Prof, Joseph Nye was on BBC Newsnight earlier, he made some pretty good interesting points.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Mar29.html

Dollop of Deeper American Values
Why 'Soft Power' Matters in Fighting Terrorism
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004; Page A19


Last year's Iraq war was a dazzling display of America's hard military power. It removed a tyrant, but did little to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism. At the same time, it was costly in terms of our "soft power" to attract others.



Long before the recent bombings in Madrid, polls showed a dramatic decline in the popularity of the United States, even in countries such as Britain, Italy and Spain, whose governments had supported us. And America's standing plummeted in Islamic countries from Morocco to Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation, three-quarters of the public said they had a favorable opinion of the United States in 2000, but within three years that had shrunk to 15 percent. Yet we will need the help of such countries in the long term to track the flow of terrorists, tainted money and dangerous weapons.

After the war in Iraq, I spoke about soft power to a conference co-sponsored by the Army. One of the speakers was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. When someone in the audience asked Rumsfeld for his opinion on soft power, he replied, "I don't know what it means." That is part of our problem. Some of our leaders don't understand the importance of soft power in our post-Sept. 11 world.

Soft power is the ability to get what we want by attracting others rather than by threatening or paying them. It is based on our culture, our political ideals and our policies. Historically, Americans have been good at wielding soft power. Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square with a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many of our values, such as democracy, human rights and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive. But attraction can turn to repulsion when we are arrogant and destroy the real message of our deeper values.

The United States is more powerful than any country since the Roman Empire, but like Rome, it is neither invincible nor invulnerable. Rome did not succumb to the rise of another empire but to the onslaught of waves of barbarians. Modern high-tech terrorists are the new barbarians.

As we wend our way deeper into the struggle with terrorism, we are discovering that there are many things beyond U.S. control. The United States alone cannot hunt down every suspected al Qaeda leader hiding in remote regions of the globe. Nor can we launch a war whenever we wish without alienating other countries and losing the cooperation we need to win the peace.

The war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations -- Islam vs. the West -- but rather a civil war within Islamic civilization between extremists who use violence to enforce their vision and a moderate majority who want such things as jobs, education, health care and dignity as they practice their faith. We will not win unless the moderates win. Our soft power will never attract Osama bin Laden and the extremists. We need hard power to deal with them. But soft power will play a crucial role in our ability to attract the moderates and deny the extremists new recruits.

With the end of the Cold War, Americans became more interested in budget savings than in investing in our soft power. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a bipartisan advisory group reported that the United States spent a paltry $150 million on public diplomacy in Muslim countries in 2002. The combined cost of the State Department's public diplomacy programs and all our international broadcasting that year was just over a billion dollars -- about the same amount spent by Britain or France, countries one-fifth our size. It is also equal to one-quarter of 1 percent of the military budget. No one would suggest that we spend as much to launch ideas as to launch bombs, but it does seem odd that we spend 400 times as much on hard power as on soft power. If we spent just 1 percent of the military budget, it would mean quadrupling our spending on soft power.

If the United States is going to win the struggle against terrorism, our leaders are going to have to learn to better combine soft and hard power into "smart power," as we did in the Cold War. We have done it before; we can do it again.

The writer is dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics." He will discuss this article at noon today on www.washingtonpost.com.

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I have something to hide.

There is some merit in this argument for "soft power", but I'm not convinced. Perhaps "soft power" can be used in some isolated instances. Perhaps Libya would be a good place to experiment with it now that Ghadfi is turning over his WMD. Make things nice for the Moslem moderates in that country and continue to use "hard power" in Afghanistan until the Taliban are destroyed and in Iraq until the insurgents there are destroyed. "Hard power" is necessary when it comes to our self defense. See my views on "Female GI's Perspective" that I posted earlier. It's a cold, cruel world and we have to be that way to survive. No appeasement.

By smart power do you think that he means extending the PA or other perceived 'rights'?

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"Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."

-Laurence J. Peter

What sort of power (hard or soft) do you think we should use in dealing with North Korea? And if we make the wrong choice, what sort of power would we use to fend off the Chinese? Let's say they saved the nukes and struck at our economy (massive selling of treasuries, for instance), to teach us that missiles aren't the only weapons we're vulnerable to.

Except for the Chinese, we could probably kick anyone's can in less than a month. To deny that is silly. But we're vulnerable on many fronts, because we've allowed ourselves to be weak in certain areas. We're being MADE weak by those who do not/cannot think ahead.

The nations of the world seem to be moving to the left. For us to become a pariah, proving our toughness by using deadly force against the guilty AND the innocent, could very well spell our eventual doom. PoliSci was never my thing. But I do believe that a successful (political) strategy is one that gets you what you want in the LONG term.

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"Tweeter was a Boyscout before she went to Vietnam and found out the hard way... nobody gives a d@mn."

I think you guys are a little off in your conception of "Soft Power". This was a concept that Prof. Nye outlined several years ago, and is taught in almost any college course that deals with geopolitics or American foreign policy.

Basically, "Soft Power" is the influence that we have over the rest of the world because of our culture. Our movies, our music, and our products spread through out the globe, and with it comes a foothold.

When you speak about "using" soft power, it really doesn't work that way.

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Any man who can render himself unconscious with a pretzel isn't smart enough to lead the free world.