The thing about power, including when people use terms like soft power and hard power, is that it is entirely misunderstood.

There is a quotation that follows people with power and authority. Until literally just now I had never thought to search out the context.

Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, KCVO DL) wrote it in a letter¹ to Archbishop Mandell Creighton on April 5, 1887.

So, not just anyone then.

And this is it:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

Speaking of bad men, I wildly overestimated the number of false or misleading statements made by the 45th President of the United States of America. It turns out that, according to the Washington Post, he only made 30,573, not the 48,000 figure I had in my head.²

It’s only been a little over 5 years since he lost the previous election.

My most repeated quotation with the #QuoteSunday hashtag – across 4 social networks including the fondly-remembered App.net – is by George Santayana. You’ll have seen and probably heard this one too:

” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Until about 16 or 17 months ago it was my fervent hope (even as an Englishman I’m being honest here) that President 47 would be constrained by the power of existing laws, and ‘the people’ would have the representation to…³

Yeah, I’m naive.

Dictator.

No, in no way, shape or form a benevolent one.

Anyway, even when power is wielded for good it doesn’t always work out as intended.

---

1. Link to Lord Acton’s letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887: https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html ↩
2. ‘False or misleading statements by Donald Trump (first term)’. Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump_(first_term). (Wikipedia used because the WaPo page might be paywalled). ↩
3. ‘Trump’s vow to only be a dictator on ‘day one’ follows growing worry over his authoritarian rhetoric’, AP News link: https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritarian-presidential-election-f27e7e9d7c13fabbe3ae7dd7f1235c72 ↩

When a nation is at war with another a calculation is made, how can we end it quickly?

Negotiation or an overwhelming display of force, both strategies are intended to show the foreign power it would be a good idea to stop attacking.

The 2026 Iran War is not a war. I’m pretty sure none of the wars the USA had involved themselves in since WWII have been wars. They get fancy names, Desert Storm, Operation Epic Fury, adult stuff right?

So if not wars then what?

It’s about control, not an imminent threat.

And because there’s no imminent threat one has to be manufactured.

Of course 2 parties are using missiles or dropping bombs on the other, and sure, other nations are helping out. But both Israel and the USA don’t seem too concerned with the convention of “we need to end this as soon as we can”.

If the war was won a few weeks ago then why are the bombs still dropping? Why is the deranged US dictator threatening to destroy all the Iranian bridges and power plants tomorrow? Why the deaths?

There’s another calculation in wartime. The first part, how long will it take to rebuild after the conflict ends and destruction and loss of life can be assessed? The second part, who’s going to do it? The third part is likely to be, how much can we make on the interest payments?

It’d be naive to assume that people don’t get rich from making armaments and reconstructing a country’s infrastructure. But I sense there’s been a plan all along.

China and Russia are used to building major infrastructure projects in areas ‘the west’ neglects, especially when the west withdraws funding.

But they’re not the bad guys here, despite Russia’s Ukraine War. Not the bad guys in the limited context of a rebuild or a shift in the world order.

There’s money to be made. Lots of it. And the people who make it for themselves don’t care where it comes from. Same as it ever was.

Before I finish this superficial, fact-light post, I have to make mention of a Mastodon toot I saw earlier. When replying to a post about the elevated likelihood that nuclear weapons would be used against Iran, a reply said they were more concerned with the near-certainty of climate change than the chance of nukes.

Climate change and the devastation that will bring is real. But we must not take our eyes off the here-and-now. We can’t allow an imminent terrible thing to happen because we don’t care it’s not as big as a more far-away terrible thing.

A fourth part to the calculation above, how long will it take for the defeated nation to pay for a rebuild? Right now it’s looking like the power plants and bridges might be destroyed tomorrow. Oil facilities have already been targeted. How could Iran pay?

I mean, it’s not as though there’s a narrow strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea that’s ripe for luxury resorts. Is it now.

So oil? Well, of course.

If it was just the re-opening of the Straits of Hormuz there’d be no need to make a country literally dark and impenetrable.

In much the same way the USA wanted to acquire the minerals and rare earth elements from Ukraine and Greenland, it’s greed.

I can’t bring myself to conclude anything right now. Well, apart from wondering who’s going to be the first nuclear power to use them in the 21st century.

USA?

Israel?

Oh, and we’ve got an entire region potentially up in arms. Yay.

Terrorists? Yay.

But terrorism, when it starts, will have a sound foundation that not many rational, sane people can deny.

From a blog post in 2017:

“One final point, simply attempting vengeance, to kill terrorists without any other coherent strategy to stop ordinary people being turned into terrorists, will never work.”

From another, showing what sane people are up against, another (sweary) 2017 blog post:

“We really do not know how lucky we are.”