The True Tragedy of American Power

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ABSTRACT: American distaste for tragedy has led US strategists and policymakers to mistake mere for power. Understanding the difference between and is vital to America's rise as a durable and balanced global power, and not merely as a forceful hegemon. This understanding is all the more imperative at a time of compounding global security challenges and austerity. ********** What individuals do is related to what they think.... Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed. (1) There is a fine line between a tragic hero's flaw and his virtue. The classic tragedies--those of Sophocles and Shakespeare, for stance--present a noble protagonist, better than to the audience. His tragic flaw causes him to fall from prosperity to misery through a series of reversals and discoveries. In a typical case, the hero's fall occurs in stages: Act I introduces the hero, against whom dark forces align in Act II so by Act III it becomes clear to the audience (and sometimes to the hero) that his fate will be the opposite of what he hoped; the catastrophe of Act IV exposes the limits of the hero's power, and Act V secures our recognition (in a moment of catharsis) of the larger patterns at work in the play. What makes tragedy so poignant is not only how it shows human beings as the playthings of fate, but how it reveals that fate lurking in our own characters, so close to the qualifies we cherish as to be indistinguishable from them. The same pride and probity that make Oedipus excel as king lead him to overestimate his strength and self-sufficiency; the same profundity and eloquence that make Hamlet a compelling individual make him a dilatory and ineffective agent. If these heroes could see their virtues within their proper bounds, they would no longer be the subjects--the victims--of tragedy. But they cannot and so they are. American stories tend to resemble not tragedies so much as classic comedies, with happy endings and no loose ends. And yet a certain tragic sensibility recently entered into our political discourse. We increasingly sense the limits of not only our budgets, but our to act as we would like in the wider world. We sense ever more palpably the frustrations of and feel ever more fleetingly the privileges it affords. Like a tragic hero as the pivotal third act draws to a close, we feel ourselves at once flawed and incapable of isolating our flaw in time to save ourselves. One dimension of our tragic flaw is this taste for happy endings itself. Among its myriad manifestations is the want of tragic sensibility in our strategic culture, which persists even as our broader political discourse becomes ever more somber. In this article, I show, first, how American distaste for tragedy has led US strategists and policymakers to mistake mere for power. I want, then, to show how vital this differentiation between force and power has been to America's rise as a durable and balanced global power, not merely a hegemon. It is important for us to appreciate this distinction all the more as we rethink America's legitimate and possible roles as the leading in the future. Finally, I will suggest what an American grand strategy informed by a sense of tragedy--as opposed to a tragic grand strategy--might look like. Power and Force Newton teaches us as much about the tragedy of as Sophocles or Shakespeare. As every graduate of Physics 101 knows, Newton defined with the following equation: Power = Force x Displacement/Time Newton could not account for without force, but he did not consider the two to be identical. In addition to force, one must account for both time and displacement, the imaginary straight path from the initial and final positions of a point, and the length and direction of which one expresses in the displacement vector. …