Soft Power and US Foreign Policy

Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Inderjeet Parmar, Michael Cox, Inderjeet Parmar, Michael Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415492041
• eBook ISBN: 9781135150471
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The rise of widespread negative attitudes towards US foreign policy, especially due to the war of aggression against Iraq and the subsequent military occupation of the country – has brought new attention to the meaning and instruments of soft power. In this edited collection, an outstanding line up of contributors provides the most extensive discussion of soft power to date. Soft power is the use of attraction and persuasion rather than the use of coercion or force in foreign policy. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals and policies, whereas hard power develops out of a country's military or economic might.

Soft Power has become part of popular political discourse since it was coined by Harvard's Joseph Nye, and this volume features a brand new chapter by Nye outlining his views on soft, hard and smart power and offers a critique of the Bush administration's inadequacies. He then goes on to examine the challenges for the incoming US president. The other contributions to the volume respond to Nye's views from a range of theoretical, historical and policy perspectives giving new insights in to both soft power and the concept of power itself.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of this key concept in foreign affairs and is essential reading for scholars of US foreign policy, public diplomacy, international relations and foreign policy analysis.

1
The future of soft power in US foreign policy

Joseph S. Nye, Jr

The USA has lost a great deal of its soft power over the past eight years. While this is not true for all areas, public opinion polls show a serious decline in American attractiveness in Europe, Latin America, and most dramatically, across the entire Muslim world. When asked why they report this decline, respondents cite American policies more than American culture or values. In contrast to the arguments made by President George W. Bush, they hate us more for what we do than who we are. The resources that produce soft power for a country include its culture (where it is attractive to others); its values (where they are attractive and not undercut by inconsistent practices) and its policies (where they are seen as inclusive and legitimate in the eyes of others). Since it is easier for a country to change its policies than its culture, this implies the possibility that a future

president could choose policies that could help to recover some of the soft power that the Bush administration squandered over the past eight years. President Bush would certainly not agree with the view that he ignored American soft power. He could cite the Wilsonian rhetoric about the universal values of freedom and democracy that were central to his second inaugural address, or his recent speech urging Arab leaders to follow such principles. He might also cite his efforts to increase development assistance and combat AIDS in Africa (which may account for better poll results on that continent). However, the crucial flaw in this defense is the failure to understand that soft power is a relationship of attraction that depends on the eyes of the beholders. By failing to understand the need for the legitimacy of a broad coalition (such as his father assembled), his use of hard power in Iraq undercut American soft power. His failure to understand the cultural context of the Muslim world meant that his appeals for freedom and democracy failed to produce attraction. Furthermore, by cavalier civil liberty practices in the campaign against terrorism, the administration made its profession of universal values look hypocritical.

American foreign policy during the Bush administration has focused around what the president termed a ‘global war on terrorism’. But there are serious problems with the idea of a war on terror, much less making that the theme for foreign policy. For example, Britain has recently told its officials not to use the words ‘war on terrorism’. Americans have a rhetorical tradition of declaring war on abstract nouns like drugs and poverty, but the British have focused on concrete opponents. The basic British concern, however, lies in a different analysis of the problem. When interrogating arrested terrorists, British officials have found a common thread. Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups use a simple yet effective narrative to recruit young Muslims to cross the line into violence. While extreme religious beliefs, diverse local conditions or issues such as Palestine or Kashmir can create a sense of grievance, it is the language of war and a narrative of battle that gives recruits a cult-like sense of status and larger meaning that leads to action. The metaphor of war may have helped Bush to rally domestic opinion in the aftermath of 9/11, but he ignored the problem of multiple audiences. What appealed at home, failed abroad.

Al-Qaeda focuses a large portion of its efforts on communication, and it has learned to use modern media and the Internet very effectively. Potential recruits are told that Islam is under attack from the West, and that it is the personal responsibility of each Muslim to fight to protect the worldwide Muslim community. This extreme version of the duty of jihad (to struggle) is reinforced by videos and internet websites that show Muslims being killed in Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir and Lebanon. This message uses the language of religion as justification, but its dynamic is like an ideology that seeks to harness the energy from a great variety of grievances. British officials have concluded that when we use the vocabulary of war and jihad, we simply reinforce al-Qaeda’s narrative and help their recruiting efforts.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once asked what metric we should use to measure success in a ‘war on terrorism’. He concluded that success depended on whether the number of terrorists we were killing or deterring was greater than the number the enemy was recruiting. By his metric, British and American intelligence estimates are not encouraging. The invasion of Iraq helped rather than hindered al-Qaeda recruitment.

