The Future of Power-POWER SHIFTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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In Digital Age, 'Future Of Power' Must Be Smart

February 1, 2011

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Before Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the number of battleships was the primary measure of a nation's sea power. After World War II, no nation ever built another one again.

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February 1, 2011

Joseph Nye coined the term "soft power," but he says that strategy alone is no longer enough. In The Future of Power, Nye explains that in the global information age, superpowers need a "smart power" strategy — the hard power of coercion and payment, plus the soft power of persuasion and attraction. Advances in technology have helped smaller actors compete on a global level, leading to a diffusion of power.

China, Nye tells NPR's Neal Conan, is an example of a country that recently turned to soft power to augment its position on the world stage. In 2007, says Nye, Chinese President Hu Jintao advocated for an investment in soft power, which "they did very well, with the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Shanghai Exposition this year," says Nye.

But they "undercut all this soft power they built up," he says, when they locked up dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. "What you do domestically can do an awful lot to undercut or reinforce what you're doing — or trying to do — internationally."

Nonstate actors figure prominently in the equation. Though we typically think of them as malicious — terrorist groups like al-Qaida — there are benign forces as well. Organizations such as Oxfam and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation work outside the government to fight hunger and cure diseases.

"Governments are still the most important actor on the world stage, but the stage is just a lot more crowded, because technology has reduced the barriers to entry," says Nye. For example, "Twenty or 30 years ago, if you wanted to have an international phone call that links all parts of the world, you could do it technologically, but it was expensive." But now all it takes is an Internet connection.

Gone are the days when one or two superpowers defined world affairs. The stage is now crowded by emerging nations like China and India.

"If you look at the world in 1800, you'll notice that more than half of the world's population was in Asia, and more than half of the world's product was made in Asia," says Nye. But in the 1900s, the picture looked very different — half of the population still lived in Asia, but because of the Industrial Revolution, production dropped to 20 percent in the East.

Now, in the 21st century, Asia is returning to a balance of half the population and half the production. "That's sometimes called the rise of Asia. It's actually the return of Asia, and that's a natural process," says Nye.

And it's not a foregone conclusion that the growth of China and the relative decline of the U.S. will lead to conflict, says Nye. Those transitions "often lead to disaster," Nye allows. For example, "if you look at the origins of World War I, many people would say it was caused by the rise in the power of Germany, and the fear that created in Britain."

But on the flip side, the United States' overtaking of Britain didn't lead to war. "So it's not inevitable ... I think a lot depends on how we manage this," he says.

And Nye is hopeful. He says it's not true that China is destined to "eat our lunch or overtake us militarily and economically." At least not anytime soon.

Excerpt: 'The Future Of Power'

by Joseph S. Nye Jr.

 

The Future Of Power
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Hardcover, 320 pages
PublicAffairs
List price: $27.99

In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama stated that "our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint." Similarly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. We must use what has been called 'smart power,' the full range of tools at our disposal." Earlier, in 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had called for the U.S. government to commit more money and effort to soft power tools including diplomacy, economic assistance, and communications because the military alone could not defend America's interests around the world. He pointed out that military spending then totaled more than half a trillion dollars annually compared with a State Department budget of $36 billion. In his words, "I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power." What does this mean? How will power work, and how is it changing in the twenty-first century?

To answer such questions, we need to have a better understanding of power than is typical in most current discussions. Let me give two examples, one personal and one public.

In the mid-1970s, France agreed to sell Pakistan a nuclear reprocessing plant that could extract plutonium, a material that could be used either for civilian purposes or for bombs. Concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons, the Ford administration tried to stop the plant by buying off Pakistan with high-performance aircraft, but Pakistan refused the deal. Both the Ford and Carter administrations tried to prevail upon France to cancel the sale, but the French refused on the grounds that it was a legitimate sale for civilian purposes only. Nothing seemed to work until June 1977, when I was in charge of Jimmy Carter's nonproliferation policy and was allowed to present French officials with new evidence that Pakistan was preparing a nuclear weapon. A top French official looked me in the eye and told me that if this were true, France would have to find a way to cancel the completion of the plant. Subsequently, he was as good as his word, and the plant was not completed. How did the United States accomplish this major objective? No threats were issued. No payments were made. No carrots were dangled or sticks brandished. French behavior changed because of persuasion and trust. I was there and saw it happen. This hardly fits the usual model of power that is preval‎ent in most editorials or in recent foreign policy books that do not consider persuasion a form of power because it "is essentially an intellectual or emotional process."

More recently, in August 2008, China and Russia provided sharp contrasts in the use of power. As French analyst Dominique Moisi wrote at the time, "Whereas China intends to seduce and impress the world by the number of its Olympic medals, Russia wants to impress the world by demonstrating its military superiority — China's soft power versus Russia's hard power." Some analysts concluded that the Russian invasion of Georgia proved the "irrelevance" of soft power and the dominance of hard military power. In reality, the story turned out to be more complicated for both countries in the long run.

Russia's use of hard power undercut its claims to legitimacy and sowed fear and mistrust in much of the world. European neighbors became more wary. An immediate cost was Poland's reversal of its resistance to an American antiballistic missile system. When Russia appealed for support on its Georgian policy to other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China and others withheld their support. An analysis one year later concluded that Russia's appeal to its neighbors did not sound very seductive. "Ideally, it would present an attractive model for its neighbors, politically and economically. Young generations would learn Russian because they wanted to, and the post-Soviet alliances would be clubs its neighbors are lining up to join." As Russian analyst Alexei Mukhin summed the matter up, "Love bought with money will not last long. That is purchased love. It is not very reliable."

