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Joseph Nye: Father of Soft Power

By Shlomo Maital

Joseph S. Nye Jr.

          Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joseph S. Nye Jr. passed away.  He was 88.

           Often, as a retired professor, I feel rather frustrated that Ivory Tower research and ideas fall on deaf ears.   Some of this research deserves oblivion.  But some could truly make a different.

           Joseph Nye’s work is an example of the latter.  He is the developer of the ‘soft power theory’ and according to the New York Times, an “architect of modern international relations”. 

              This is how Wikipedia defines soft power: 

           In politics (and particularly in international politics), soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power). It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change. In 2012, Joseph Nye of Harvard University explained that with soft power, “the best propaganda is not propaganda”, further explaining that during the Information Age, “credibility is the scarcest resource”.

                The VDEM website asserts that today, for the first time in many decades, there are more autocratic regimes in the world than democratic ones.  Autocrats believe in hard power – force, threat, coercion.  Liberal democratic nations once believed in Nye’s soft power —   collaboration, persuasion, dialog.    Trump is in the hard power camp.   The result is so far rather disastrous. 

           My own country disastrously, as NYT columnist Tom Friedman painfully explains, is in the hard power camp.  So far, the results are terrible.

               Joseph Nye’s quiet powerful voice is a strong counter-example to all those who deny that ideas have value or impact.  The US did mostly practice soft power, for 80 years, after World War II, stumbling badly in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan when hard power hawks temporarily prevailed. 

                 If there is any lesson from America’s foreign policy from 1945 to 2025, 80 years, it is the failure of hard power and the supremacy of soft.  This is a lesson Israel seems hellbent on learning …at great cost.