The Art of British Power

Power involves doing what one can to get what one wants. Politics and power are distinct but inseparable. Politics happens when two or more individuals or groups are in conflict. Power is the means that each uses to defend or enhance its interests in its conflicts. Since politics is integral to life, the exercise of power is an art that all people struggle to master, although few do.

So what, then, is that elusive but essential art of power? Two and a half millennia ago, Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu identified timeless principles of power. Although Sun Tzu explained the art of power in war, his principles apply to any conflict. Knowledge is the key — one must know the interests, values, aspirations, strengths, weaknesses, and psyches of one's enemies, one's allies, one's potential enemies, one's potential allies, and, above all, oneself. All of that knowledge will reveal the nature of the conflict and how best to prevail.

As such, the art of power is easier said than done. People tend to mistake their beliefs for knowledge, and beliefs are often no more than wishful thinking. The worse one's ignorance and delusions, the worse one's exercise of power. Among the most common reasons for power's poor exercise is a failure to know one's limits. Power is relative. Ultimately power is measured by how much one gets of what one wants. Those who reach even relatively modest goals are more powerful than those whose ambitions exceed their abilities. Another reason is a failure to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate power. Power has been explained in many ways, but the best explanation distinguishes among hard, soft, and smart power. Hard power is physical, soft power is psychological, and smart power is the selection and assertion of those elements of available hard and soft power necessary to prevail.

The challenges of mastering the art of power are magnified for sovereign governments ruling numerous diverse, complex, competing groups of people amid rival nation-states. Ideally, there is a virtuous relationship among national interests, policies, and power whereby each reinforces the others. Political actors wield appropriate powers according to appropriate policies to defend or enhance national interests. One constant national interest is to amass more power to defend or enhance all the other national interests. Here again, all this is much easier said than done.

Governments vary greatly in their ability to understand, let alone tap and assert, potential sources of power. Nation-states themselves are composed of a myriad of institutional, legal, and cultural components that in most cases emerged haphazardly over time in response to crises. Somehow leaders must transcend the tunnel vision of the bureaucrats, politicians, interest groups, editors, and the public at home, and the generals, admirals, diplomats, and spies in the field. Perceiving the common good in the midst of multiple competing interests, of course, is an enormous challenge under the best of circumstances.

A chicken-and-egg relationship exists between political and military power, succinctly expressed by Charles Tilley: "War made the state and the state made war." Such mutual reinforcement certainly characterized the development of European states from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century, and the United States from World War II through the Global War on Terror and beyond. Yet, starting in the late nineteenth century, one might say that welfare also made the state and the state also made welfare. Regardless, by 1792 related advances in administration, finance, and technology enhanced the power of European states not just to wage war but to better deal with an array of other challenges. Wars pressured states to adopt these innovations sooner rather than later.

War is power's ultimate assertion and clearest measure, as it forces governments to grapple with and pay the consequences for responding to a series of vital questions. First, is the war worth fighting? If so, then how is it best fought? The answers come from knowing the ends and means of oneself and one's enemy. History records a seemingly endless parade of governments failing to perform this elementary task of power. A frequent reason for this is ignoring the reality that money is hard power's literal and figurative bottom line, what historian John Brewer aptly called "the sinews of power." Pasty-faced clerks and bookkeepers in dimly lighted counting rooms and warehouses are as important to national power as ruddy-faced, brawny soldiers in the field and sailors at sea. Yet money itself is not power unless it is invested in ways that protect or enhance national interests. Governments often squander potential economic power as senselessly as they do military power.

Governments are just as likely to misunderstand and thus misapply or neglect the exercise of soft or psychological power. Soft power must be believed to exist. People act on what they think is true. So manipulating the beliefs of oneself and others in one's favor is crucial to the art of power. For instance, one's reputation can enhance or diminish one's power. Potential aggressors tend to bully those perceived to be weak and bow before those perceived to be strong. Thus a reputation for toughness can be self fulfilling if it deters challengers. But here too the art of soft power can be tricky. All too many people mistake hubris for confidence, snobbery for sophistication, glorification for patriotism, and tyranny for leadership, and so undermine rather than advance themselves.

Nationalism, or a people's mass emotional belief in their common legacy, language, values, institutions, interests, and aspirations, is a relatively new source of power in history. Nationalism and war are often dynamically linked, with one promoting the other. Indeed, one could say that in the modern world nations make wars and wars make nations. The reason is at once simple and profound. Identity is as much about what one is not as what one is. People define themselves within one group opposed to other groups; the worse the antagonisms with other groups, the stronger one's identity. Eric Hobsbawn nicely expressed that phenomena: "There is no more effective way of bonding together the disparate sections of restless peoples than to unite them against outsiders."

The American and French revolutions revealed just how powerful nationalism can be. People believed so fervently in their nation that they were willing to kill and die not just to defend but even to glorify it. Yet, for monarchs, a dilemma was embedded in trying to conjure up nationalism — it appeared intertwined with a liberalism that championed natural rights and representative government. They sought to harness nationalism's power after gingerly...