The Will to Power
The United States is more powerful than any country in history
I hear this kind of blanket profundity a lot these days. But isn’t it just yet another example of the persistent narcissistic tendency for blithe US exceptionalism?
Power is a process, not a potential. It is realised only through execution and results. The US can barely maintain a tenuous hold over Iraq – a rather small country with an infrastructure largely devastated after more than a decade of seige.
I think the Umayyad/Abbasid Persians managed Iraq rather better in their day. That, to me, was a projection of power, an exercise in control, with results that lasted centuries.
It’s notable that for all its posturing, the US these days generally picks fights only with crappy developing nations or tiny island states with minimal defences. And its track record in producing long-term favourable changes within the local environment is rather hit and miss.
The current desperate attempts to avoid a conflict with North Korea at all costs reminds us of how leery the US war planners must be when it comes to confronting this undeafeated enemy once again.
For all this talk about “pacifist” Europe, let’s not forget that Germany, which in 1930 had been reduced through economics and treaties, to a low state of military strength, managed within a decade to re-arm to such a degree that it took the combined “Power” of much of the rest of the world to defeat it utterly.
That’s a small nation around only slightly larger than California fighting the rest of the world to a standstill for years. And almost winning.
Germany, or any other similar advanced, developed, wealthy European country, could once again pose such a threat, were it expedient. However, within today’s Europe the amazingly effective expansionist EU ideology is proving eerily effective at drawing more and more of the continent’s resources within its purview. It stretches almost from the Atlantic to the goddam Urals these days!
This alliance of France, Germany, and Italy has proved more effective at exerting dominance over more and more of the richest, most prosperous part of the world than any recent military Empire. And they didn’t even have to fire a single shot or spend a penny. Between the expanding empires of the EU and China, the diminishing Russian Empire is being slowly carved up by a process that reminds me of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the assimilation of its vassal states by other rising world Powers of that era. It too is bereft of a unifying ideology, riven by separatist and nationalist movements, and drifting into feedback mechanism of militant yet ineffectual autocratic kleptocracy.
Tell me again what is meant by “Power”?