����vlog����

Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the tough problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Joseph Nye): Well, in Trump’s first administration, America first, which implied everybody else second—they realized that that was a difficult slogan. And people like H.R. McMaster, the national securities advisor, would say things like: “America first doesn’t mean America alone.” But there’s much less subtlety in Trump’s second administration. I mean, when you come into office and the first things you say are that you’re going to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, no matter what. Or you say that we’re going to retake the Panama Canal, which reawakens all of the Latin American suspicions about American imperialism. Or you abolish AID, which is an agency which makes Americans look more benign through its assistance. Basically, these suggest that you’re not even thinking about America first, you’re thinking about America alone.  

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome back. I’m Ralph Ranalli. It’s not every day in the world of policy and academia, when you’re exploring an important and widely held concept or idea, to be able to go to the straight to the original source. Well, today is that day here on PolicyCast. My guest is Joseph Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School and now Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. During his storied career in academia and government service, he’s also served as United States deputy secretary of state, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and as an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. But he may be best known for a moment of inspiration at his kitchen table, when he was trying to define what gives governments influence in the world beyond the size of their armies or the wealth in their economies. He called it “soft power,” and it quickly became an indispensable staple of serious conversations about geopolitics and global diplomacy. It’s also a concept rooted in subtlety, meaning it is at serious odds with the smashmouth ethos of the Trump presidency here in the United States. Joe Nye joins me to talk about the history of American soft power, how it is already declining under Trump, and what that could mean for the future.

Ralph Ranalli: Joe, welcome to PolicyCast.  

Joeseph Nye: Nice to be with you.  

Ralph Ranalli: You’ve defined power as the ability to affect others to get the outcome you want. And you’ve said there are three dimensions to power, coercion, payment, and attraction. You famously coined the term “soft power,” which you say is largely about attraction, that third dimension. And it’s convincing someone to essentially want what you want. Can you walk us through how that works, especially in the way it applies to geopolitics? How does that work in the real world?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, in just terms of power, we all use it and experience it every day. The common metaphors we have: sticks, coercion, carrots, payment and honey, or attraction. And in a democracy, as we work with others, we actually are doing much more with honey, attraction, soft power than with hard power. But in practice, we use all three at the same time. The same thing is true internationally, though you put a higher premium on the hard power end than you do in a well-ordered domestic society. So, within the power resources that you have internationally, obviously your military power and your economic power are important for coercion and for payment.

But in addition to that, your ability to get others to do what you want because they’re attractive is worth quite a lot. I’ll give you an example: In the Cold War, a Norwegian analyst said there were two empires in Europe, the Soviet empire and the American empire. He said the difference was that the American empire was an empire by invitation, and that meant that when France decided to leave NATO’s integrated structures, we more or less shrugged. Whereas, in the Soviet empire, when the Hungarians tried to liberalize in ’56 or the Czechs in ’68, the Soviets had to send in troops. So that’s the difference is we had soft power and the Soviets didn’t.  

Ralph Ranalli: You’ve had a lot of experience both inside government and in academia. You were the dean of the Kennedy School. You were an assistant secretary of defense, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, deputy undersecretary of state. When along the line did you come up with this notion, this definition of soft power, and what was the inspiration? Was it a particular program or a moment in history? What was that moment of inspiration where it clicked that this concept was something that needed to be defined?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, in the late 1980s there was a widespread view that the United States was in decline. Paul Kennedy, the great British historian, wrote a book called “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers,” which was on the New York Times bestseller list. He saw the United States going the direction of Philip II’s Spain or Edwardian England or something. And I thought that was wrong. And so I set out to write a book as to why it was wrong, and I totaled up all of the American military power and all the economic power and said: there’s still something missing, which is the ability that we have to get others to do what we want through attraction.

