Last year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, asked US Secretary of State Colin Powell why the US seemed to focus only on its hard power rather than its soft power. 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 Plan. 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 US 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 al-Qaeda leader 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 the US in the struggle against terrorism.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
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.
A dazzling display
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 critical in preventing terrorists from gaining supporters and for gaining the international cooperation necessary to counter terrorism.
The US is more powerful than any country since the Roman Empire, but like Rome, the US 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 the US' hard military power that removed a vicious tyrant. But it did not remove the US' 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 backed the war. The US' 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. The US will not win unless the moderates win.
American soft power will never attract bin Laden and his fellow extremists; only hard power can deal with these people. But soft power will play a crucial role in attracting moderates and denying the extremists new recruits.
Trojan horses
During the Cold War, the West's strategy of containment mixed 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 at 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, former US president Dwight Eisenhower said that he should have taken money from 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. Last year, a bipartisan advisory group reported that the US was spending only US$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 the US' international broadcasting is just over US$1 billion, about the same amount spent by Britain or France, countries that are one-fifth the US' size and whose military budgets are only 25 percent as large. No one would suggest that the US 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 percent of the military budget on soft power, it would quadruple its current spending on this key component of the war on terrorism.
If the US is to win that war, its leaders are going to have to do better at combining soft and hard power into "smart power."
Joseph 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
The US Senate’s passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which urges Taiwan’s inclusion in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise and allocates US$1 billion in military aid, marks yet another milestone in Washington’s growing support for Taipei. On paper, it reflects the steadiness of US commitment, but beneath this show of solidarity lies contradiction. While the US Congress builds a stable, bipartisan architecture of deterrence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly undercuts it through erratic decisions and transactional diplomacy. This dissonance not only weakens the US’ credibility abroad — it also fractures public trust within Taiwan. For decades,
In 1976, the Gang of Four was ousted. The Gang of Four was a leftist political group comprising Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members: Jiang Qing (江青), its leading figure and Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) last wife; Zhang Chunqiao (張春橋); Yao Wenyuan (姚文元); and Wang Hongwen (王洪文). The four wielded supreme power during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but when Mao died, they were overthrown and charged with crimes against China in what was in essence a political coup of the right against the left. The same type of thing might be happening again as the CCP has expelled nine top generals. Rather than a
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmaker Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) on Saturday won the party’s chairperson election with 65,122 votes, or 50.15 percent of the votes, becoming the second woman in the seat and the first to have switched allegiance from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to the KMT. Cheng, running for the top KMT position for the first time, had been termed a “dark horse,” while the biggest contender was former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), considered by many to represent the party’s establishment elite. Hau also has substantial experience in government and in the KMT. Cheng joined the Wild Lily Student
Taipei stands as one of the safest capital cities the world. Taiwan has exceptionally low crime rates — lower than many European nations — and is one of Asia’s leading democracies, respected for its rule of law and commitment to human rights. It is among the few Asian countries to have given legal effect to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Social Economic and Cultural Rights. Yet Taiwan continues to uphold the death penalty. This year, the government has taken a number of regressive steps: Executions have resumed, proposals for harsher prison sentences
RSS