Tough times mean brittle impoverished societies with weak armies that crumble easily. Easy times (prosperous, politically stable societies) are what creates strong armies.
War requires huge investments of resources, so only prosperous societies can have powerful armies. War also requires strong leadership that can't be corrupted or divided - only politically stable societies can ensure their war leaders will not turn cloak or start fighting among themselves.
Rather, hard times (economic depression, warfare, disease, etc.) creating strong men meant creating toughness, resilience, patience and conservatism in society. The endurance of these events would eventually (somehow) allow the next generation to have its progress and luxuries; peace, economic prosperity, education. But easy times create comfort, arrogance, impatience, over-leverage; spoiled people don't know how good they have it, and so they think it'll last forever. It gets taken away from them, and they fight amongst each other about whose fault it is that everything is slipping away (blame immigrants, blame opposing parties, blame foreign powers, general polarization and divisiveness; them vs us).
Everything goes to shit, and the cycle is renewed.
Still, even taking it the way you say, the quote is false. Poor and weakened societies tend to get lost in vicious cycles, and tend to create damaged people who struggle for the rest of their lives with the effects of the shock - ill, relying on vices, corrupt etc. It takes huge luck and hard work to transition back to a successful, prosperous and healthy society.
Conversely, societies that become wealthy and successful tend to continue that way for a very long time, and they create healthy and ethical people much more readily.
This can be easily seen in recent history by looking at post-USSR states vs Western Europe & the USA. By any measure, people living in Western Europe for example in 1989 were living much easier times than those behind the Iron Curtain. Still, even today, 33 years later, Western Europe is vastly more wealthy, culturally active, healthy, more powerful militarily and in every conceivable way than former Soviet bloc countries - especially the former USSR ones.
One of the most important wounds that hard times leave in a society is an extreme form of screw-you-got-mine individualism. This leads to people who are willing to do anything to succeed and grow above others - especially manifested as corruption and nepotism at every level. When you have lived through times you either take what you can or die of hunger, you can't afford to care for rules or others' well-being (except your own family).
What I think is useful from this quote is that across generations, people forget the horror of war. They forget what it actually means to push through hard work & living with mass dysfunction. They feel entitled to much and unwilling to take on dirty, unglorified but necessary work.
Personally, I strongly suspect anybody that talks about mass entitlement. That's a phenomenon that I simply could not see on the real world. (Yet, many people keep saying it's there.)
Personal entitlement surely exist, but it never seems to extend over a population.
Just think on longer timescales; with your example of the US and Western Europe, I would argue that they are in the process of weak men making hard times. The soviet countries are the opposite, strong men are now improving things. It's only been 30 years since the USSR collapsed. It took Rome centuries to fall from it's peak, why would the west be any different?
Another issue is that in modern times the richest people in poor countries tend to move to rich countries eventually. Immigrants are often the hardest workers and the most entrepreneurial.
I think the case of Rome is exactly one of the ones where people get history extremely mixed up. The Roman empire was powerful and prosperous for hundreds of years - more than any other empire in Europe in history. The vast majority of people of those prosperous times created more prosperous times, again and again for those hundreds of years. Rome only fell because of an extraordinary amount of bad things happening at the same time, not because "easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times".
Basically, by the model of the quote, we shouldn't expect any prosperous society to exist for anything more than 1-2 generations.
Even looking at the times after the fall of Rome, it took many more hundreds of years to get back to the prosperity of the earlier times - so the "hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times" part of the quote is also false.
Edit: As a complete aside, there is a particularly hilarious take on the history of Rome that made some splashes in right-wing circles, by a ridiculous self-proclaimed intellectual named Stephen Molyneux. Among many other historical inaccuracies, he was taking quotes from Cicero about the moral decay of Roman society to show how that "moral decay" led to the fall of the Roman empire - of course, Cicero didn't even live to actually see the Roman empire or its peak, nevermind its fall some 500 years later. If anything, Cicero's "moral decay" could be said to have led to the rise of the Roman empire.
