A Recipe for Inaction

It seems that The Agonist has picked up on my previous post on Georgia and Abkhazia and dished out a little disagreement:

[...] Louis would have done well to heed the benefits of peace, the usefulness of ceasefires and the maintanence of the status quo, as those were the only things keeping him in power and France great.

As well, Chirol would do well to heed the good Colonel’s words. Ideas, seductive and transient as they are, aren’t worth much when order and stability have fled.

Indeed, one can easily cherry pick examples of rulers who bit off more than they could chew. Germany’s Wilhelm II would have done well to follow Bismarck’s example but wanted more. Tony Montana’s downfall was his catch phrase “the world is yours.” Yet, too many people choose to dangerously overvalue the status quo. In a letter to Valentine Chirol in 1903, Lord Curzon wrote:

[...] never talk about preserving the status quo. It is the signpost of ignorance and the synonym for inaction. What we want everywhere all the world over is a policy. At present we are the greatest opportunists in creation. We wait for whatever may turn up and think that statesmanship: we mistake drifting for swimming: and we flatter ourselves on a compromise when all we have accomplished is a concession.

Indeed, if Sean-Paul Kelley is to be believed, the United States should heed the benefits of peace and enjoy our position of power. Yet, this statement is doubly wrong. Firstly, there is a great deal of war in the world today and many areas where peace and stability are merely deceptive facades. Should we simply abandon a large part of the world for the sake of stability and the status quo or actively shrink the Gap?

The second part of the statement I take issue with is that upsetting the status quo will endanger our position in the world. By inferrence, we can assume that Kelley values US hegemony but disagrees with our use thereof. As a fellow Kissinger fan, I’d like to remind him of a statement Kissinger made in Dipomacy, namely that the real challenge the U.S. faces is

Great empires don’t compete against other systems per se, they strive to become “the system”

Indeed, if we hope to create the more peaceful and prosperous world that so many desire it’s imperative to rise up and take the opportunity to create it, not play balance of power politics forever. In fact, as globalization spreads wealth and power, taking advantage of our current hegemony and unrivaled superpower status is absolutely necessary. As Martin Luther King once said that there’s no sadder word in English than “too late.”

It would be wise to heed the wisdom of Robert Kaplan in his essay on the dangers of peace:

Of course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. However, the truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you’ll sacrifice any principal for the sake of it.

In conclusion, this is not a call for unilateral action or multilateral action but action itself. Knowing when and where to act is the craft of statesmen, but someone who doesn’t act for fear of upsetting the status quo should seek out a new profession.