the fallacy of power

I've been reading Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah. Some thoughts after reading the first quarter of the book:

The radical Islamic students who overran America's embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979 believed that they were striking a blow against the evil plots of imperial America. In the minds of those students, the embassy was a critical tool enabling America's continued meddling in Iran's internal affairs. While most of the staff claimed to be serving diplomatic functions, the Iranian students knew that they were actually the agents of a superpower working to impose its will on Iran. The same superpower that had placed the Shah in power in 1953 was conspiring to defeat the Islamic revolution and return the Shah to power--how else to explain the fact that the he was allowed to come to the US for medical treatment? The students who led the attack on the embassy knew that in capturing the embassy they would find proof of America's continued plotting, would expose to the world the machinations of a scheming power.

The students were wrong. Of 66 embassy staffers that were captured, only seven were working for the CIA (three of whom handled communications, and one of whom was a secretary). Those few CIA agents at the embassy had little influence and no control over events in Iran. Far from imposing America's will on Iran, the CIA was primarily concerned with trying to get enough information about the new revolutionary government to understand what was going on in the country. The students spent weeks interrogating diplomats and clerical staff, trying to find evidence of plots that didn't exist. They thought that America was capable of controlling events on a global scale and that America frequently exerted that control, but they were wrong.

America was and is a superpower, but that power has limits. Both our capability and desire to control the world are limited. Many people believe that the primary source of this world's problems is America--we are the sole superpower and we exercise power on a global scale, so problems that exist in this world could be resolved if America would just stop misbehaving. Global poverty, war, famine, environmental problems--they are all either caused or allowed to exist by an America that wields power irresponsibly, the theory goes. The people who hold to this belief are just as wrong as the Islamic students who were bewildered to find that they had overrun an office building full of mundane people doing mundane tasks. America has global influence but it is limited in scope. We are neither the primary source of nor the ultimate solution to this world's problems.