Why ‘Soft Power’ Matters in Fighting Terrorism
June 3, 2008
A short article I saved from a few years back that gives a nice basic overview of Soft Power
A Dollop of Deeper American Values
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Washington Post, 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.
