Makt och vanmakt

Jag har länge med stort intresse följt Fareed Zakaria. Jag har läst hans böcker, jag läser han krönikor i Washington Post och jag lyssnar på hans CNN-program GPS (Global Public Square). Jag lyssnade på honom när han talade på Svenskt Näringslivs seminarium i Almedalen och blev, om möjligt, än mer imponerade.

Nyligen gjorde han denna pregnanta iakttagelse:

For most of history, the side with the bigger army usually won a conflict. But over the past few decades a different pattern has been emerging – the power of asymmetrical warfare. Look at the pro-Russian separatists, or Hamas or Hezbollah or the insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq, and you will see attacks that are cheap compared with the massiveresponse then launched by traditional armies. 

In Moisés Naim’s excellent book The End of Power, he calculates that for every dollar that al Qaeda spent planning and executing the 9/11 attacks the United States spent $7 million countering it or coping with the losses. That’s a ratio of $1 to $7 million. Staggering, indeed. That is why Naim says never in the field of human conflict have so few had the potential to do so much to so many at so little cost.

Naim cites scholar Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who looked at asymmetrical conflicts in history and found that while 150 years ago the weaker party would win only about 12 percent of such wars, in the last 50 years it has prevailed 55 percent of the time.

Vi lever alltså i en tid då traditionell makt förvandlats till vanmakt.