Joseph S. Nye, Jr.: American Foreign Policy After Iraq
[Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a university distinguished-service professor at Harvard. His recent books include The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford University Press, 2002), and Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004).]
What comes after Iraq? If President Bush's current surge of troops fails to produce "victory," what lessons will the United States draw for its future foreign policy? Will it turn inward as it did after the defeat in Vietnam three decades ago? Will it turn away from a values-oriented foreign policy of promoting democracy to a narrow realist view of its interests? Even while discussion in Washington is fixated on current events in Iraq, four books have begun to draw lessons for the next stage. All four agree on condemning the Iraq War, but their recommendations then diverge.
Academics and pundits have often been mistaken about America's position in the world. For example, two decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline, suffering from "imperial overstretch." A decade later, with the end of the cold war, the new conventional wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Some neoconservative pundits drew the conclusion that the United States was so powerful that it could decide what it thought was right, and others would have no choice but to follow. Charles Krauthammer celebrated this view as "the new unilateralism," and it heavily influenced the Bush administration even before the shock of the attacks on September 11, 2001, produced a new "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war and coercive democratization.
That new unilateralism was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to get the outcomes one wants. Whether the possession of resources will produce such outcomes depends upon the context. For example, a large modern tank army is a power resource if a war is fought in a desert, but not if it is fought in a swamp — as the Americans discovered in Vietnam. In the past, it was assumed that military power dominated most issues, but in today's world, the contexts of power differ greatly on military, economic, and transnational issues. Those include some of the greatest challenges we face today, among them climate change, pandemics, and trans-national terrorism. The old academic distinction between realists and liberal institutionalists needs to give way to a new synthesis that might be termed liberal realism.
The only way to grapple with these new problems is through cooperation with others, and that requires smart power — a strategy that combines the soft power of attraction with the hard power of coercion. For example, American and British intelligence agencies report that our use of hard power without sufficient attention to soft power has increased rather than reduced the number of Islamist terrorists over the past five years. The soft power of attraction will not win over the hard-core terrorists, but it is essential in winning the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims without whose support success will be impossible in the long term. Yet all the polling evidence suggests that American soft power has declined dramatically in the Muslim world. There is no simple military solution that will produce the outcomes we want. The nature of these transnational problems means that the United States does not have the luxury of turning inward, no matter what the outcome in Iraq. These are not problems that stop at the water's edge....
[HNN Editor: In this long article Nye critiques the arguments made by Chalmers Johnson and others concerning the threats to American power.]
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
What comes after Iraq? If President Bush's current surge of troops fails to produce "victory," what lessons will the United States draw for its future foreign policy? Will it turn inward as it did after the defeat in Vietnam three decades ago? Will it turn away from a values-oriented foreign policy of promoting democracy to a narrow realist view of its interests? Even while discussion in Washington is fixated on current events in Iraq, four books have begun to draw lessons for the next stage. All four agree on condemning the Iraq War, but their recommendations then diverge.
Academics and pundits have often been mistaken about America's position in the world. For example, two decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline, suffering from "imperial overstretch." A decade later, with the end of the cold war, the new conventional wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Some neoconservative pundits drew the conclusion that the United States was so powerful that it could decide what it thought was right, and others would have no choice but to follow. Charles Krauthammer celebrated this view as "the new unilateralism," and it heavily influenced the Bush administration even before the shock of the attacks on September 11, 2001, produced a new "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war and coercive democratization.
That new unilateralism was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to get the outcomes one wants. Whether the possession of resources will produce such outcomes depends upon the context. For example, a large modern tank army is a power resource if a war is fought in a desert, but not if it is fought in a swamp — as the Americans discovered in Vietnam. In the past, it was assumed that military power dominated most issues, but in today's world, the contexts of power differ greatly on military, economic, and transnational issues. Those include some of the greatest challenges we face today, among them climate change, pandemics, and trans-national terrorism. The old academic distinction between realists and liberal institutionalists needs to give way to a new synthesis that might be termed liberal realism.
The only way to grapple with these new problems is through cooperation with others, and that requires smart power — a strategy that combines the soft power of attraction with the hard power of coercion. For example, American and British intelligence agencies report that our use of hard power without sufficient attention to soft power has increased rather than reduced the number of Islamist terrorists over the past five years. The soft power of attraction will not win over the hard-core terrorists, but it is essential in winning the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims without whose support success will be impossible in the long term. Yet all the polling evidence suggests that American soft power has declined dramatically in the Muslim world. There is no simple military solution that will produce the outcomes we want. The nature of these transnational problems means that the United States does not have the luxury of turning inward, no matter what the outcome in Iraq. These are not problems that stop at the water's edge....
[HNN Editor: In this long article Nye critiques the arguments made by Chalmers Johnson and others concerning the threats to American power.]