In contrast, China ended August with its soft power enhanced by its successful staging of the Olympic Games. In October 2007, President Hu Jintao declared China's intent to increase its soft power, and the Olympics were an important part of that strategy. With the establishment of several hundred Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese culture around the world, increased international broadcasting, attraction of foreign students to its universities, and softer diplomacy toward its neighbors in Southeast Asia, China made major investments in soft power. Opinion polls showed an increase in its international reputation. By accompanying its growth in hard power with an attractive soft power narrative, China was trying to use smart power to convey the idea of its "peaceful rise" and thus head off a countervailing balance of power.

From The Future Of Power by Joseph S. Nye Jr. Copyright 2011. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/01/133406857/in-digital-age-future-of-power-must-be-smart

POWER SHIFTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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By Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

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The Montréal Review, May 2012

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"The Future of Power" by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (PublicAffairs; Reprint edition, 2011) 

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"Joseph Nye has crystallized decades of disciplined, pragmatic, and influential thinking about what power is and how it should be used. With his trademark combination of lucidity and persuasiveness, Nye has provided an antidote to apprehensions about newly powerful nations and fears about American decline."

 -Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution

"If you are searching for a brilliant and original analysis of cyberpower, read chapter 5 of Joseph S. Nye's The Future of Power.  If you are looking for the best available comprehensive analysis of power in world politics, read the whole book."   

-Robert O. Keohane, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

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As authoritarian regimes like Syria struggle with Twitter and Al Jazeera inflamed insurrections; Iran tries to cope with the cyber sabotage of its nuclear enrichment program; Russia witnesses demonstrations against Vladimir Putin; and China creates a great firewall to filter the internet, it is clear that smart policy in an information age requires a better understanding of power. America is wrestling with the implications of revolutions in the Middle East, as well as the rise of China in Asia, and the decline of Russia. We all need a better understanding of what it means to have power in world politics, and how that is shifting. Traditionally, the mark of a great power was the ability to prevail in war. But in an information age, success depends not just on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins.

That is the argument of my new book The Future of Power. Two types of power shifts are occurring in this century - power transition and power diffusion. Power transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical event, but power diffusion is a more novel process. The problem for all states in today's global information age is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful states. In the words of Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "the proliferation of information is as much a cause of non-polarity as is the proliferation of weaponry." The problem for all states in today's global information age -- democratic or authoritarian -- is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful governments.

Information revolutions are not new in history, but the current revolution is based on rapid technological advances that have dramatically decreased the cost of creating, finding and transmitting information. Computing power doubled every 18 months for 30 years, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century it cost one-thousandth of what it did in the early 1970s. If the price of automobiles had fallen as quickly as the price of semiconductors, a car would cost five dollars. The key characteristic of this current information revolution is not just the speed of communications, but the enormous reduction in the cost of transmitting information that has reduced the barriers to entry.

What this means is that world politics will not be the sole province of governments. Individuals and private organizations, ranging from hackers to corporations to NGOs to terrorists to spontaneous societal movements are all empowered to play direct roles in world politics. The spread of information means that power will be more widely distributed and informal networks will undercut the monopoly of traditional bureaucracy. The speed of Internet time means all governments have less control of their agendas. Political leaders enjoy fewer degrees of freedom before they must respond to events, and then must communicate not only with other governments but with civil societies as well - witness the difficulties of the Obama Administration trying to fine tune its responses in the Middle East.

It might seem that the tasks of authoritarian governments are easier, but this is an illusion. Syria has learned to use Facebook to track and attack dissidents, but there is still plenty of outside information reaching people in Homs and Hama through cable tv as well as the internet. Even the great firewall of China leaks. Yes, the government can censor and arrest people, but at a cost. As the dissident artist Ai Wei Wei recently said, if China wants to be in the business of inventing the i-phone rather than just providing labor in its assembly, it will have to realize that censorship inhibits the creativity that is necessary for the next stages of China's development.

Regarding power transition, the other great historical shift, we have been misled by traditional narratives of a supposed American decline, and facile historical analogies to Britain and Rome. But Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power, and even then, it did not succumb to the rise of another state, but died a death of a thousand cuts inflicted by various barbarian tribes. Indeed for all the fashionable predictions of China, India or Brazil surpassing the United States in the next decades, the greater threats may come from modern barbarians and non-state actors. China has had remarkable and worthy economic success in the past three decades and in the years since the global economic meltdown of 2008, but that success plus a belief that the United States was in decline emboldened China to pursue an overly assertive foreign policy that resulted in worsened relations with nearly all its major neighbors over the past few years.

Today, it is far from clear how we measure a balance of power, much less how to develop successful strategies to survive in this new world. Most current projections of a shift in the global balance of power to China are based primarily on one factor - linear projections of growth in China's gross national product. They ignore the other dimensions of power that are discussed in my book, not to mention the policy difficulties of combining them into smart strategies. For example, while Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needs to invest more in its soft power, polls show that China's soft power is limited by a domestic authoritarian regime that arrests people like Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo and the blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng. In an information age, the ability to mobilize networks of others through soft power will be as important as hard power. It is true that China is growing rapidly, but the diffusion of power may be as consequential as power transitions between major states. Foreign and domestic policy become difficult to disentangle. Contrary to the current conventional wisdom about the advantages of authoritarian states, American soft power and its open society may actually give the country new power advantages in the twenty-first century.

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Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Professor and former Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a deputy under secretary of state. The author of many books, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy.

http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Future-of-Power-Joseph-Nye.php