Bush’s legacy

Some pundits believe that no matter who wins the 2008 election, he or she will be bound to follow the broad lines of Bush’s strategy. Vice-President Richard Cheney has argued, ‘when we get all through 10 years from now, we’ll look back on this period of time and see that liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq really did represent a major, fundamental shift, obviously, in US policy in terms of how we dealt with the emerging terrorist threat – and that we’ll have fundamentally changed circumstances in that part of the world.’ President Bush himself has pointed out that Harry Truman suffered low ratings in the last year of his presidency because of the Korean War, but today is held in high regard and South Korea is a democracy protected by American troops. But this is an over-simplification of history. By this stage of his presidency, Truman had built major cooperative institutions such as the Marshall Plan and NATO.

The crisis of 9/11 produced an opportunity for George W. Bush to express a bold new vision of foreign policy, but one should judge a vision by whether it balances ideals with capabilities. Anyone can produce a wish list, but effective visions combine feasibility with the inspiration. Among past presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt was good at this, but Woodrow Wilson was not. David Gergen, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership has described the difference between the boldness of FDR and George W. Bush: ‘FDR was also much more of a public educator than Bush, talking people carefully through the challenges and choices the nation faced, cultivating public opinion, building up a sturdy foundation of support before he acted. As he showed during the lead-up to World War II, he would never charge as far in front of his followers as Bush.’ Bush’s temperament is less patient. He saw himself as a transformational leader. As one journalist put it, ‘he likes to shake things up. That was the key to going into Iraq.’ But by failing to understand the cultural context, his transformation was for the worse, rather than better.

Contextual intelligence

The next president will need what I call ‘contextual intelligence’ in my new book, The Powers to Lead. In foreign policy, contextual intelligence is the intuitive diagnostic skill that helps you align tactics with objectives to create smart strategies in varying situations. Of recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had impressive contextual intelligence, but the younger Bush did not. It starts with a clear understanding of the current context of American foreign policy, both at home and abroad.

Academics, pundits and advisors have often been mistaken about America’s position in the world. For example, two decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that the USA was in decline, suffering from ‘imperial overstretch’. It was during this debate that I coined the term soft power. After summarizing the hard military and economic resources of the USA, I realized that something was still missing. Particularly with the growth in the popularity of structural neo-realism, international relations theory suffered from a materialist bias that truncated our conceptions of power, and ignored the non-material factors that can influence behavior through attraction. That is what I tried to recover with the idea of soft power.

A decade later, with the end of the Cold War, the new conventional wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Some neo-conservative pundits drew the conclusion that the USA was so powerful that it could decide what it thought was right, and others would have no choice but to follow. Charles Krauthammer celebrated this view as ‘the new unilateralism’ and it heavily influenced the Bush administration even before the shock of the attacks on 9/11 produced a new ‘Bush doctrine’ of preventive war and coercive democratization. This new unilateralism was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants. Whether the possession of resources will produce such outcomes depends upon the context. In the past, it was assumed that military power dominated most issues, but in today’s world, the contexts of power differ greatly on military, economic and transnational issues.

Contextual intelligence must start with an understanding of the strength and limits of American power. The USA is the only superpower, but preponderance is not empire or hegemony. America can influence but not control other parts of the world. Power always depends upon context, and the context of world politics today is like a three-dimensional chess game. The top board of military power is unipolar; but on the middle board of economic relations, the world is multipolar. On the bottom board of transnational relations (such as climate change, illegal drugs, pandemics and terrorism) power is chaotically distributed. We see a diffusion of power to non-state actors that Robert Keohane and I began to describe three decades ago. Military power is a small part of the solution in responding to these new threats. They require cooperation among governments and international institutions. Even on the top board (where America represents nearly half of world defense expenditures), the American military is supreme in the global commons of air, sea and space, but much more limited in its ability to control nationalistic populations in occupied areas.

Second, the next president must understand the importance of developing an integrated grand strategy that combines hard military power with soft attractive power. In the struggle against terrorism, we need to use hard power against the hard core terrorists, but we cannot hope to win unless we gain the hearts and minds of the moderates. If the misuse of hard power (such as in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo) creates more new terrorist recruits than we kill or deter, we will lose. Right now we have no integrated strategy for combining hard and soft power. Many official instruments of soft power – public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military to military contacts – are scattered around the government and there is no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching national security strategy. We spend about 500 times more on the military than we do on broadcasting and exchanges. Is this the right proportion? How would we know? How would we make trade-offs? What are the relevant time horizons? And how should the government relate to the non-official generators of soft power – everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – that emanate from civil society? A new administration will have to realize that it cannot control these actors who sometimes produce and sometimes consume soft power. It will have to think of public diplomacy as involving contacts and listening rather than just broadcasting values and policies that may be heard differently in other cultures. As Edward R. Murrow once put it, the most important part of public diplomacy is the last three feet of face-to-face interactions. Or to use a more modern metaphor, public diplomacy will have to be more like Web 2.0 where peer-to-peer interactions generate much of the content.

