Unwillingness to Exercise Warranted Power

Most people have heard the very often incorrectly cited words of Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The correct quote is: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is a very vital difference created by the critically important words “tends to” meaning that power does not, in fact, automatically have to be always corruptive all of the time and under any/all circumstances.

Moreover, as Thomas Molnar and others have most insightfully and correctly commented, the immoral and improper unwillingness to exercise warranted or authoritative power can also tend to be quite corruptive and, if willingly repeated, corrupts absolutely. [For instance, there is Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky's notable failure to properly guard against the development of the Bolshevist coup d' état, which consequently lead to tens of millions of resulting deaths, was a terribly clear case of not using power when it was vitally needed to be correctly exercised.]

Thus, the appropriate and requisite use of power, which to be truly legitimate must be first based mostly or entirely upon authority rightly understood within (usually constitutional) limits, is not simply a supposed, entirely, one-way street. Its political proper use or nonuse can, either way, be similarly the observed and real cause of noted corruption, a decay and degeneration of one of the main purposes of political governance qua government, the basic and expected protection of the valued lives and safety of persons and property against criminal trespass, assault, attack, and lethal consequences.

In contemporary times, the evident failure of the nations of the civilized world to importantly deal with various acts of blatant piracy, meaning by effectively stopping it in the Indian Ocean, clearly bespeaks how this is an example of the obvious lack of a committed will to effectively act against criminality of a high order. This is, one sees, a rather manifest case, therefore, of how not exercising power responsibly can cause some actual corruption to exist and, if so essentially continued, will then come to corrupt absolutely any country’s governmental actions concerning the pretense of truly enforcing international law or the law of the seas.

What is so sad these days is that, in the deluded minds of many progressives/liberals, the desire to crush piracy is seen as just a reactionary act of oppression against minority groups exercising their right to express themselves by expropriating the expropriators as acts of subjective justice conducted on the high seas. International civil-rights lawyers would willingly wish, moreover, to come to eagerly provide their assumed services as willing defense counsels should any of these wicked buccaneers be actually caught and brought to trial. [There is the classic saying that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.]

Thus, much of the civilized world, especially the West, has already been partly intellectually disarmed (read: blinded) by this ideologically bizarre attitude of granting even to pirates, to bold brigands, no less, civil and criminal law protections and, by more legal extension, the ironic, highly coveted and privileged status of being discriminated against as, thus, supposed, minority group-classified defendants in a court of law. But, this instance of considering contemporary acts of piracy and piratical anarchy at large is only, insanely enough, a small aspect of a much larger topic needing an interesting and intriguing discussion.

Although today and in the near future America will certainly remain the world’s current and only true superpower, as had been the case, e.g., with Great Britain in the 19th century, this fact alone is no simple guarantee of permanent superpower status. Yes, of course, it is also a verity that the next four powers combined, Russia, China, European Union, and Japan, would together begin to rival the armed might of the USA, which stresses the demonstrable superpower reality of this country.

However, mighty armaments alone or greatly combined with technological advantages and industrial-productive capacity or other objective elements of power do not in and of themselves really count for much- if there is not a genuine will to exercise such power when needed and required to oppose an aggressor; it is, as such, a seeming paradox of power, which can be notably illustrated, from recorded history, for added emphasis.

After World War I, England, though it had then just emerged as potentially still a great power, failed to necessarily marshal the requisite intellectual, moral, and spiritual resources necessary to fight against the later, fairly historically rapid decomposition of its quite vast empire.

This can be readily observed and confirmed by, for instance, reading such important books as Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost an Empire and the West Lost the World. Merely having, possessing, superpower status is, therefore, no easy guarantee of future success at so retaining that particular measure of national greatness; some kind of a continuing and sustained and suitably sustainable national resolve must be involved by which and through which an integral core vision of both meaningful purpose and coherent legitimacy is not cognitively and morally, culturally and spiritually, lost.

If the means or, more importantly, the vital will to use such power, when and where actually warranted and needed, is functionally lacking to a great degree, then land, sea and air forces all combined and much else will be just uselessly appealed to; this is critically to be observed and recorded if the politically and, what’s even more important, morally requisite willingness is (shockingly) missing when a world-historic decision must then be absolutely made either in 1.) terms of basic national survival or, at the least, 2.) regarding essential national viability, as a truly major country, being able to independently determine its very own destiny in the world.

If even the latter consideration is, in fact, effectively and empirically removed from the actual capacity of the United States of America, its then true and revealed (debilitated) status will be, thus, downgraded substantially to logically match the degraded reality of its then much exposed national and, by implication, international impotence. As with observed Nature, so with existent international politics, any created (power) vacuum will seek, therefore, to be somehow filled by an aggressive, rising power; such a nation, filled with a dominating confidence, would be wishing and willing to successfully attain an international affirmation and recognition of the new power realities on this planet.

Observed national impotence, as a consequence, gets unsentimentally punished as the power players grasp at those hard measures of ability and capacity made available by the fall of a superpower, which miserably and decadently had failed to so sustain itself when the world-historic decision, as Arnold Toynbee would have understood it, was, thus, either not made correctly or not executed in a timely enough manner.

For America, the future contest (war) between Israel and Iran will, therefore, be the acid test. This scenario is made urgent, however, by Obama’s evident ideological preference, according to his many critics, to want to proverbially snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

One will observe that this will be done, of course, in his absurd pursuing many unintelligent international policies tending naturally toward substantial policy failures, perceived national defeat, and, therefore, what may appear to be an everlasting ignominy and shame for some generations to come. It can be easily predicted that Obama (AKA El Supremo) will, through his future failures in effeminate judgment, make Jimmy Carter’s presidency look almost fairly heroic in a cold comparison.

All such observations will, thus, prove the point made that an unwillingness to exercise warranted power corrupts absolutely; and, further to this matter, whenever arrogant and ill-prepared statesmen, in the future, are seen to horribly fail to such a massive degree of both willful incompetence and ideological audacity, such an egregious act will be justifiably referred to, most sarcastically, as having consequently committed “an Obama.”