Friday - July 02, 2004
Power Vacuums Must be Filled, or Else
People who talk about international relations
often mention dire consequences if a power vacuum occurs. But sometimes the
vacuum is only apparent in hindsight and not
immediately.
I think we are currently
floundering in a power vacuum and if we or someone else doesn't fill that void
quickly enough, not only can it be dangerous for us and our neighbors, it could
be the end of civilization and culture as we know it.
Let's look at some prominent power vacuums and
the disasters that befell subsequent to the void's creation and failure to be
filled.
The first one I'm most familiar
with is the failure of the Greeks to exploit their victory over the Persian
hegemony. The greatest military power in Greece was Sparta, by far. They
dominated not only in reality, but all the other Greek cities recognized them as
the leaders. Athens had a superb navy, but generally at the end of the war with
the Great King of Persia the Athenians didn't understand the immense power of
their fleet. Persian hegemony was checked when Xerxes was defeated in his
attempt to invade the Greek mainland, leaving a power
void.
Rather than unite and allow their
superior culture to propel the world into economic and scientific prosperity,
the Greeks descended into decades of wars with each other. The war has been
analyzed in great depth by the greatest scholars of each generation since then,
with lessons learned on how the war could have been won by one side or another
were it not for mistakes in its execution, but most analysis of the war ignores
that Sparta, with its strong tendency towards isolationism, failed to exploit
the victory over Persia by retaining its place as leader of the
Greeks.
Even the Athenians expected
Spartan leadership in the beginning, but Sparta's fear of outside entanglements
that would keep them from enforcing the subjugation of their own populations
prevented them from establishing a united Greek state. So, in the absence of
Spartan leadership, Athens established its own Delian League meant to protect
itself and its mostly island Asian allies from a return of the Persians. And
thus began all the trouble. The result of the wars between Sparta and Athens is
that Persia was able to play one side off against the other. Persia's power was
dying, about to be overrun by Alexander the Great, but in its dying spasms it
destroyed all hope of Greek military dominance. Instead, Macedonia led by
Alexander created a new, expanded empire that included Persia, Egypt, Greece,
and what are now known as Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
During the death throes of
the western Roman Empire, there was no power to fill the vacuum. In fact, the
power that could fill the vacuum was the dissolving Roman Empire. Having no
strong neighbors left Europe without anyone in charge. The power vacuum in the
West was filled by the Roman Catholic church. A few hundred years later the
eastern Roman Empire faced a similar fate, but their vacuum was filled by the
Muslims and later the Turks.
It took
more than a thousand years before Europe rose above its dark ages, spurred on by
the end of the monopoly on mystical power through Martin Luther's revolutionary
Protestantism. It's true that much of the continent was united from time to
time, most notably by Charlemagne, but this power and unity always proved
temporary. It wasn't really until the Arabs were thrown out of Grenada, Spain
in 1492 that Europe began to assert itself militarily and eventually come to
dominate the world as an amalgamated culture.
With the end of the cold war the
United States has successfully, so far, taken the leadership of the Soviet Bloc
nations and stabilized Europe and most of the world. But one of the effects of
the end of that struggle is that the former Eastern Roman Empire is now
unfettered and challenging the US role in filling the Soviet's power
vacuum.
It is critical to civilization
that this power vacuum be filled and this challenge to world peace and order be
put down. It is the responsibility of the United States to restore civilization
to the world. We cannot choose to back down because that will leave a power
vacuum that will be filled by the type of people that think it a lovely day to
cut peoples' heads off.
If we don't
rise to this challenge, there's no telling what might happen, but history has
shown that it's rarely a good thing when a power vacuum isn't
filled.
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