And I then wrestled with how do you make that a precise concept? And, you know, sitting at my kitchen table, scribbling notes and so forth, I decided, well, I’ll use this term “soft power.” And I thought of it as an analytical term, a third dimension of power behavior. One of the great surprises of my life was to hear it coming out of the mouth of Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, in 2007. Well, that’s a long way from my kitchen table.  

Ralph Ranalli: That’s a way to know you’ve arrived...  

Joeseph Nye: Yeah.  

Ralph Ranalli: ...defining a geopolitical concept. Another thing you’ve said about soft power is that it has a tendency to be cyclical. And that there have been mistakes, historical mistakes, in the relatively recent past that have caused the US to lose its soft power. Things like Vietnam, the Iraq War. What do those conflicts, those down moments, have in common that resulted in this erosion of soft power?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, in Vietnam, there was a certain amount of unilateralism on our part and inadequate attention to the costs that were involved internationally, as well as domestically. And as the war became more and more unpopular, people were marching in the streets opposing American government policy. And something similar in the Iraq War. It’s interesting if you compare George H.W. Bush and his Iraq War, the first one, and George W. Bush.

George H.W. Bush or Bush 41, as we sometimes call him, first of all got a UN resolution supporting the military action. Second, he got support of the Arab League, and he also made sure to include Arab armies, though he didn’t need them at all militarily. So he had a legitimacy which made that war popular. George W. Bush, Bush 43, wasn’t able to get a UN resolution, wasn’t able to get regional support. Indeed wasn’t able to get broad support among allies in NATO. And that led to a sense that the American war in Iraq, the second one, was illegitimate. In terms of hard power, it took us only a few months to destroy Saddam Hussein’s military capacity. But in terms of soft power that we needed to be able to govern Iraq, after we had occupied it, we basically lacked it and that was expensive for us.  

Ralph Ranalli: So you’ve said that we seem to be entering another down period for soft power that began in the first Trump administration and with Trump’s catchphrase of “America first.” I suppose America first, by definition defeats the whole notion of trying to get someone else to want what you want, because it’s hard to imagine another country wanting America’s interests to be first before their own. What have you seen in the Trump years that makes you convinced that this is going to be another down period for soft power?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, in Trump’s first administration, America first, which implied everybody else second—they realized that that was a difficult slogan. And people like H.R. McMaster, the national securities advisor, would say things like: “America first doesn’t mean America alone.” But there’s much less subtlety in Trump’s second administration. I mean, when you come into office and the first things you say are that you’re going to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, no matter what. Or you say that we’re going to retake the Panama Canal, which reawakens all of the Latin American suspicions about American imperialism. Or you abolish AID, which is an agency which makes Americans look more benign through its assistance. Basically, these suggest that you’re not even thinking about America first, you’re thinking about America alone.  

And that makes it expensive for us. I mean, there’s resistance to that. So I think we’re in another downturn. If you think of this as cycles, we ran an up cycle in the fifties and a down cycle in the late sixties ’cause of Vietnam. And then after Carter’s human rights and Reagan’s more optimistic view, we’re on an up cycle again. Then Bush’s—second Bush’s—invasion of Iraq puts it into a down cycle, and the election of Obama puts it into a upcycle again. So looking back historically, we’ve had ups and downs. The polls, public opinion polls, show it goes up somewhat under Biden after being down under Trump one. But I suspect that if we had this interview a year from now, we’d be saying, this is a down cycle.

Ralph Ranalli: Speaking of history and going back, maybe even further than the history you were just talking about, have we seen a hard power president like Trump before? Are there any analogs in American history for the approach he’s taking? And by we, I mean Americans throughout the years, not you and me, even though we have some mileage behind us, both of us. Or perhaps are there hard power eras in American history that you would compare to how things are playing out right now?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, every president has to use hard power. It’s the question of whether you combine hard and soft power so that they reinforce each other—and what I call smart power, that’s the secret sauce. If you look at Richard Nixon, he placed a lot of emphasis on hard power, but he also had a sense of the role of soft power. If you think back to Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, he made his name and his reputation as a general commander of allied military forces in Europe. But he placed a great deal of emphasis on soft power as well. And he said, you know, “You can beat people over the head,” he said, “but that’s not gonna be effective. You gotta get ’em to want to follow you.”

