Abe Greenwald: The Soft-Power Fallacy
[Abe Greenwald is associate editor of COMMENTARY.]
The concept of soft power was first described at length by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. According to Nye, soft power is exercised “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants.” This is to be achieved through “intangible forms of power,” such as the setting of a good example, the export of positive popular culture, and a redoubled willingness to approach problems through international bodies and coalitions. All this is opposed to “the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” Barack Obama has accepted this contrast with little reservation. “All too often,” he said in his first interview as president, “the United States starts by dictating.” He has since frequently elaborated on what he sees as the aims of the “international community.”...
The supposed advantage of the soft-power approach lies in Nye’s contention that “the great powers of today are less able to use their traditional power resources to achieve their purposes than in the past.” For great powers, the use of force has simply become too costly. Additionally, the world has seen—or had seen, when Nye was writing in 1990—a “diffusion of power” due to economic interdependence, transnational actors, increased nationalism in weak states, widespread technology, and “changing political issues.”
For example, the Japanese of the 1980s, who loomed large in Nye’s original calculation about the world power nexus, chose not to build up their military force because “the political cost both at home and in the reaction of other countries would be considerable. Militarization might then reduce rather than increase Japan’s ability to achieve its ends.” This was, for Nye, a model to be taken seriously. Twenty years later, in his national-security strategy, Obama warns, “When we overuse our military might, or fail to invest in or deploy complementary tools, or act without partners, then our military is overstretched, Americans bear a greater burden, and our leadership around the world is too narrowly identified with military force.”...
Like Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History,” soft-power theory was a creative and appealing attempt to make sense of America’s global purpose. Unlike Fukuyama’s theory, however, which the new global order seemed to support for nearly a decade, Nye’s was basically refuted by world events in its very first year. In the summer of 1990, a massive contingent of Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and effectively annexed it as a province of Iraq. Although months earlier Nye had asserted that “geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important,” the fact is that Saddam invaded Kuwait because of its geographic proximity, insubstantial military, and plentiful oil reserves. Despite Nye’s claim that “the definition of power is losing its emphasis on military force,” months of concerted international pressure, including the passage of a UN resolution, failed to persuade Saddam to withdraw. In the end, only overwhelming American military power succeeded in liberating Kuwait. The American show of force also succeeded in establishing the U.S. as the single, unrivaled post–Cold War superpower....
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The concept of soft power was first described at length by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. According to Nye, soft power is exercised “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants.” This is to be achieved through “intangible forms of power,” such as the setting of a good example, the export of positive popular culture, and a redoubled willingness to approach problems through international bodies and coalitions. All this is opposed to “the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” Barack Obama has accepted this contrast with little reservation. “All too often,” he said in his first interview as president, “the United States starts by dictating.” He has since frequently elaborated on what he sees as the aims of the “international community.”...
The supposed advantage of the soft-power approach lies in Nye’s contention that “the great powers of today are less able to use their traditional power resources to achieve their purposes than in the past.” For great powers, the use of force has simply become too costly. Additionally, the world has seen—or had seen, when Nye was writing in 1990—a “diffusion of power” due to economic interdependence, transnational actors, increased nationalism in weak states, widespread technology, and “changing political issues.”
For example, the Japanese of the 1980s, who loomed large in Nye’s original calculation about the world power nexus, chose not to build up their military force because “the political cost both at home and in the reaction of other countries would be considerable. Militarization might then reduce rather than increase Japan’s ability to achieve its ends.” This was, for Nye, a model to be taken seriously. Twenty years later, in his national-security strategy, Obama warns, “When we overuse our military might, or fail to invest in or deploy complementary tools, or act without partners, then our military is overstretched, Americans bear a greater burden, and our leadership around the world is too narrowly identified with military force.”...
Like Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History,” soft-power theory was a creative and appealing attempt to make sense of America’s global purpose. Unlike Fukuyama’s theory, however, which the new global order seemed to support for nearly a decade, Nye’s was basically refuted by world events in its very first year. In the summer of 1990, a massive contingent of Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and effectively annexed it as a province of Iraq. Although months earlier Nye had asserted that “geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important,” the fact is that Saddam invaded Kuwait because of its geographic proximity, insubstantial military, and plentiful oil reserves. Despite Nye’s claim that “the definition of power is losing its emphasis on military force,” months of concerted international pressure, including the passage of a UN resolution, failed to persuade Saddam to withdraw. In the end, only overwhelming American military power succeeded in liberating Kuwait. The American show of force also succeeded in establishing the U.S. as the single, unrivaled post–Cold War superpower....