The Idea in Brief As people realize that hard power alone can’t solve complex problems, they are starting to understand the importance of soft power. The United States makes it particularly difficult for women to combine soft and hard power in public life. Business is ahead of politics in terms of understanding the need for soft power. The United States has a great deal of soft power embodied in its culture and its values. Five hundred years ago, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that “a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred.” As the next administration in the United States prepares to face an increasingly multipolar political world—where challenges to world peace, the global economy, and the environment are enormous—that advice seems particularly relevant. Exercising the military and economic strengths of the United States will not by itself bring peace and prosperity. The president will have to make the ideas of democracy and free enterprise attractive, and present the country as an exemplar of them. According to Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, that will require a sophisticated understanding of how to combine American muscle with the tools of “soft power,” a term he coined in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. Formerly the assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs, the chair of the National Intelligence Council, and the deputy undersecretary of state for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology, Nye is the author of a dozen books, including the recently published The Powers to Lead. He believes that the biggest challenge facing the next administration is to present an agenda that looks beyond the military and political problems of today. In this edited interview with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, Nye describes soft power and distinguishes it from hard power. Great leaders, he says, know how to combine the two to exercise “smart power,” through which they generate trust and mobilize people around forward-looking agendas. If the U.S. leadership can pull that off, this century will be one in which America still has a major role to play. What are soft power and hard power, and how can you combine them? In essence, power is nothing more than the ability to affect others to get what you want, and that requires a set of tools. Some of these are tools of coercion or payment, or hard power, and some are tools of attraction, or soft power. For individuals, charisma (emotional appeal), vision, and communication are key soft-power skills; for nations, soft power is embodied in their culture, values, and legitimate policies. With the exception of the Dalai Lama and perhaps a few others, it’s hard to think of anybody who has been able to lead using soft power alone. On the other hand, we often talk about hard power while forgetting that attraction is a very powerful tool. Ignoring it is a mistake. 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. Of course, working out how to combine hard and soft power depends on understanding the context. A large part of what I call contextual intelligence comes from experience, but there’s more to it. As Mark Twain put it, a cat that sits once on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but the cat won’t sit on a cold stove, either. Using the tools of power wisely requires both experience and analysis. Can a democracy really defeat terrorism with soft power? Let me be clear: There are definitely times when you have to use hard power. Think back to the 1990s, when the Taliban government was providing refuge to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and President Bill Clinton tried to solve that problem diplomatically. He was trying to persuade the Taliban, and the approach failed. The net result was that the United States didn’t do enough to destroy the terrorist havens the Taliban had created for Al Qaeda. That’s a case when soft power did not work and actually delayed the United States from acting as it probably should have—with more hard power. So soft power can be counterproductive if it prevents you from doing what needs to be done. But if the way you use your hard power antagonizes the mainstream, you will find that the Osama bin Ladens of this world are able to recruit more people with their soft power than you are able to deter with your hard power. Today the United States is involved in a battle for the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims. Americans have to use soft power to prevent them from being recruited by terrorists. That’s why Iraq was a serious mistake. President Bush tried to produce democracy in Iraq through hard power alone, and the negative effect has set America back. Yes, coercion—hard power—is absolutely necessary for a democracy to defeat terrorism. But at times, attraction—soft power—is the more critical component. Soft power can draw young people toward something other than the terrorist alternative. You can’t do that through coercion. You say soft power and hard power are both necessary. Yet you dedicate your latest book to your wife, Molly, “who leads with soft power.” I do prefer soft power to hard power. But you have to realize that soft power is not good per se; it has to be put to good purpose. The ability to attract others has been possessed by some evil people: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, bin Laden. Jim Jones, who started Peoples Temple, used manipulative soft power to get over 900 people to commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. His followers believed that he was a guru who had the ultimate word on their salvation. As I said, soft or hard, power is simply an instrument. You can argue that soft power is slightly preferable to hard because it gives more freedom to the person who is its object. If I want to steal your money and I take out a gun and shoot you, that’s hard power—you have no choice in the matter. If I try to convince you that I’m a guru and that you should give me your bank account number, presumably you could choose to resist me. Teddy Roosevelt famously said that we must speak softly and carry a big stick. Was he talking about soft or hard power? Roosevelt was the epitome of smart power: the combination of soft and hard power in the right mix in the appropriate context. The problems facing America and the world today are going to need lots of smart power, and leaders who want to understand it could do worse than to study Teddy Roosevelt. He was acutely alert to the use of hard power—look at his fondness for the military. But he was also aware of the importance of soft power. Roosevelt’s chief motivation in negotiating crucial treaties such as the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905, which ended the war between Russia and Japan, was to make the United States more appealing. When he sent the Great White Fleet, the new American navy, on a tour around the world, he wanted both to display the country’s new military power and to advertise America as a force for good. In effect, he used a hard-power tool—the navy—as a soft-power symbol. This kind of exercise of smart power is why Teddy Roosevelt often ends up on lists of the best half dozen or so presidents in U.S. history. Do women encounter barriers when they try to use smart power in public life? Definitely. It’s much harder for a woman to exert smart power than it is for a man. If you think of classic women leaders—Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir—they all came up fighting the gender stereotype and emphasizing the Iron Lady aspect of their leadership. Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and later the head of the World Health Organization, was effective in her use of smart power. She could be tough in domestic affairs, but she used soft power for Norway internationally. Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland, and Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a former president of Latvia, also come to mind, but we haven’t seen a female leader of a major country use smart power. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a promising candidate, but she hasn’t been in office long enough for us to judge. The United States makes it particularly difficult for women to use smart power in public life, in part because of macho myths that dominate American culture and in part because of the climate of fear that followed September 11. Look at this year’s Democratic presidential primaries. In terms of political leadership, gender is still a greater obstacle than race. There are lots of ways in which the stereotypes of African-Americans work against them, but an African-American male doesn’t have to prove he’s tough. Geraldine Ferraro said this during the campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and was castigated for it, but basically she was right. A woman seeking public office still has to play against the gender stereotype that women are soft. So Hillary Clinton spent a good deal of her campaign proving that she was tough and experienced. That meant that Obama was able to be the candidate who could use soft power. He could appeal to people with a message of hope, a new beginning, a new future. I think business is ahead of politics in this respect. If you look at the literature on management, you’ll find a great emphasis on soft power—for example, on how managers can motivate and persuade people to deliver the results they need without resorting to carrots and sticks. The prevailing view in business is that networks are supplementing hierarchies and so organizations are becoming flatter. As a result, business leaders need to exert more soft power. You don’t see that at all in the literature about politics. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine, a congresswoman, and she said, “You’re absolutely right about soft power as an analytical concept, but it’s a losing term on the political horizon because no American wants to vote for somebody who is ‘soft.’” How did you learn about soft power? I learned a lot about it when I joined the State Department, in 1977. I had no experience in government and no experience in management. I was a professor, and the only person I managed was my secretary—and some people thought that was the other way around. My first assignment was to lead an interagency committee to slow the spread of materials that could produce nuclear weapons. My inclination was to try to do things myself. I quickly learned that if I did that, I would drown. I needed others, but I couldn’t give them orders because as a State Department officer I had no authority over people from departments like Defense and Energy. I had to attract people and make them want to help me. Another important lesson I learned was that government is an oral culture. It produces reams and reams of paper, but the crucial communications are oral, and they’re often short. To some extent this is because of the amount of paper—you can’t possibly keep up with all of it, so you have to fall back on the spoken word for the important things. When I was the dean of the Kennedy School, I tried to train students to give an elevator briefing—to say, in the time it takes an elevator to go from the first to the seventh floor, the two or three things your boss needs to know. Succinct, clear communication is one of the most effective tools of power. What’s your elevator pitch to the 44th president of the United States? I think the first thing is for the new president to make sure he doesn’t become hostage to George W. Bush’s in-box. Of course, he’s going to have to fix Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. But if that’s all he does, he misses the opportunity to set a new tone for U.S. foreign policy. If he’s to exercise smart power, his mix of soft and hard must be more forward looking and offer more hope. He ought to close Guantanamo and set up a joint commission to look at how we should handle trials for suspected terrorists. He may want to appoint a bipartisan group to consider practical and immediate steps for dealing with climate change. He might also want to take a trip to Asia—starting in Tokyo and then going to Seoul, Beijing, and Delhi—to demonstrate that America is aware of and particularly focused on the rise of Asia, that it’s not focused just on the problems of the Middle East. It’s striking how many of the inherited problems are Middle Eastern ones. Of course, they’ll continue to be tremendously pressing, but they shouldn’t dominate the next presidential agenda. To set a new tone for U.S. foreign policy, the next president must not become hostage to Bush’s in-box. Do you believe that the United States is in decline as a world power? No. People have been making that claim for decades. In the late 1980s, everybody thought the Americans were finished—the Cold War was over and the prevailing belief was that Japan had displaced the United States, driving it out of the world economy and so on. I thought this was wrong, and my book Bound to Lead was an effort to refute that claim. I started by looking at American military power and then at American economic power. I realized that I was missing something: the ability of Americans to attract others to their ideals and to their country. That’s what I called soft power, and it’s why I wrote then that the United States would be the dominant power of the twenty-first century. I’m a long-term optimist about the United States. There’s been a spate of books in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq that have tried to revive declinism. I don’t believe it myself. The United States is a society that rewards creativity more than many other societies. I think it also has a great deal of soft power derived from its culture and its values, even though recent policies have undercut that. But policies can be changed. The American economy still has impressive capacity, and I think the American military is not about to be surpassed. This century will certainly see what Fareed Zakaria has called “the rise of the rest.” We’re beginning to see it now. But that’s different from seeing the eclipse of the United States.
