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Soft Power: The Means to Success in Global Politics

The Honorable

Joseph P. Nye

Dean, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard

8 April, 2004

Thank you, Michael Larkin. It’s a pleasure to be here in Los Angeles.  When I hear a nice introduction like that I’m always reminded of the way my three sons used to answer the phone when somebody would call the house and say, “Is Dr. Nye there?”  They would say, “Yes, but he’s not the useful kind.” 

I am going to talk a little bit about “soft power” as it relates to our current conundrums of the threats we face from terrorism, and I think probably the place to start any such discussion would be with 9/11.  I’ve often said that 9/11 was like a flash of lightening on a summer evening in which you suddenly see revealed in front of you a landscape and you know you’re going to have to pick your way across that landscape. But then, after the flash of lightening, it goes dark. We, as a people, are in the process of trying to pick our way through that dangerous landscape.

What 9/11 revealed were two deep changes that had been occurring in the latter part of the 20^th century and that only became clear in that tragic event.  One was the deepening and quickening of globalization and the other was the dramatic changes in technology, sometimes called the “information revolution.”

  Let me give you illustrations in both cases.  If you’d asked an American in the 1990s, “What’s going on in Afghanistan?” he probably would have said, “Conditions in Afghanistan are terrible, absolutely dreadful.  Too bad for the Afghans, but it’s not clear that it matters to us.”  And on September 11, 2001 we suddenly realized that, under the conditions of globalization, terrible conditions in a poor, weak country half-way around the world could matter very much to us. 

The other deep change that was going on in the 20^th century that became clear on 9/11 was the dramatic changes in technology.  This is sometimes put in the following number:  the price of computing power declined 1,000-fold from 1970 to 2000.  That’s a little bit abstract until you realize that if the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly, you could buy a car today for $ 5.  And what that means is that when the price of something goes down that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down.  Anybody can play in the game.  So in 1970, if you wanted instantaneous global communications, you probably had to have a pretty big organization a pretty big budget – a government, a multinational corporation, may be the Catholic Church.  Today anybody can have instantaneous global communications for pennies. All you need is the price of entry to an Internet café.  That’s quite a dramatic change and what that has meant is the ability of new actors to play in international politics has greatly increased.  Some of these are nongovernmental organizations, like Oxfam , or Human Rights Watch, and so forth but others are malevolent nongovernmental organizations such as Al Qaeda . What we’ve seen is that the dark side of globalization, the transnational terrorist side, has also been enabled by these changes in technology that I call the “democratization of technology” making it available to everyone. 

Terrorism isn’t new.  Obviously, we’ve been living with terrorism for centuries, but what’s interesting is to notice the extraordinary increase in the agility and lethality of terrorism that has occurred as we turn our way into the 21^st century.  The numbers killed in terrorist events in the 20^th century were generally in the tens, maybe hundreds.  The worst terrorist incident was the bombing of an Air India flight by Sikh extremists, which killed about 329 people in the 1980s, but, of course, by 9/11 that had gone up to 3,000. If terrorists were able to get hold of weapons of mass destruction, which, alas, is not science fiction, you can imagine the capacity of nongovernmental organizations to kill in the millions. Again, that’s not unprecedented in the sense that you could say that in the 20^th century pathological people, like Hitler or Stalin, were able to kill millions but they needed the apparatus of a totalitarian government to do it.  Today, a pathological individual or group no longer needs the government to be able to do it. 

Another way of looking at that is that on September 11 a transnational terrorist organization killed more Americans than the Japanese government did at Pearl Harbor.  This is truly a dramatic change in world politics.  In my book I call it the “privatization of war.”

I think that President Bush properly responded by readjusting American foreign policy.  If you remember, in the 2000 election campaign he ran as a classical realistist who was going to focus just on the great powers – no more nation-building, no more foreign policy as social work what he dubbed the Clinton policy.  China was to be a strategic competitor, not a strategic partner.  We were going to have a new hardnosed closely-bound look at foreign policy.  Indeed, one of the things that was charged, I guess, against Condoleezza Rice as she appeared today is that when she wrote and talked about foreign policy in 2000 and the beginning of 2001 it was a very narrow traditional realists view with very little attention to these new dimensions of transnational terrorism and globalization. 

By September of 2002, the president had changed our national security strategy quite dramatically.  We now have statements such as “we have more to fear from terrible conditions in failed states than from great powers and our greatest threat is from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction”, and China became a strategic partner rather than a strategic competitor.  These are quite dramatic changes and, I think, correctly so.  I think this is the greatest danger we face, and it is proper that we are focusing on it.  The difference with the way, I think, we’ve done this as a people, both in the administration in the Congress and the columnists who focus on these things, is that we have not chosen the best mix of the means available to deal with this issue.  We’ve focused correctly on the ends, but I think, made some mistakes on the means. 