(Cue Peter Heather's argument that the fall of Rome was actually related to its inability to attract immigrants any more: for generations Rome survived and triumphed over other cultures because of its unparalleled ability to make new Romans- from other people's in Italy, from Gaul, from Egypt, from Germans, they could make everyone's sons into real, classically educated Romans, and that meant that their state and armies were sufficient. Then, for various reasons that he describes in his 2005 book _The Fall of the Roman Empire_, they lost that ability, and that was what doomed the Western Roman Empire.)
Like Belarus, Russia and Chechenya are improving ... what exactly?
Edit: since this is downvoted - Russia had worst issues after fall of communism then countries currently in EU. So did Chechnya- they had two wars with Russia and lost. Belarus was not exactly paradise on word for quite a long time either. Thise countries are the ones starting the was and supporting it the most.
Anecdotally, in my experience through athletics, I would describe groups of athletes from certain countries to be certainly tougher. They train harder, they endure more, they have less access to quality nutrition, medicine, equipment, etc. And yet they accomplish more despite having less. You can't phase or intimidate them because they've already endured far worse.
Ex: Dagestani wrestlers, Thai kick boxers.
So while this is a hyper-granular examination, the rewards are going to those "strong men" who endured "hard times". Of course there's a lot of selection bias going on here as well.
Notably, WWII was started by generation that went though WWI. Generation after WWI had more terrorist acts. Oh, and war in Ukraine was started by Russia - country that average person is far from living in luxury or economic prosperity.
Still, "strong men", the way I read it, means "adamantly striving for the increase of power" (not just military power) rather than "being powerful already".
When it comes down to such vague and ambiguous terms, the whole thing becomes as open to interpretation as a horoscope - basically unfalsifiable : )
Synonyms include: powerful, muscular, sturdy, robust, tough, rugged, stalwart, hardy.
In ordinary English these terms can be applied to mental as well as physical fortitude.
The meaning here is not opaque.
The problem in that case is that I don't think it is true that these types of strong men tend to create easy times - if anything, they tend to create worse times for everyone around them, unless they are actually already extremely powerful. Warmongering leaders (whether we are discussing economic or open war), especially ones leading currently weak countries, tend to create even worse times for their people. Just look at Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or, perhaps more arguably, Putin right now.
Yeah - if they fail (or are arguably failing, in Putin's case). Not really the case of, say, Charlemagne or Alexander The Great.
Plus, after he died, civil wars broke up, which does not suggest happy people either.
I've never understood it as you do - strong men are just strong men, no need to read between the lines (of 1-liner). If you stick to the original meaning, this saying is as valid now as anytime in the past.
Strong men know what they want and need and are not afraid to go for it, and most often also obtain it. Being able to defend oneself is another meaning. In opposite to weak men, who are unsure of themselves, don't know what they want out of life, expecting things to be handled to them and life figured out.
I don't know in which part of society you do exist, but anytime in my past and present both of those groups are/were well represented, and successful life is definitely a domain of the strong folks.
Even so, regardless of other context, the general reality is that wealth and power beget wealth and power. Poor people (or societies) have a much much smaller chance of becoming wealthy than people who start wealthy have of maintaining their wealth.
I would agree that it those extraordinarily few people who manage to ascend the social latter are probably universally very strong people. But there are many times more people who could be considered weak that nevertheless preserve their wealth and status than there are strong people who improve their own. This applies both at an individual level as well as a group and societal level.
I believe a counterpoint to this are armies such as the Viet Cong, and especially the Taliban.
The Viet Cong was a well supplied and well organized army, with significant logistical support from North Vietnam, and would likely had failed miserably if North Vietnam hadn't waited to consolidate its power and accrue supplies (and international support) after the revolution and previous civil war.
In the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban received ample support from the USA, including training, arms and logistics; again, they would have very likely failed in the absence of this support. In the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban quickly lost the military war, but ultimately retained their cultural advantage; the regime that the USA tried to install was simply unpopular, and instantly folded the moment it stopped being propped up. Either way, the last few decades of war have not led to some flourishing of Afghanistan as the theory predicts: it remains poor and by all likelihood will remain poor for the forseeable future, as all other war zones do.
Also, in both cases, the advantage of fighting in their own territory was a significant part of what ultimately defeated their opponents.
