Feeling powerless? You’re not alone.
By Richard Cohen, WashPost, Monday, August 26, 5:44 PM
The late Katharine Graham was often called one of the most powerful women in the world. You can see why. She controlled The Post, Newsweek, a bevy of television stations and was Washington’s preeminent hostess, gathering the influential or the merely interesting in her Georgetown home. Yet she knew her power was severely limited. On a given day, she wouldn’t even dare stop her own newspaper from savaging one of her friends.
What brings this to mind is “The End of Power,” a remarkable new book by the remarkable Moises Naim, the former editor of Foreign Policy. It was recommended to me by former president Bill Clinton during a brief conversation on the situation in Egypt. There, as we all know, the United States huffed and puffed but could not stop the military from riding roughshod over the Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama administration could have withheld aid, but the amount — about $1.5 billion — could have been made up in a jiffy by Saudi Arabia — maybe out of the king’s entertainment budget.
Naim wrote his book before Egypt descended into chaos. But there could be no more pertinent example of his thesis. The Middle East, after all, is substantially the creation of the Great Powers, which out of whim and obligation created Jordan and Iraq with little more than cartographers’ ink and the chutzpah of Winston Churchill. Britain put a Hashemite on the throne of Iraq and another on the throne of Jordan — and that, for a long time, was that. Now the Great Powers can’t do much of anything. Bashar al-Assad in Syria tweaks Barack Obama’s nose and ominously drops the threat of another “Vietnam” — a painful example of the limits of power.
“Power is decaying,” Naim writes — and he provides all sorts of examples. Companies that once ruled the world (sort of) suddenly disappear. Kodak went bust (in a flash). Two huge American auto companies came to Washington with a tin cup. BlackBerry was once supposedly so addictive it was called “crackberry.” Now it’s nearly a goner. CEOs come and go at a dizzying pace — about 80 percent of the leaders of major companies are forced out before their terms are up, gridlocking golf courses all over America. Belgium veers to the ungovernable; the United Kingdom may not be united for long, the Northern League wants out of Italy, and in this increasingly fractured world, South Sudan in 2011 became the world’s 193rd nation, up from 51 in the 1940s.
(More here.)
The late Katharine Graham was often called one of the most powerful women in the world. You can see why. She controlled The Post, Newsweek, a bevy of television stations and was Washington’s preeminent hostess, gathering the influential or the merely interesting in her Georgetown home. Yet she knew her power was severely limited. On a given day, she wouldn’t even dare stop her own newspaper from savaging one of her friends.
What brings this to mind is “The End of Power,” a remarkable new book by the remarkable Moises Naim, the former editor of Foreign Policy. It was recommended to me by former president Bill Clinton during a brief conversation on the situation in Egypt. There, as we all know, the United States huffed and puffed but could not stop the military from riding roughshod over the Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama administration could have withheld aid, but the amount — about $1.5 billion — could have been made up in a jiffy by Saudi Arabia — maybe out of the king’s entertainment budget.
Naim wrote his book before Egypt descended into chaos. But there could be no more pertinent example of his thesis. The Middle East, after all, is substantially the creation of the Great Powers, which out of whim and obligation created Jordan and Iraq with little more than cartographers’ ink and the chutzpah of Winston Churchill. Britain put a Hashemite on the throne of Iraq and another on the throne of Jordan — and that, for a long time, was that. Now the Great Powers can’t do much of anything. Bashar al-Assad in Syria tweaks Barack Obama’s nose and ominously drops the threat of another “Vietnam” — a painful example of the limits of power.
“Power is decaying,” Naim writes — and he provides all sorts of examples. Companies that once ruled the world (sort of) suddenly disappear. Kodak went bust (in a flash). Two huge American auto companies came to Washington with a tin cup. BlackBerry was once supposedly so addictive it was called “crackberry.” Now it’s nearly a goner. CEOs come and go at a dizzying pace — about 80 percent of the leaders of major companies are forced out before their terms are up, gridlocking golf courses all over America. Belgium veers to the ungovernable; the United Kingdom may not be united for long, the Northern League wants out of Italy, and in this increasingly fractured world, South Sudan in 2011 became the world’s 193rd nation, up from 51 in the 1940s.
(More here.)
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