Dissecting soft power

Jim Hoagland has a good review of Joseph Nye’s Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics and John Lewis Gaddis’ Surprise, Security, and the American Experience in The New Republic. I’ve always found “soft power” a maddening concept, in that Nye has managed to identiy something important but its precise definition and causal logic remains inchoate (click here, here, and here for more of my thoughts on the matter). Hoagland appears to be equally frustrated with Nye:

Soft power, or so the doctrine goes, will set Americans free from misunderstanding, vilification, and the kind of determined opposition to American foreign policy that has marked the presidency of George W. Bush. We can and must “attract others to our side,” and we can do this by better communicating America’s true character and values to the world. The next president must seduce other governments and international institutions rather than bully them. If that does not work, take two aspirin and call Harvard tomorrow. By then it may be clearer what soft power is and how it will work…. In 1990, his three main sources of soft power were American culture, international laws and institutions, and American multinational corporations. Two of those secret weapons have now dropped well down the list. Culture–in particular educational exchanges, “public diplomacy” (as government-run information programs are now known), and mass-market films and other media–still makes Nye’s cut as an American resource for changing opinion abroad through the force of example or persuasion. But American political values (when, Nye warns, they are in fact honored in America) and American foreign policies (“when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority”) have somehow stormed ahead of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola in Nye’s worldview. It would be interesting to know why and how, but we are glided past that and much more. Definition is all in this kind of exercise. Nye’s book so stretches the definition of soft power, and so heavily conditions it, that the term comes to mean almost everything and therefore almost nothing.

In contrast, Hoagland has a more favorable take on the Gaddis book:

The alternative to Nye’s softness, of course, is not an unsophisticated and chest-thumping unilateralism. There are significant roots in American history for a smart multilateralism that is not at all allergic to the use of force. For this, we must return to Gaddis…. Gaddis reminds (or more likely informs) us that the United States would not exist today as a continental power if it had not employed unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony as tools of national policy well into the twentieth century. Bush 43, meet Adams 6. In 1793, John Quincy Adams, whom Gaddis plausibly describes as the “most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century,” was already writing that only unilateralism–staying disconnected “from all European interests and European politics”–would guarantee “real independence” for the fledgling United States. Nor could the United States simply co-exist on equal terms with any other great power on the North American continent. That, Adams wrote in 1811, would create “an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors.”…. Gaddis is convincing in arguing that the Bush administration has paid a heavy price for sustaining momentum in the war on terrorism rather than consolidating its battlefield successes through a more focused, more Rooseveltian multilateralism. “Shock and awe are necessary departures from the normal,” he observes. But “they become what’s expected, and that undermines the element of surprise that makes such practices work in the first place. That’s why good strategists know when to stop shocking and awing.” And he continues: “The precedent John Quincy Adams set has at last produced what he warned against: an American government that deliberately goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy–lest those monsters attempt to destroy it.”

UPDATE: For more on the Gaddis book, readers would be well-served to check out the Slate Book Club exchange between Robert Kagan and Niall Ferguson about Gaddis’ book as well as Walter Russell Mead’s Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk.