What the man who coined the term ‘soft power’ thinks of Trump

Soft power

Nye started off researching African politics, but, seeing post-independence misgovernance, decided he did not want to become “a carping critic of African leaders for the rest of his life”. He refocused closer to home.

In 1987, British historian Paul Kennedy claimed the US was doomed to decline. In response, Nye came up with the idea of soft power to argue the US would still be able to exert influence, albeit of a different type.

Soft power is “the ability to get what you want through attraction, rather than coercion or payment”. It includes cultural appeal from “Harvard to Hollywood”. However, the concept has been distorted as it has entered the mainstream: “Unfortunately, a lot of the people who use it think it means anything other than military power. You can coerce by economic means.”

Soft power captured the imagination of Chinese leaders in the early 2000s. But events in Ukraine and Gaza have underlined the importance of hard power. Was soft power overrated?

“When you’re dealing with wars, you’d be foolish not to start with military power. But that’s not the whole story. In Ukraine, Zelensky realised that wearing a green T-shirt and appealing to victimhood would develop sympathies. [He] was brilliant at using soft power, and that translated into hard power, in the form of shipments of military equipment. Hard power is the core, but soft power plays an auxiliary role.”

Nye gives five reasons why the US will not necessarily be eclipsed by China: geography and friendly neighbours; domestic energy supplies; the dollar-based financial system; demographics; and tech leadership.

None of these factors, I note, includes soft power. Nye says that is because they are intended to meet his critics on their own terms. But he argues that China, despite 20 years of investing in Confucius Institutes to promote its perspectives, lags behind on soft power too.

“Pew polls show the US is more attractive than China to other countries in Asia and in Latin America, Australia and Europe,” Nye says.

“Why is China unpopular in its own region? Because it is seen as a threat. It’s very difficult to develop soft power in New Delhi by establishing a Confucius Institute if your troops are killing Indian troops on the Himalayan border.

“From a strategic point, it’s equally mistaken to underestimate and overestimate your opponent. And right now what’s popular in Washington is overestimation [of China].”

He identifies not with the hawks (who, he argues, overestimate the Chinese threat), or the doves (who underestimate it), but as an “owl”. War between China and the US is not probable, he argues.

Even so, the US can seem powerless. It has failed to convince its ally Israel to act with restraint in Gaza. Could it have done so in the past?

“It’s not clear that they could have done it 20 years ago. George H.W. Bush intimated [in 1991] that American aid could be cut and that may have helped to stimulate the Oslo process, but that didn’t bring about two states.”

Nye adds that “Israel is not the only ally that has proved quite capable of resisting the US”, pointing to Saudi Arabia among others. For the moment, “Israel is hurting its own soft power, and by extension that’s hurting American soft power”.

The attraction of academia

Nye spent two years pushing nuclear non-proliferation under Jimmy Carter. But he preferred the ability to think freely in academia, even if his influence fell. “Launching policy ideas from outside government is like dropping pennies into a deep well,” he writes in his memoir.

Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council, and was “surprised to find how much of [the president’s daily brief] I could have learnt by reading The Economist, the Financial Times, or The Washington Post”. He moved to the Pentagon, where his “Nye Initiative” committed the US to a security partnership with Japan, rather than demanding trade concessions from Tokyo and withdrawing US troops from the region.

He gently criticises Carter for being too focused on details and Obama for not responding with cruise missiles to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Biden’s foreign policy is driven by Obama-era veterans, such as Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken. Have they learnt from previous mistakes?

“They hadn’t thought [the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal] through. In that sense, I don’t think you see an improvement on Obama. Obama on Syria, Biden on Afghanistan – I think they are in the same category.”

Both Obama and Biden have maintained the US’s alliances: there is no “huge difference” between their records.

Biden’s approach to China has been “sensible but firm”.

“If I had to fault him on his Asia policy, it’s that it’s weak on the economic leg. By not going ahead with [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], he deprived the United States of presence in the economic sense.”

Biden’s foreign policy merits “a B or a B+” .

Nye argues Biden, 81, was too old in 2020 and is making “a mistake” by running for re-election. “Biden would have been better if he’d served one term and gone down as the hero in American history who saved America from Trump and then prepared the way for a younger generation of Democratic Party politicians.

“People in their 80s don’t have the same degree of energy that they did in [their] 60s or 70s,” says Nye, himself 86. “Who knows what will happen to his health, but if you just look at actuarial tables, probabilities about onsets of various diseases, these are reasons not to go on too far into your 80s.”

At Harvard, Nye initially supported Gay, after she said that calling for the genocide of Jews would only break Harvard’s harassment rules “depending on context”.

“She was technically correct, under first-amendment purposes. But she mistook giving a legalistic answer for what was really required in political theatre. She should have given a values statement. That’s simply a misjudgment and she could have survived that.”

But he believes instances of alleged plagiarism, which Gay has called “citation errors”, were sufficient to merit her resignation. “You can’t have one standard for students and another standard for the president. Even if the charges of plagiarism were based on sloppiness, rather than an intent to defraud, that’s still not sufficient to leave her in office.”

Is this a moment for Harvard to reset the diversity policies championed by Gay? Nye argues there is a pro-diversity norm shared by “the country or at least in half the country”. His “concern” is the creation of bureaucracies to enforce the norm: “Bureaucrats always have to find things to do, and that can lead to policies that are unduly rigid. I’m all in favour of diversity and inclusion, but I think it should be more as a norm than a bureaucracy.”

Ackman is backing outsiders to join Harvard’s board of overseers. “There have been successful protest candidacies at [that] level before and I have no objection to his proposal as an alumnus,” says Nye. Where others see upheaval, he prefers to see resilience.

Financial Times