Because we are so extraordinarily strong in military power we’ve tended to do things militarily alone and neglected what I call “soft power.”  In that sense we’re a little bit like the boy with the hammer who sees every problem as a nail and we have basically been one-dimensional thinkers in a three-dimensional world.  What do I mean by that?  Well, if you look at the distribution of power in the world today you would think of it being like a three-dimensional chess game in which you play across and up and down at the same time.  On the top board of military power among the states, nobody can match us.  We are the hegemon-- the world’s only superpower, a unipolar world, all the other clichés.  Go to the middle board of economic relations among states, the world is multipolar.  We can’t get along alone.  We can’t get a trade agreement without the cooperation of the Europeans or the Chinese or the Japanese.  Jack Welsh couldn’t merge GE and Honeywell without the approval of the European Union Commission.  Then you go to the bottom board of transnational relations, which are things that cross borders outside the control of governments, whether it be transactions made by bankers or money, or whether it be carrying drugs across borders by drug smugglers or whether it’s terrorists acting across borders; in that domain it makes no sense at all to talk about unipolarity or American empire or American hegemony.  Nobody is in charge. It’s chaotically organized, and the only way you could deal with those issues is essentially through cooperation with others. Yet it’s that bottom board of transnational relations where the greatest threats are arising.  Indeed, one of the great dangers is that by focusing so heavily on the top board we’re neglecting some of the impacts of our actions on the bottom board. 

So if you apply that, for example, to the war in Iraq ,on the top board, we very successfully, and with a very brilliant, short military campaign removed a tyrant, Saddam Hussein, but at the same time we didn’t look at the full effects on the bottom board, which was to increase recruiting by Al Qaeda throughout the Islamic world.  And the danger of this, of course, is that if you’re involved in the three-dimensional chess game and you focus on one board only, in the long run you’re going to lose.  When you look at this bottom board of transnational relations of the nongovernmental sectors, the things that are posing the greatest threats we face now, you do need cooperation and your cooperation is going to depend to a considerable extent on your ability to attract others.I think one of the real dangers that we face is that we haven’t spent enough time thinking about our ability to attract others and our soft power.

 Just to dramatize or to clarify in your minds what I mean by “soft power,” power is the ability to influence others to get what you want and there are basically three ways you can do it: you can do it with threats, or sticks; you can do it with payments, carrots, or you can do it with attraction, or co-opting others, and it’s that last of the three that I call “soft power.”

The United States gets soft power from three different sources.  One is our popular culture, whether it be Hollywood or Harvard or pop music.  A second is our values and ideals, like democracy and human rights, when we live up to them; and the third is our foreign policies, when we formulate our policies that make others feel involved, consulted, that include interests so that our policies look legitimate in their eyes.  And when we fail to pay enough attention to the impact of our soft power we then find that we’re less able to use our “hard power” effectively.  One of the dangers is that in the last few years, because there is no military power to balance us stet the Soviet Union went away there was no balance of military power, we have, many of us, succumbed to the view that we can do whatever we want.  Take, for example, the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthamer, who invented the term “the new unilateralism”, in his eyes a term of a praise.What he said in the column was that the United States is the world’s only superpower.We should figure out what we think is right and just do it, and others have no choice but to follow.  They can’t stop us.  In some ways that’s right.If you look at Afghanistan, which Krauthamer said was a brilliant exercise of the new unilateralism, he’s correct.  American military power was sufficient in Afghanistan and to defeat the Taliban government.  But if you look again more closely at what happened in Afghanistan, we defeated the Taliban, but we did not wrap up Al Qaeda through military means.  We maybe got a quarter of Al Qaeda there.  To wrap up a transnational network like Al Qaeda with cells in 50 or 60 countries you need close civilian cooperation, intelligence sharing, police work across borders, tracing financial flows and so forth. 

Now, to some extent others will share or cooperate with us out of their own self-interest, but the degree of cooperation you get from others depends on the degree of your attractiveness, and that’s where our soft power comes in.  If being pro-American is the kiss of death in the domestic politics of another country, you’ll get cooperation up to a point, but not beyond that.  If you look at Pakistan today, for example, where President Musharraf has to try to balance concessions to America on the one hand and not antagonize his own fundamentalists on the other hand, the more unattractive the United States is in the politics of Pakistan, the more difficult it is for Musharraf to make concessions. 

