Home » Opinion » Foreign Views
The end of US soft power as fear overtakes hope?
Print Edition
TRADITIONALLY, countries’ global political power was assessed according to military might: the one with the largest army had the most power. But that logic was not always reflected in reality.
The US lost the Vietnam War; the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan. In its first few years in Iraq, the US discovered the wisdom of Talleyrand’s adage that the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it.
Enter soft power. The term was coined by Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye in 1990 to account for the influence a country wields, beyond its military (or “hard”) power. As Nye put it, a country’s power rests on its “ability to alter the behavior of others” to get what it wants, whether through coercion (sticks), payments (carrots), or attraction (soft power).
The US has been a haven for immigrants, and the land of the American Dream — the promise that anyone can be anything if they work hard enough.
It is also the home of Boeing and Intel, Google and Apple, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonald’s and Starbucks — in short, some of the most recognizable and influential brands and industries in the world.
The attractiveness of these assets, and of the American lifestyle that they represent, is that they enable the US to persuade, rather than compel, others to adopt its agenda. In this sense, soft power acts as both an alternative and a complement to hard power.
But there are limits to a country’s soft power — even America’s. In the wake of the US terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was an outpouring of goodwill for the US. Then the country launched its War on Terror, in which it relied heavily on hard power.
The instruments of that power — the Iraq invasion, indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” and other suspects at Guantánamo Bay prison, the Abu Ghraib scandal, revelations of CIA “black sites,” the killing of Iraqi civilians by private US security contractors — were not received well by the global public.
America’s soft-power assets were inadequate to compensate for the deficiencies of its hard-power approach.
Fans of American culture were not prepared to overlook the excesses of Guantánamo. Using Microsoft Windows does not predispose you to accept torture by the country that produces it. America’s soft power declined sharply, demonstrating that how a country exercises its hard power affects how much soft power it can evoke.
Nye has argued that, in an information age, soft power often accrues to the country with the better story.
The US has long been the “land of the better story.” It has a thirst for new ideas and a knack for innovation. But the story of America told in this election has deeply diminished the soft power the US evokes. Fear trumped hope.
Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is currently Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and an MP for the Indian National Congress. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2016.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
