Of Might and Right
Soft Power and the Struggle Against Terrorism
Joseph S. Nye
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Last year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, asked Secretary of State Colin Powell why the United States seemed to focus only on its hard power rather than its soft power. Secretary Powell replied that the US had used hard power to win World War II, but he continued: "What followed immediately after hard power? Did the US ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan¼.We did the same thing in Japan."
After the war in Iraq ended, I spoke about soft power (a concept I developed) to a conference co-sponsored by the US Army in Washington. One speaker was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. According to a press account, "the top military brass listened sympathetically," but when someone asked Rumsfeld for his opinion on soft power, he replied, "I don't know what it means."
One of Rumsfeld's "rules" is that "weakness is provocative." He is correct, up to a point. As Osama bin Laden observed, people like a strong horse. But power, defined as the ability to influence others, comes in many guises, and soft power is not weakness. On the contrary, it is the failure to use soft power effectively that weakens America in the struggle against terrorism.
Soft power is the ability to get what one wants by attracting others rather than threatening or paying them. It is based on culture, political ideals, and policies. When you persuade others to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction.
Hard power, which relies on coercion, grows out of military and economic might. It remains crucial in a world populated by threatening states and terrorist organizations. But soft power will become increasingly important in preventing terrorists from recruiting new supporters, and for obtaining the international cooperation necessary for countering terrorism.
The US is more powerful than any country since the Roman Empire, but like Rome, America is neither invincible nor invulnerable. Rome did not succumb to the rise of another empire, but to the onslaught of waves of barbarians. Modern high-tech terrorists are the new barbarians. The US cannot alone hunt down every suspected Al Qaeda leader. Nor can it launch a war whenever it wishes without alienating other countries.
The four-week war in Iraq was a dazzling display of America's hard military power that removed a vicious tyrant. But it did not remove America's vulnerability to terrorism. It was also costly in terms of our soft power to attract others.
In the aftermath of the war, polls showed a dramatic decline in the popularity of the US even in countries like Britain, Spain, and Italy, whose governments supported the war. America's standing plummeted in Islamic countries, whose support is needed to help track the flow of terrorists, tainted money, and dangerous weapons.
The war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations - Islam versus the West - but a civil war within Islamic civilization between extremists who use violence to enforce their vision and a moderate majority who want things like jobs, education, health care, and dignity as they pursue their faith. America will not win unless the moderates win.
American soft power will never attract Osama bin Laden and the extremists. Only hard power can deal with them. But soft power will play a crucial role in attracting moderates and denying the extremists new recruits.
During the Cold War, the West's strategy of containment combined the hard power of military deterrence with the soft power of attracting people behind the Iron Curtain. Behind the wall of military containment, the West ate away Soviet self-confidence with broadcasts, student and cultural exchanges, and the success of capitalist economics. As a former KGB official later testified, "Exchanges were a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system." In retirement, President Dwight Eisenhower said that he should have taken money out of the defense budget to strengthen the US Information Agency.
With the Cold War's end, Americans became more interested in budget savings than in investing in soft power. In 2003, a bipartisan advisory group reported that the US was spending only $150 million on public diplomacy in Muslim countries, an amount it called grossly inadequate.
Indeed, the combined cost for the State Department's public diplomacy programs and all of America's international broadcasting is just over $1 billion, about the same amount spent by Britain or France, countries that are one-fifth America's size and whose military budgets are only 25% as large. No one would suggest that America spend as much to launch ideas as to launch bombs, but it does seem odd that the US spends 400 times as much on hard power as on soft power. If the US spent just 1% of the military budget on soft power, it would quadruple its current spending on this key component of the war on terrorism.
If America is to win that war, its leaders are going to have to do better at combining soft and hard power into "smart power."
Joseph S. Nye is Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, April 2004.
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