So we’ve had presidents who were skilled at hard power, but they’ve usually had the sense to combine it with soft power. What I don’t see in President Trump, particularly in the second vintage, is any sensitivity to the usefulness of combining soft and hard powers. Another way of putting it is if you use a little honey, you can economize on carrots and sticks.  

Ralph Ranalli: Speaking of honey, we’ve seen, and you mentioned basically the elimination of USAID, which ran food programs, medicine, other humanitarian assistance programs, things that are really hard to be against. And it made me think of a theory, and I wanted you to give me your sense of whether you think this is true. Can you make an argument that the more altruistic a soft power program is, the more effective it is?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, I think if the altruism is appreciated, that’s true. I mean, imagine that you gave vast amounts of aid, and the sacks of grain didn’t say “A gift of the American people,” but you just had cargo ships come in and unload the grain in bulk, and nobody knew where the cargo ships came from. Well, that’s a humanitarian effort, but not going to generate a lot of soft power. So obviously, messaging and advertising plays a role as well. But the alternative or the converse of that is if you’re saying that you’re providing humanitarian assistance and it doesn’t work, or it’s an inch deep so that it doesn’t really go very far, then you become accused of hypocrisy and that doesn’t generate soft power either. So it’s not enough just to put your logo on the grain sack. You have to also deliver the grain.  

Ralph Ranalli: Were there USAID programs that you think you could level legitimate criticisms at?

Joeseph Nye: Oh yeah. I mean, aid like any large bureaucracy has large areas of inefficiency, and some of the infrastructure programs, some of the efforts to generate economic growth, were not terribly well conceived. One can make a criticism of aid that’s legitimate. There have been academics who’ve have written sensible, critical arguments about aid not being helpful. They tend to focus more on the economic development aspects rather than the humanitarian aspects.  

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. I think you’d also written something about how humanitarian assistance programs tend to be more effective than infrastructure programs, like say, China’s Silk Road program. Why is that?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, the Chinese Silk Road program, which is a massive aid program focused very heavily on infrastructure, is often accompanied by high interest rates, onerous terms, and so forth. So, if it’s true that they expend a lot of money, but they also impose conditions which lead to popular reactions, which are not attraction. So it’s not enough just to have the money in the pipeline. It’s under the conditions which you impose it.  

But Chinese also have a problem in terms of their soft power, which is that they have some basic difficulties. I wrote a memoir, which I published last year called “A Life in the American Century.” And I describe in that an invitation I had from the Chinese foreign minister to have dinner. And I thought it was a big dinner. It was one-on-one. He wanted to ask me, how do we increase China’s soft power? And I said the first thing you have to do is solve these territorial disputes with your neighbors. It doesn’t do you any good to create a Confucius Institute in New Delhi if Chinese soldiers are killing Indian soldiers on the border. And the other thing you have to do is loosen this insistence on tight party control on all aspects of civil society. So that when you have a genius like Ai Weiwei, he winds up in jail or in exile. And I think those are limits on Chinese soft power and all the money in the Belt and Road initiative is not going to resolve those. They’re deeper-rooted problems than just the amount of money being provided.  

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, because they go to trust, right?

Joeseph Nye: Yeah.

Ralph Ranalli: If you’re exhibiting untrustworthiness in a couple of other areas of your geopolitical relations, it’s hard to say, “Oh, well you should really trust us in this area here.” But if the US is retreating from projecting its soft power, can, for example, China step in and even with its problems, extend its soft power? Or could it be the EU that steps into this void and projects more soft power? How do you see the void being created by the US withdrawal from the notion of soft power being filled?  

Joeseph Nye: Well, the fact that China has problems with its soft power, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any soft power. It has quite a lot. And it can do a lot to fill the gap that the Americans leave. If you’re looking at the current example of the earthquake and its terrible aftermath in Myanmar, USAID has been so badly dismantled that it has almost no presence. China was in there immediately with major assistance, humanitarian assistance. That means that China filled that gap, and the Americans left the gap to be filled.

Ralph Ranalli: Turning to domestic politics for a little bit. I think it’s almost a paradox of soft power and foreign aid programs in that it’s their altruistic nature that makes them effective overseas, but it makes them vulnerable politically, domestically, if you have a President Trump and a Republican party who are in power, and they have a tendency to be highly transactional. I think that’s not an unfair way to characterize them. There’s no transaction there. It is just planting a tree that you’ll never see grow to full height. Right? How do you make the case in that environment? How do you make a case for soft power, when its effectiveness is counterintuitive in the way it is?

Joeseph Nye: Well, if you look at the programs that we have, as you mentioned earlier, the ones that are easier to sell to the American public are the humanitarian ones. I mean, there is—and public opinion polls show this—that there is an element of American public opinion that really does want to help other people.

Ralph Ranalli: We want to be the good guy.  

Joeseph Nye: Yeah. And we’re doing this because we think we should, and that gives you a basis for support for a soft power policy that’s based on humanitarianism. The harder sell becomes when you are trying to support budgetary problems in a country which is not doing a very good job of economic management. And then some reporter looks at this, or the World Bank looks at it, and says, “This money was wasted.” And then that leaves a major vulnerability in terms of public opinion for the critics to fill. So a lot depends on the nature of the programs, and also on the way they’re presented, and also the particular public opinion that that is brought to bear on it.

So, it’s interesting that USAID was a tiny part of the federal budget. I guess 50 billion dollars. And compared to the defense budget of over $850 billion, it’s not very much.

Ralph Ranalli: Right.

Joeseph Nye: It became unpopular as a giveaway to foreigners. But even after the Trump administration cut back on it there was still popularity for the humanitarian dimensions of it.

Ralph Ranalli: So, again talking about the notion of aid and its upsides and downsides, you’ve said that the flip side of aid—when it can become non-constructive—is when it becomes a substitute for local institutions as opposed to a builder or a facilitator of local institutions. Can you give us an example of a failure in that vein?  

Joeseph Nye: if you look at Egypt, which has gotten a good deal of American aid. In fact, it came about after the wars in the seventies and not all the aid was for economic development, some good part of it was for military purposes. And the motivation was to keep the peace in the region. But Egypt didn’t do a very good job of turning the economic aid it got into economic development. It required a number of bailouts because of its problems of fiscal irresponsibility. And serious economists who have looked back at cases like that have said it’s not clear that aid helped. And indeed, there’s some economists who say that it may have hurt, because it got them off the hook from making the reforms they needed to make. So, there is a case to be made against some aspects of aid, but the defenders of aid would say, well, that means you improve it, or you redirect it, as opposed to just abolishing it.  

Ralph Ranalli: So we’ve talked about soft power in terms of what government actors do to project it and create it. But it’s not all about the actions of government. You’ve said it’s about a society’s culture. It’s about a society’s values in addition to its policies. And one source is the corporate world. Corporations can actually project a country’s soft power. Although it seems to be a little bit of a paradox because Trump’s gotten a lot of support from corporations. But you would think that corporations would be the ones to understand the concept of return on investment. Can you talk a little bit about the role of first corporations, but also other non-government actors...

Joeseph Nye: Yeah.  

Ralph Ranalli: …that can be involved in soft power?

Joeseph Nye: Well, every, every corporation has to be attending to its soft power, because its brand—attracting purchasers or buyers—is crucial to its profitability. So companies spend a lot of time thinking about brand management, which is basically soft power. And I think the classic case of this is Coca-Cola. I mean, what symbolizes America around the world? Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is happy to have that, because it sells Cokes. So corporations have an interest in projecting their soft power.

