power

Power, like cheap tequila, is most potent just before it makes you sick. From the marble corridors of Brussels to the fluorescent-lit war rooms of Beijing, the world’s sharpest minds are busy proving that axiom daily, usually while someone else foots the bar tab.

Consider the United Nations Security Council on any given Tuesday: five permanent members clutching veto pens like rosaries, genuflecting to sovereignty while auctioning off bits of it in backroom deals. The French delegate waxes lyrical about multilateralism; the Russian envoy reminds everyone that pipelines still trump principles; the U.S. representative live-tweets both positions and adds a GIF for emphasis. Somewhere in the gallery, a Syrian diplomat checks his watch—time zones blur when your hometown no longer has electricity. Power, distilled to its essence: the right to speak while others count the dead.

Travel east and the flavor changes but the hangover stays. In Riyadh, a crown prince rebrands medieval justice as “reform,” buys English football clubs to launder the image, and schedules another beheading before brunch. The West applauds—quietly—because, well, someone has to keep selling the Saudis weapons they can’t aim without American satellites. Call it soft power with a hard cash register. Meanwhile, the prince’s Instagram feed glows with photos of him jogging through Neom, a city still more CGI than concrete, proving that in the 21st century you can Photoshop legitimacy if the budget is large enough.

Hop across the Himalayas and Beijing is busy redefining power as the ability to make geography itself disappear. Islands sprout in the South China Sea like mushrooms after a storm, each runway paved with enough concrete to shame a Roman emperor. Maps are redrawn on touchscreen tablets, nine-dash lines morph into ten, and neighboring capitals learn the subtle art of simultaneous outrage and investment. When the Philippine foreign minister tweets a curse at China in the morning and signs an infrastructure loan by dusk, you realize sovereignty is now a subscription service—cancel anytime, terms and conditions may apply.

Not that democracies are above the game. Brussels, self-declared conscience of Europe, lectures Poland on judicial independence while quietly approving emergency funds that keep Hungarian autocrats in bespoke suits. The European Parliament passes resolutions on human rights at 11 a.m., then inks trade deals with regimes that treat Amnesty International reports as cocktail napkins. Power here wears a tailored suit and speaks in white-paper jargon, but the effect is the same: rules for thee, markets for me.

Even the once-romantic notion of “people power” has been IPO’d and is now trading on secondary markets. From Tahrir Square to Maidan, from Hong Kong’s umbrella streets to Minneapolis after George Floyd, crowds discover that viral momentum depreciates faster than crypto. Regimes learned to wait out the hashtags; investors learned to price in civil unrest. Today’s revolutionaries find their slogans trademarked and sold back as T-shirts made in Bangladeshi sweatshops—an irony so pure it should be bottled and served at Davos.

Yet for all its costume changes, power still obeys one dreary constant: it abhors a vacuum, and it always collects its tab. Climate change, that slow-motion asteroid, is the latest venue for the same old game. Pacific island leaders beg, oil executives stall, and hedge funds place bets on catastrophe futures. COP summits have become the new G-20: photo-ops above shrinking glaciers, pledges recycled like airline safety cards. The planet runs a fever, but the thermostat is locked in a room where everyone’s arguing over the bill.

So what’s the worldly takeaway? Power isn’t a mountain to be climbed; it’s a mirage that keeps moving the closer you get. States hoard it, corporations monetize it, influencers filter it, and the rest of us refresh the feed. Tomorrow’s superpower may well be the algorithm that can make you feel empowered while emptying your wallet and selling your data to the highest bidder. Until then, we toast with whatever’s left in the glass—cheap tequila, after all, still gets you drunk.