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by Alan Philps
Joseph Nye shares his thoughts on on America's role in an increasingly affluent world,
America's challenge is to wield smart power, a combination of hard and soft power. Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want. That can be done by coercion and payment (hard power) or attraction and persuasion (soft power).
Most smart strategies involve both elements of power, with the mix depending on the context. In some contexts, you may not be able to get the outcomes you want by hard or soft power. In such cases, the Hippocratic Oath should prevail: first do no harm. It is not clear that we know how to get the outcomes we want in
It took
In
Since withdrawal in 2011, the US has turned its back on
The so-called law of holes says that when you are in one stop digging. I regarded withdrawal from
In your book,
Alas, although Putin has urged his diplomats to wield soft power,
One of the elements of power is wealth. If the extraordinary wealth of the US is a freak result of the Second World War, how is the 'end of affluence' going to affect US power?
American wealth is not just a freak result of the war. In my new book, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era, I have a chart that shows the changes in America's share of world product over time. The US entered and left the 20th century with about a quarter of world product. After 1945, when the war had strengthened the US while weakening other countries, the US share climbed close to half of world product. That was bound to change as others regained their economic health. Nixon and others misinterpreted this as economic decline and the onset of multipolarity when it was really reversion to the long-term norm.
Ironically, even when America had a preponderance of power resources, it was sometimes unable to get the outcomes it wanted: witness the year 1949, which saw both the 'loss of
Still the relative decline of the US must change the balance of power?
There have always been limits to US power in terms of behavioural outcomes, even when we had a preponderance of power resources. Some of our biggest problems have arisen when we failed to understand those limits to power. We did not have a smart power strategy in
When Hu told the 17th
The question is whether
Yes,
The attraction of Western ideas is in decline. There is a process of re-Islamization in the
A liberal order does not require an identity of political views. Each society can interpret modernity in its own way. And this is not new.
When an idea such as soft power gains wings, is it possible for the author to keep control of it?
No author can control the use that is made of his concepts. I frequently cringe when I read people using the term soft power as a rough synonym for economic power or anything that is the opposite of military action.
Critics say the term soft power has become so fuzzy that it has lost all meaning. Is it time for its retirement?
Usually the people who make this charge are those who misuse the concept. It is always easier to knock down a straw man. Very often people fail to distinguish the resources that can produce power from the behaviour of obtaining preferred outcomes. I try to spell this out carefully in the first chapters of my 2011 book, The Future of Power. But I often encounter critics who have never looked at those careful definitions and prefer to joust with a creature of their own imaginations.
It is 20 years since
Huntington was correct that, after the defeat of fascism and communism, culture would become a more frequent source of conflict. But he was mistaken to identify culture with Toynbee's grandiose concept of civilizations. Many of the world clashes have been within those civilizations rather than between them. He neglected what Freud called the 'narcissism of small differences' such as we saw in
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Article: Copyright ©, Tribune Media Services Inc.
"Joseph Nye: America's Challenge to Wield Smart Power "