced. The syringe becomes more frightening than the illness. Anti-vaccine movements rise not during plagues but after them. During the 1950s, even as Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine transformed childhood health, sceptics spread doubts about safety and government overreach. In the 1990s, a now-discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism triggered widespread fear that lingers today.
Declining vaccination rates illustrate the devastating consequences of allowing herd immunity to erode. Measles, which had been reduced to just 86 U.S. cases in 2000, resurged to more than 1,400 by September 2025, leading to at least 155 hospitalisations and three deaths—the first measles fatalities in America in a decade. Nearly every severe case occurred among unvaccinated people, most of them children. The epicentre was Gaines County, Texas, a politically conservative area where vaccination exemptions are among the highest in the state: in the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 school years, only about 77–82 per cent of incoming kindergarteners received the MMR vaccine, far below the 95 per cent threshold needed for herd immunity. This low coverage, compounded by resistance within some Mennonite and other religious communities, fueled an outbreak that generated more than 400 cases locally and spread into surrounding counties and even neighbouring states. Two unvaccinated children in Texas and an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico died, stark reminders that diseases we once thought gone can return with tragic speed when complacency, politics, and misinformation align against science.
And during COVID-19, vaccine scepticism turned into a global cultural war, fueled by misinformation and distrust. Public health experts warned that reduced vaccination rates could bring back diseases thought long gone—and in some places, measles and polio have indeed returned. The paradox is cruel: the more effective vaccines are, the less people believe they need them.
Immunisation: The Broader Story
The broader story of immunisation shows how fragile collective memory can be. Each generation has its own relationship to disease. For our great-grandparents, diphtheria and tuberculosis were everyday terrors. For our parents, polio was the lurking threat that could cripple a child overnight. For today’s children, these diseases are historical footnotes. That is a triumph of public health—and a recipe for complacency.
Immunisation requires collective participation; herd immunity works only if most people participate. However, collective action is most challenging to maintain when the benefits are invisible. If a child never sees measles, the value of the MMR shot seems abstract. If an adult has never heard of polio, they may doubt the risk of contracting it. Success becomes its own undoing.
What ties NATO, feminism, and vaccines together is not just history but psychology. Humans are poor at perceiving counterfactuals. We don’t easily see the war that didn’t happen, the discrimination that was prevented, the disease that never spread. We are storytellers, and absence is a bad story. Presence—conflict, crisis, outbreak—is what we remember.
This makes institutions of prevention vulnerable to neglect. They appear bloated, outdated, and even dangerous. Why keep a standing alliance if peace holds? Why march for equality when women are already CEOs? Why vaccinate against polio when no one you know has polio? In each case, the logic of maintenance is fragile in the face of human hunger for proof.
The danger is not abstract. NATO’s relevance only became clear again when Russian tanks rolled west. Feminism’s necessity only becomes obvious when rights are rolled back, as in recent battles over reproductive rights. Vaccination’s urgency only hits home when preventable diseases resurge, killing the unprotected.
Each time, society rediscovers the value of these institutions at the cost of pain that could have been avoided. Complacency turns the invisible into the visible again—often violently.