It’s worth noticing that in recent public opinion polls in Pakistan, and also in Jordan, which is an allegedly friendly country, Osama bin Laden is more popular than President Bush.  That’s a problem.  Indeed, if you look at what’s happened to American attraction, or attractiveness, around the world, the polls are quite daunting.  If you take in a survey that was done by few Foundation, you will find that the United States has lost 30 points on average of attractiveness in all major European countries including those that supported us in the war, like Italy and Britain and Spain.  And when you turn to the Islamic world, it’s even worse.Not only in cases like Pakistan and Jordan that I just mentioned, but if you take the case of Indonesia which is the largest Islamic country in the year 2000 three-quarters of Indonesians had a positive view of the United States.By the end of the Iraq war that had declined to 15 percent.  That’s an extraordinary drop, and it is important, because those are the people we need to help us, for example, when we try to deal with Jemaah Islamiya  an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia. 

So we have lost a great deal of soft power over the last couple of years, and I would submit that that hurts our hard power.  For example, when we wanted to move the 4^th Infantry Division across Turkey a year ago to enter Iraq from the north we had become so unpopular our policies were regarded as illegitimate.  It was a widespread view that the Americans had already made up their minds what they were going to do without consulting anybody and that all the UN consultations were window dressing.  When we went to the Turkish Parliament to ask for permission to move troops across Turkey, they said no And that meant that the 4^th Infantry division had to go down through the Suez Canal, come up through the Gulf and it was late to the party, and that was costly to us.  Similarly, the fact that the view that we had already made up our mind and were not consulting others ,meant that when, after the war last summer when we began to run into trouble in Iraq and we asked other countries like India,China and Pakistan as well as the Europeans to help us the answer was “No.  You didn’t ask us before, why are you asking us now?” 

So, the willingness to ignore soft power, pay little attention to how we go about our policies that the new unilateralisst had advocated, has turned out to be quite costly to us in terms of our hard power in terms of blood and treasure.

Now, the skeptics will say, “Yes.  Maybe you’re right about soft power but it has nothing to do with the war on terrorism.  After all, you’re never going to attract a bin Laden or an Al Qaeda.”  That again is partly true, but also profoundly misleading in the following sense: you’re not going to attract the Taliban or bin Laden,and you have to use hard power to deal with them, but on the other hand if you think of what’s going on with Islamic terrorism today, it’s not a clash of civilizations of Islam versus the West, it’s a civil war within Islamic civilization, between a small group of radical extremists who are trying to use force to impose what they see as a pure form of their religion, and a much larger majority who want things like better jobs, education for their kids, health care and dignity things that we all want.  And in the long run, unless the moderates win, We will not win.  We’re never going to be able to solve by bombs and bullets alone the problem of dealing with terrorism and Islamic terrorism in particular. 

Secretary Rumsfeld has said in a memo that was leaked some time ago, “How do we know the metric for judging how we’re doing on the war on terrorism?”  And what he said was we have to know whether the number that we are killing and deterring is greater than the numbers that the madrassas are producing and bin Laden is recruiting.  Well, thus far we’re not doing well on that metric.  That to me is a tragedy, because by ignoring the importance of our soft power we’re not paying enough attention to attracting that moderate majority. 

Let me give you a couple of examples.  The United States spends, on all of its public diplomacy toward the Islamic world, according to a recent bipartisan commission on the subject, about $150 million dollars a year.  That’s about two hours of the defense budget.  If you look at the broadcasting that we do, in the Cold War about 70 percent of East Europeans would listen to the Voice of America; now about 2 percent of Arabs listen to the Voice of America.  If you look at what we’re investing in this area we are spending about the same on public diplomacy—by that I mean not just broadcasting but also exchange programs and libraries and so forth.  We’re spending about the same amount as Britain or France, and yet we’re five times their size.  Another way of turning the same figures in your, mind is that we spend 400 times more on our hard power than on our soft power.  There’s something oddly wrong about that ratio.  I would not advocate, as a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, that we spend equally on the two forms of power, but there is something odd about the fact that we’re 400 to one.  Another way of putting that is that if we were to spend one percent of the defense budget on launching ideas as well as bombs, it would mean quadrupling what we do in public diplomacy.

So we’re a long way from where we need to be if we’re going to succeed in the war on terrorism, and I think until we, as a people, learn how to regress the balance to combine more soft power with our hard power we’re probably not going to prevail.  The good news is that if you look back historically, during the Cold War we did know how to combine soft power with hard power, and there are several chapters in my book, which give you concrete illustrations of how we did it.  The good news then is that we’ve done it before, the bad news is that we’re not doing it yet.  But if we’ve done it before, presumably we could do it again, and when we learn how to combine soft power with hard power then finally we may be a smart power.

Let me stop there and see if you have any questions.