Hard and Soft Power
By Joseph Nye*
huffingtonpost.com
06.08.2005
Bob Boorstin, always a fount of interesting ideas, has announced that The Center for American Progress is going to develop the concept of integrated power and a unified national security budget. Two cheers! He would rate a third cheer, except that he also announces that he will "discard" the previous concepts of hard and soft power because they are not alternatives but must be linked. Exactly. As I wrote in Soft Power: the Means to Success in World Politics, we should not aim for hard or soft power, but to combine the two as a "smart power." That is what we did in the Cold War. Our hard military power helped to deter Soviet aggression while our soft power ate away the basis of communism behind the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall came down, it was under hammers and bulldozers, not artillery. We are failing to make that combination of hard and soft power in the so called "war on terrorism". We spend 450 times more on our hard military power than we do on our budget for public diplomacy (including broadcasts and exchanges). If we spent one percent, we would quadruple the expenditure for that particular instrument of soft power. Good luck to the Center if if pulls that off, and a third cheer if it stops knocking down straw people such as "discarding" hard and soft power.
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*Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, was Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government from December 1995 through June, 2004. Nye has been on the faculty at Harvard since 1964, during which time he also served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. His most recent publications are Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), and an anthology, Power in the Global Information Age (2004). Nye received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. |