Soft and hard power

The Bush administration has drawn analogies between the war on terrorism and the Cold War. The president is correct that this will be a long struggle. Most outbreaks of transnational terrorism in the past century took a generation to burn out. But another aspect of the analogy has been neglected. Despite numerous errors, the Cold War strategy involved a smart combination of hard coercive power and the soft attractive power of ideas. When the Berlin Wall finally collapsed, it was not destroyed by an artillery barrage, but by hammers and bulldozers wielded by those who had lost faith in communism.

There is very little likelihood that we can ever attract people like Osama bin Laden: we need hard power to deal with such cases. But there is enormous diversity of opinion in the Muslim world. Witness Iran whose ruling mullahs see American culture as the Great Satan, but where many in the younger generation want American videos to play in the privacy of their homes. Many Muslims disagree with American values as well as policies, but that does not make mean they agree with bin Laden. By Rumsfeld’s calculus, we cannot win if the number of people the extremists are recruiting is larger than the number we are killing and deterring or convincing to choose moderation over extremism. The Bush administration is beginning to understand this general proposition, but it does not seem to know how to implement such a strategy. To achieve this – to thwart our enemies, but also to reduce their numbers through deterrence, suasion and attraction – we need better strategy.

In the information age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins. The current struggle against extremist jihadi terrorism is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. We cannot win unless the Muslim mainstream wins. While we need hard power to battle the extremists, we need the soft power of attraction to win the hearts and minds of the majority. Polls throughout the Muslim world show that we are not winning this battle, and that it is our policies not our values that offend. Presidential rhetoric about promoting democracy is less convincing than pictures of Abu Ghraib.

Despite these failures, there has not been enough political debate in the USA about the squandering of American soft power. Soft power is an analytical term, not a political slogan and perhaps that is why, not surprisingly, it has taken hold in academic analysis, and in other places such as Europe, China and India, but not in the American political debate. Especially in the current political climate, it makes a poor slogan – post-9/11, emotions left little room for anything described as ‘soft.’ We may need soft power as a nation, but it is a difficult political sell for politicians. Bill Clinton captured the mindset of the American people when he said that in a climate of fear, the electorate would choose ‘strong and wrong’ over ‘timid and right.’

Of course soft power is not the solution to all problems. Even though North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il likes to watch Hollywood movies, that is unlikely to affect his nuclear weapons programme. And soft power got nowhere in attracting the Taliban government away from its support for al-Qaeda in the 1990s. It took hard military power to end that. But other goals such as the promotion of democracy and human rights are better achieved by soft power. Coercive democratization has its limits as the Bush administration has found in Iraq.

Smart power

I have used the term ‘smart power’ to describe strategies that successfully combine hard and soft power resources. The USA needs to rediscover how to be a ‘smart power’. That was the conclusion of a bipartisan commission that I recently co-chaired with Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration. A group of Republican and Democratic members of Congress, former ambassadors, retired military officers and heads of non-profit organizations was convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. We concluded that America’s image and influence had declined in recent years, and that the USA had to move from exporting fear to inspiring optimism and hope.

The Smart Power Commission is not alone in this conclusion. Recently Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for the US government to commit more money and effort to soft power tools including diplomacy, economic assistance and communications because the military alone cannot defend America’s interests around the world. He pointed out that military spending totals nearly half a trillion dollars annually compared with a State Department budget of US$36 billion. In his words, ‘I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.’ He acknowledged that for the head of the Pentagon to plead for more resources for the State Department was as odd as a man biting a dog, but these are not normal times.

Smart power is the ability to combine the hard power of coercion or payment with the soft power of attraction into a successful strategy. By and large, the USA managed such a combination during the Cold War, but more recently US foreign policy has tended to over-rely on hard power because it is the most direct and visible source of American strength. The Pentagon is the best trained and best resourced arm of the government, but there are limits to what hard power can achieve on its own. Promoting democracy, human rights and development of civil society are not best handled with the barrel of a gun. It is true that the American military has an impressive operational cap...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in US foreign policy
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The future of soft power in US foreign policy
• 2 From hegemony to soft power
• 3 Soft power and strategy
• 4 The unbearable lightness of soft power
• 5 The Power Game, soft power and the international historian1
• 6 Challenging elite anti-Americanism in the Cold War
• 7 Technological leadership and American soft power
• 8 The military use of soft power – information campaigns
• 9 Public diplomacy and the information war on terror
• 10 Soft power in an era of US decline
• 11 Cheques and balances
• 12 The myth and reality of China’s ‘soft power’
• 13 Responding to my critics and concluding thoughts
• Index