Power: Game, Conceit, or Realistic Strategy?

There is no real fully acceptable definition of power among the nations of the world. Many have tried. Here is one which may be close: "We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always bidding for hegemony. Today it is the United States; a century ago it was Britain. Before that, it was the French, the Spaniards and so on. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, doyen of the study of statecraft, portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in which a balance of power was possible only through recurrent conflict. Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal."[1]

We still hear the sentiment that Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But, the strategies of power- its use as both economic and political gain around the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Century- did not serve Great Britain well. Why, in these decades did Britain lose the domination of her European rivals, even as her so-called "Empire" showed signs of resistance and crumbling? And was the fact that Victoria's DNA seemed to appear in monarchies and royalty from Berlin and Copenhagen to Moscow play a role in the initial fear of engaging in a fierce competition with Continental Europe? Despite such strong political figures in Britain in the 1800s, like Disraeli and Gladstone, Britain's needs were, for the most part, less political and even less focused on Continental Europe, than on its possessions and colonies, needed to provide raw materials for the expanding Industrial Revolution. One has to wonder if Britain, indeed, forsook political "gamesmanship" versus Napoleon III and the growing German unification threat (and Bismarck) in order to find a trade resolution with America, following its War Between the States. Can we begin with the premise that, with priorities on economic advantages, Great Britain suffered from political (and therefore "power") myopia during the last half of the Nineteenth century?