Joseph Nye, outgoing dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense coined the term “soft power” in the late 1980s. It is now used frequently —and often incorrectly — by political leaders, editorial writers, and academics around the world. So what is soft power? As presented by Nye, soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies, whereas hard power — the ability to coerce — grows out of a country’s military or economic might.
Nye spoke to World Bank staff at a brown bag lunch on June 3, 2004, an event arranged by the Bank Infoshop and the Bank-Fund Staff Kennedy School of Government Alumni Association. His presentation centered around his new book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, in which he argues that it is essential that the United States better understand and apply its soft power. Nye insisted that the US government must resolve the imbalance between hard and soft power, pointing to the fact that public diplomacy and outreach makes up just 0.25 percent of the entire military budget. Cheryl Gray, sector director for Poverty Reduction & Economic Management in the Bank’s Europe and Central Asia region, offered introductory remarks and gave background to Mr. Nye’s political experience.
American soft power has been declining, Nye argued, and public opinion polls show a dramatic increase in anti-American sentiment in recent days. The most striking drops have occurred in the Islamic world. While 75 percent of people in Indonesia regarded the US as favorable in 2000, that number has plummeted and presently stands at a mere 15 percent. In Jordan and Pakistan, recent polls show that Osama bin Laden is taken to be more credible than George Bush. Soft power is always present, though sometimes the temptation in international politics is to ignore its significance to diplomacy. The collapse of the USSR, Nye purported, was caused as much by soft power as by hard power. In fact, the use of Soviet hard power in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the growth of its weapons stocks in the 1970s were directly correlated to the decline of Soviet soft power.
Despite claims like those of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who insists that international relations has reached a “new unilateralism,” the US must recognize that being only a military superpower doesn’t give us the capacity to make decisions for the world. Nye compared international relations to a three-dimensional game of chess, where the top board is interstate military relations, the middle is economic relations, and the bottom is transnational relations like terrorism, climate, and natural resources. While the US clearly dominates the top board, no nation dominates the middle board and the bottom one is entirely chaotic.
To overcome these flaws, the US requires changes in the substance and style of its foreign policy. America must be more consultative and must devote more resources to broadcasting its message. Nye told the story of the US television station in Iraq, which broadcasts only four hours a day and pales in comparison to Al Jazeera’s constant news coverage. At just US$1 billion per year, Nye called public diplomacy an “appalling underinvestment” — the same amount spent in Britain and France, two dramatically smaller nations. The bad news, he said, is that America is not doing public diplomacy well now. The good news, though, is that the US has done it well in the past.
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