I read a wide variety of online news sources and I’m used to seeing certain names pop up on certain sites as regular contributors. It's rare though for a name familiar to me from foreign policy sites to suddenly appear on the trendy pop culture sites, so I noticed when this opinion piece from Joseph Nye appeared in the popular Huffington Post website. Prof. Nye wrote the book on soft power and so it's no surprise that he is advocating here a mix of hard and soft power by the Obama Administration as the best means of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals:
Obama's election itself has done a great deal to restore American soft power, but he will need to follow up with policies that combine hard and soft power into a smart strategy of the sort that won the Cold War. Democracy promotion is best accomplished by soft attraction rather than hard coercion, and it takes time and patience. Here he should lead by example and remember the historical wisdom of being Reagan's “shining city on a hill.” Closing Guantanamo, while it raises tough questions about the future of some detainees, will give such a signal. As for democracy promotion, it is in our cultural genes. The United States should always encourage the gradual evolution of democracy but in a manner that accepts the reality of diversity.
Prof. Nye is suggesting that the U.S act as a responsible superpower, building and maintaining international institutions and consensual rules that provide for a free, open, and stable world order. Of course, one can argue that this has been the American project since WWII, and the real challenge will be to reverse trends which saw the U.S. undermining those very institutions and rules that it created as part of that post-war international order.