But I think the larger point you were suggesting is that a lot of a country’s soft power, or attraction, comes from its civil society, not from government actions. To go back to the example of Vietnam, while people were marching through the streets protesting the American government actions in Vietnam, they were singing Martin Luther King’s “We Shall Overcome,” not the communist “Internationale.” And, at the same time the people in the period of the Iraq War were having mass protests against Bush’s war, they still wanted to come to Harvard or watch Hollywood movies. So in that sense, fortunately for us, our civil society has been able to produce a great deal of soft power. And that includes our ability to be self-critical. Notice the fact that we have an independent press, and that we have institutions that can take issue with the government, adds to our soft power.  

Ralph Ranalli: So we try to be solutions oriented here at PolicyCast, and we usually ask for recommendations for policymakers. In this case, I think it might be more interesting and might be more helpful to ask you for your recommendations about what non-government actors can do—for anyone from corporations to NGOs to citizens groups—things that normal, just everyday folk could have a shot at getting involved in. If people who are in those groups and in those organizations, are interested in keeping America’s values and its culture projected outward in a positive way that contributes to America still having some soft power in the world, what would your recommendations be in terms of what course they should pursue?    

Joeseph Nye: Well, I tend to be optimistic about the long run because I think there’s still a lot of resilience in American civil society and there’s no one sector, it’s many sectors. Just to start where we are now at universities, educating foreign students is a great source of soft power. That doesn’t mean they’re all converted to being little Americans, but it does mean they have a better understanding of the United States when they go home.  

Or another example would be if you look at American foundations. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes a major effort on vaccinations in Africa that is attractive. Or look at the role of the entertainment industry. I mean, I’ve mentioned the Hollywood movies—some of which are attractive, some of which are repulsive to people in different countries—but they’re available and accessible and sometimes they have unintended positive effects.  

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. Cultural exportation is a double-edged sword.

Joeseph Nye: Yes. But the same thing with the music industry and popular musical groups appearing in concerts overseas. It’d be interesting to have some pollsters measure the soft power of Taylor Swift at some point. So it’s not any one aspect.  

And as I mentioned earlier, it’s also the way American civil groups conduct themselves at home. The fact that people can stand up and criticize the government, and that that will be published by a free press- that attracts people abroad to American values. So I tend to be optimistic over the long run about American soft power because I think there’s a lot of resilience in our society of that nature, even though I tend to be somewhat skeptical or pessimistic about government policies over the short run.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. It was interesting because you mentioned educating foreign students. We’re having some issues right now with immigration enforcement that I think a reasonable person could say is likely to make the United States a less attractive place for foreign students. But on this podcast, we had Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Crow in, and that was one of the things he said should be a priority for Europe, which is bringing foreign students in, and educating them, but then sending them back to their own...

Joeseph Nye: Mm-hmm.

Ralph Ranalli: ...countries. And it was in the context of Europe extending its soft power and begin taking on a leadership role that perhaps the US is vacating. So I think that shows the difference between the short term. But I like your optimistic take on the long term, so I think I’m going to adopt that as my own.

Joeseph Nye: Well, this memoir I mentioned, I said I end it with a faint ray of guarded optimism.  

Ralph Ranalli: Well, Joe, that’s the one to end on. Thank you so much for being here. It’s an honor to talk about soft power with the source, and this has been a great conversation and I really appreciate it.

Joeseph Nye: Well, I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you’d like to read Joe Nye’s book, “A Life in the American Century,” please visit the page for this episode on the Harvard Kennedy School website and follow the link. And please join us for our next episode, when I’ll be joined by ����vlog���� Senior Fellow and former Commodities Futures Trading Commission chairman Tim Massad and Harvard Law School Professor Howell Jackson, for a fascinating discussion about how digital assets—better known to many as cryptocurrencies—could soon go from a fringe speculative oddity to part of the mainstream world financial system, and what that could mean for you. If you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app, and while you’re there, follow us so you don’t miss any of our important upcoming episodes. So, until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.