The mid-term election in the US was the sharpest popular rebuke that President George W. Bush has yet suffered at home. With Congress lost to the Democrats and exit polls showing six in 10 voters opposed to the Iraq war, Bush finally fired Donald Rumsfeld, his disastrous secretary of defense. But while Americans gave Bush low marks on the war in Iraq, polls show that they still support him on the struggle against terrorism.
Unfortunately, the US is not winning the "war on terrorism." An official National Intelligence Estimate confirmed that more jihadist terrorists are being recruited than the US is killing. Bush is correct to say that al-Qaeda has been disrupted, but its attraction as a movement has been enhanced. The cancer has metastasized.
Bush is also right to say that this will be a long struggle. Most outbreaks of transnational terrorism in the past took a generation to burn out. But the US won the long Cold War by a smart combination of hard coercive power and attractive ideas. When the Berlin Wall 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 little likelihood that people like Osama bin Laden can ever be attracted: Only force can deal with such cases. But the people the extremists recruit can be brought to choose moderation over extremism. The Bush administration is beginning to understand this proposition, but it does not seem to know how to implement such a strategy.
In the information age, success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins. The struggle against jihad terrorism is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. There can be no victory unless the Muslim mainstream wins.
Polls throughout the Muslim world show that the US is not winning this battle, and that US policies are offensive. Bush's rhetoric about promoting democracy is less convincing than pictures of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
There has been too little political debate about the squandering of the global attractiveness of the US. "Soft power" is an analytical term, not a political slogan. Perhaps that is why, not surprisingly, it has taken hold in academic analysis, and in places like Europe, China, and India, but not in US political debate.
Especially in the current US political climate, "soft power" sounds like a loser. Having been attacked, Americans' emotions rebel against anything described as "soft." The US may need soft power as a nation, but politicians need the harder stuff to win re-election. Former president 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."
The good news from the recent election is that the pendulum may be swinging back to the middle. One sign will be if the bipartisan Iraq Commission chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton produces a consensus on a strategy for gradual disengagement in Iraq.
After the election, Democrats need to press "hard power" issues like the failure of the administration to implement key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report, or the inadequate number of troops in Afghanistan, and Republicans need to press for a strategy that pays more attention to attracting hearts and minds.
The US spends about 500 times more on the military than on broadcasting and exchanges, with little discussion of trade-offs. Public diplomacy -- broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military-to-military contacts -- is scattered around the government, with no overarching strategy or budget to integrate them into a comprehensive national security policy.
Nor does the US have a strategy for how the government should relate to non-official generators of soft power -- everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Gates Foundation -- that emanate from civil society.
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 program. Likewise, 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 alliance.
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.
If Republicans and Democrats continue to ignore soft power, and the public debate about foreign policy remains limited to a competition over who can sound tougher, the US malaise will deepen. The US does not need more of the partisanship that ossified our public discourse. It needs to recognize the importance of both hard and soft power, and to debate a smart strategy aimed at integrating them. Let us hope that the 2006 election has begun that process.
Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard, is former assistant secretary of defense and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Copyright: Project Syndicate
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
The Constitutional Court on Tuesday last week held a debate over the constitutionality of the death penalty. The issue of the retention or abolition of the death penalty often involves the conceptual aspects of social values and even religious philosophies. As it is written in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the government’s policy is often a choice between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods, and it is impossible to be perfect. Today’s controversy over the retention or abolition of the death penalty can be viewed in the same way. UNACCEPTABLE Viewing the
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused