Smart Power Blog

An Introduction to Smart Power

There's lots of talk about hard power and soft power. But not nearly enough discussion about 'smart power'

There is already a robust global discourse in policy communities and the academy on the many meanings of ‘soft power’, the term given currency in the 1980s and 1990s by Professor Joseph Nye of the KSG at Harvard. Nye distinguishes between ‘soft power’, i.e. the power to co-opt and get others to want what you want; and ‘hard power’ (the power to coerce). In common terms, it is the difference between the carrot and the stick.

Our course, there has been a parallel, long-standing tradition of debate about the uses and abuses of ‘hard power’, i.e. the power of the stick, typically done by militaries.

Curiously, little attention is ever given to the ways these two aspects of power intersect with one another to enhance or undercut their separate purposes, or to achieve the goals and purposes of an entity.

This blog will be a conversation about those intersections. If we assume rational unitary actors, (a tough assumptions these days) then hard and soft power is supposed to be exercised in tandem to advance the national interest.

What Is Smart Power?
Smart power is the exercise of hard power and soft power in complementary ways that advances the goals of an entity. Usually those entities are national governments, but other levels of government and non-governmental actors also wield both, and seek smart power to achieve their goals.

But smart power is more than just using hard and soft power to achieve your ends. If you have enough power, literally with power to spare, you can also use your resources wastefully. Your hard power activities can undercut your soft power activities, and vice versa. Then achieving goals becomes more costly than it need be; you end up wasting money, manpower, materiel, or international prestige. Smart power is the efficient as well as the effecting melding of hard and soft power to achieve one’s ends

Why Smart Power Now?
There are two reasons to hold a serious conversation about ‘smart power’ now. First, and most obviously, the failures of the war in Iraq and the efforts to combat terrorism have provoked across the political spectrum, in the United States and around the world, an intense and widespread debate about how best to balance the power to coerce and the power to persuade.
Elections, polls and street demonstrations indicate the U.S. isn't doing a particularly good job at persuading anybody these days.

Second, beyond the conjunctural provocations of Iraq and counter-terrorism, there may be a more fundamental reason to pay attention to soft power’s intersections with hard power. More and more scholars and practitioners are recognizing that we are entering a new era of social organization. Bell calls it a ‘post industrial’ society; Manuel Castells names it the ‘network society.’ Others call it the ‘digital age’. Whatever the preferred term, there is general agreement about the reality - cross border transactions of people, goods, services and ideas are increasing their speed, their scope and their depth, and a lot of this is occurring through social networks. The tremendous hierarchy that was the hallmark of industrial society, whether at General Motors or at the Pentagon, is giving way to flatter organizations where work in small groups is more and more the norm. Networks flourish, especially as democracy diffuses through once-authoritarian lands and people seek new outlets for their new-found empowerment.

In this brave new world, hard power is no longer expressed just through large standing armies or nuclear threats. Hard power gets re-organized into smaller, more flexible and nimble units, whether terrorist cells of Al Quaeda or Marine Corps platoons. Soft power zips around in cyberspace, appearing on small hand-held screens as well as large screens in movie houses, produced by teenagers and not just propagandists in centralized radio studios in central Europe. The distributed does battle with the centralized. Soft power insinuates itself into daily conversations in chat rooms and blogs. Colonels in Baghdad blog. Bloggers in Baghdad shoot soldiers. Where then is the boundary between coercion and cooptation?

There are no ready answers to these questions. It is clear however that restoring some kind of balance between diplomacy and warfighting, between listening and shouting, between hard power and soft has become a central matter of our time. Think Israel, Palestine, Iraq or the Congo. Arguably, we have seen the exercise of a lot of stupid power these days and not enough smart power.

Just as war is too important to be left to the generals in the Pentagon, maybe soft power is too important to be left to the cultural officers in the State Department. Maybe everybody needs to do a little of both. Maybe we all need to learn how to wield a lot more ‘smart power’, and admit that hard power alone, and soft power by itself, are simply inadequate in today’s topsy turvey world.

Some other questions:
- What are good historical examples of smart power, where coercion and co-optation were well joined? What are examples of bad combinations?
- Do the basic terms adequately capture the full range of activities? Do we have to redefine ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ to give meaning to ‘smart’?
- Why do the two communities that do diplomacy and do military fail to engage and talk to one another enough? Is it a cultural thing?
- To do smart power effectively, what do you need to know? What skills do you need? What are the competencies for smart power?

But hey, these are just suggestions. What do you think about smart power?

Joseph Nye is reporting live from the Davos Conference, and he shares with his readers an Asian diplomat's take on U.S. soft power:

But my strongest take-away of the day was a seasoned Asian diplomat telling me that in all his travels, he has never seen American soft power at such a low ebb. In his words, only the Israelis, Indians, and Vietnamese have a positive view of the U.S.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-nye/day-one-at-davos-and-the-_b_39536.html

This in itself is of course no surprise. It's the kind of thing we would expect to hear from, well, everybody around the world. It got me thinking, however, about the notion of "soft power" and how we seek to define the term.

Let us imagine for a moment that the U.S. administration was to hear this remark and actually be concerned. What if it actually cared about world public opinion and in turn, U.S. soft power? What could it do to fix it?

The answer, I fear, is this: Very little.

Soft power - as Professor Nye himself has defined it - is out of our immediate control. No wonder Americans love the hard power idea. What you see is what you get. Everything can be planned. Find something to blow up, and then send in what is needed to do the blowing up.

Soft power is different. It is out of our control. Sure, government leaders can listen to the concerns of their counterparts from around the world and then act accordingly, but we really never know how it is going to play.

With this in mind, I think it would be interesting to create a method by which soft power can be measured with different audiences around the world. If what this Asian diplomat is saying is correct, let's go to the places he is talking about and look at the public opinion polling data. We could then come up with a numeric rating of where U.S. soft power is that year (or even that month or that week!).

We're certainly not at the point in which American policymakers would be willing to let these "ratings" affect U.S. public policy. But when the time comes when the United States realizes it must consider world opinion when making policy, government leaders are going to need a means of quantifying it.

What about the "Soft Powerscope?" "Soft Powermeter?" "Soft Powernator"?????

The only way possible we can exercise ‘smart power’, yet alone ‘soft power’ is to have a Constitutional amendment. As long as we have lobby groups pushing for war, those getting fat on dead bodies (The Pentagon's budget for buying new weapons rose from $61 billion in 2001 to over $80 billion in 2004. Lockheed Martin's sales rose by over 30% at the same time, with tens of billions of dollars on the books for future purchases. From 2000 to 2004, Lockheed Martins stock value rose 300%. Northrup-Grumann saw similar growth with Department of Defense (DoD) contracts rising from $3.2 billion in 2001 to $11.1 billion in 2004. Halliburton, with Dick Cheney as former CEO, had defense contracts totaling $427 million in 2001. By 2003, they had $4.3 billion in defense contracts, of which approximately a third were sole source agreements)..

Additionally, I am sure you all saw how it is now Hollywood that gives a platform to presidential candidates, not only with their money but with their voice. Hello???? So, yes, Hollywood in itself is soft power, but it is scary power! In other words, the power behind the power, are movie stars. This in itself is disturbing because of the cultural divide with other countries.

We need to start by having the right people in Congress and in the White House. Once we have the right decision makers and policy makers, there is no limit to what America can do. At one time America’s shine attracted like gold, now it repels as strongly. It would not have to increase it army if it not have so many enemies. It has enemies because of its policies. The policies are bad because those who want to get rich at the expense of the country. And more importantly because so many have forgotten George Washington’s farewell speech and also Wilson:

“The Founding Fathers have warned against the evils of the politics of factions, especially in the conduct of foreign relations.” He further wrote: President Wilson had proposed an “infallible test” for the hyphenated American that, so that in spite of maintaining affections for the old country, when voting or fighting, the heart and mind are centered around America.”

With all the talk of the return of public diplomacy, I can't help but reminisce over the motivation to bring it back and the approach and pysche that is stimulating efforts of bridging the 'cultural divide'. Let us begin by considering a prominent aspect of the elusive realm of culture: religious culture.

I don't intend to delve into the one religion being over-discussed in many forums - academic, professional and freelance alike - Islam. Instead, I would like to point towards a fascinating and surprising (*yaah.. right*) similarity between the religious cultures of Islam and Christianity.

Had a very interesting couple of conversations this weekend with a couple of very smart Marine officers about SMART POWER.

Both had good insights about how to think about Smart Power. Both were very encouraging about pursuing the Holy Grail of Smart Power. They said it’s a very worthwhile endeavor, and both agreed to give it some thot and give us some additional suggestions.

Here's one excellent analogy.
The military has a doctrine and training concept called ‘combined arms’. It’s a framework for helping officers figure out how to combine different kinds of firepower. The question: ‘Under particular circumstances, to achieve a particular military objective, what is the ‘best’ mix of small arms fire, mortar fire, SCUDs, etc.?

The analogy would be, “Under particular circumstances, to achieve a particular SOFT POWER objective, what is the best mix of broadcasting, exchanges, diplomatic demarches, working through NGOs, etc.”

According to one of these gentlemen, the subject of mixing hard power and soft power is touched on in the military academies, and in National Defense University, but only on the surface. Officers are given a basic introduction to soft power, but not in detail nor with the objective of indicating decision rules for combining military and non-military to create SMART power.

I suspect the same is true for diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), in reverse. They teach a little about military and ‘pol-mil’ relations, but not in detail and not with an eye toward combining the two.

Another point we discussed is how the possession of clear military assets would amplify the influence of what you say and do with your soft power resources.

Also talked about cases that would indicate successful or unsuccessful combinations of hard and soft power. Remember when the Clinton administration sent in a small contingent of Marines (I think Marines) into Haiti, landing at the beach with the aim of …intimidating the regime in power to stop its repression? There was a of public rhetoric leading into the operation, but then not backed up with hard power. It was a failure, and the administration looked weak and inept when the troops had to return to the landing craft and head back home.

What about the expansion of NATO into east and central Europe? A visible campaign led by a political appointee Jeremy Rosner, working jointly for the Secretary fo State and the President, it was an effort to use soft power to extend hard power’s influence closer to the doorstep of the former Soviet Union. These might make interesting case studies.

TR calls for a 'SoftpowerScope, or a SoftpowerMeter! Excellent idea? What would go into a measurement of SP? Maybe some weighted combination of the Pew Foundation overseas opinion surveys, combined with % market share of movies, TV shows, and winning sports teams....Lets hold on to that thought.

Or vice versa….

Hard power, soft power, and smart power, all have roots in something or other. Obviously hard power relies primarily on military power, whereas soft power is more the attraction of ideology.