The Bush administration thinks about soft power

I’ve occasionally opined about the question of America’s soft power — whether the concept is useful, and assuming it is, whether it’s on the wane. With the Iraq election, I missed David Brooks’s NYT column on Saturday suggesting that Bush administration officials were paying more attention to soft power as well:

The new mood has also brought a resurgence of soft-power thinking. Administration officials are trying to think big about what institutions can be used to implement the freedom agenda the president sketched out in his Inaugural Address. When you ask exactly which institutions need to be created, they get more than a little vague, but you get a clear sense of their preferences. Bush folks have not developed any new love for the Security Council. Instead, they are much more interested in working with regional groups, like the Organization of American States. Their favorite kinds of institutions are the kinds they created in response to the tsunami disaster: the kind with no permanent offices and no permanent staff, the kind that is created to address a discrete problem and then disappear when the problem is over. The phrase for this is coalitions of the willing. If you think the Iraq situation soured the Bush team on these sorts of coalitions, you’re wrong.

The focus on ad hoc coalitions over more formal institutions will be the subject of a later post — for now, I would strongly recommend that the Bushies read and absorb Andrew Moravcsik’s provocative but well-sourced essay in Newsweek International warning that American soft power is fading fast. Some highlights:

The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America’s self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country’s social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions—globalization, in a word. Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book “The European Dream,” hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that’s caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a “model” for development as America’s scandal-ridden corporate culture. “First we emulate,” one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S. multinational, “then we overtake.” Many are tempted to write off the new anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation, or mere resentment. Blinded by its own myth, America has grown incapable of recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the American Dream to fault. If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American model—political, economic, diplomatic—it’s partly for the very good reason that it doesn’t work as well anymore.

Read the whole thing — Moravcsik demonstrates the diminishing allure for America’s legal system, economic system, and foreign policy. As someone who thought of anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation, I do think Moravcsik is massaging the evidence overstating his thesis a bit. The fact that other countries don’t want to adopt America’s constitution lock, stock and barrel doesn’t mean a rejection the more basic values of liberty, democracy and capitalism. Our serious “soft power rivals” — i.e., Europe — look much more like us than was the case during the Cold War. Compared to the values schism that exists between the west and the Arab Middle East, differences over the size of the welfare state or the appropriate electoral system seem trifling Plus, as he notes in the essay, it remains the case that the United States remains popular “in the poorest and most dictatorial countries.” This fact has not changed in quite some time — it’s just that there are fewer poor dictatorships than there used to be. That said, Moravcsik’s thesis cannot be quickly dismissed — he’s onto something that Bush officials should consider when talking about soft power.