Smart Power

Reprint: R0811B

The next U.S. administration will face enormous challenges to world peace, the global economy, and the environment. Exercising military and economic muscle alone will not bring peace and prosperity.

According to Nye, a former U.S. government official and a former dean at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the next president must be able to combine hard power, characterized by coercion, and what Nye calls “soft” power, which relies instead on attraction. The result is smart power, a tool great leaders use to mobilize people around agendas that look beyond current problems.

Hard power is often necessary, Nye explains. In the 1990s, when the Taliban was providing refuge to Al Qaeda, President Clinton tried—and failed—to solve the problem diplomatically instead of destroying terrorist havens in Afghanistan. In other situations, however, soft power is more effective, though it has been too often overlooked. In Iraq, Nye argues, the use of soft power could draw young people toward something other than terrorism. “I think that there’s an awakening to the need for soft power as people look at the crisis in the Middle East and begin to realize that hard power is not sufficient to resolve it,” he says.

Solving today’s global problems will require smart power—a judicious blend of the other two powers. While there are notable examples of men who have used smart power—Teddy Roosevelt, for instance—it’s much more difficult for women to lead with smart power, especially in the United States, where women feel pressure to prove that they are not “soft.”

Only by exercising smart power, Nye says, can the next president of the United States set a new tone for U.S. foreign policy in this century.