Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor of international relations at Harvard University, is the author, most recently, of The Future of Power, published this year by PublicAffairs.
Power is the ability to affect others to produce the outcomes one wants. This can be accomplished by coercion and payment or by attraction and persuasion. What resources will produce such power in this century? In the 16th century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; the 17th-century Netherlands profited from trade and finance; 18th-century France benefited from its large population and army; 19th-century Britain relied on the Industrial Revolution and its navy for primacy. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in the information age of the 21st century, it may be the state (or nonstates) with the best story that wins. It is no longer clear how to measure the global balance of power, much less how to develop successful strategies to survive in this new world....
When it comes to transnational politics—the bottom chessboard—the information revolution has significantly reduced barriers to entry in global politics. Forty years ago, instantaneous global communication was possible but costly, and restricted to governments and large corporations. Today it is free on Skype. When I served in the State Department, in the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union spent billions on satellite photographs with one-meter resolution. Today anyone can download higher-quality pictures from Google Earth, free. In 2001 a nonstate group killed more Americans than the government of Japan killed at Pearl Harbor. A pandemic spread by birds or airplane travelers could kill more people than perished in World War I or II. And increasingly, power will be exercised in the diffuse domain of cyber interactions....
