Smart Power Blog

Ever notice who is talking about soft power? No, who really talks about it in a real, reasonable, and strategic sense. This means we're excluding talk about how we share values, all love Big Macs, can drive cross country, anything like that. I'm talking about how to really use soft power, the power of communication to persuade when it counts: in this Long War.

In the challenge to understand “war”, I offer some definitions from people brighter than myself, none of which, however, comform to past or present conflicts perfectly.

I think that as we examine the idea of "coercion" it is important that we examine some of the assumptions we tend to make about hard power and how it works. RJ Art points out in "The Fungibiliy of Force" that when nations engage in "soft" negotiations or transactions, the "rules of the game" are held in place by underlying threats of hard power. I do not wish to dispute this argument. However, I think it is important that we recognize that "hard power" is similarly undergirded by forces of soft power.

I will try to explain this position by making a couple of conceptual points. I've also got some examples -- the liberation movement of India-Pakistan lead by Gandhi and the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. on Japan -- but I'll save those for another post so that it doesn't get too long and unwieldy....

There's this great scene in "My Fair Lady" where Eliza Doolittle launches into a musical tirade against her new suitor with the following lyrics:

" Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?"

She follows with a plea to be shown his feelings via actions instead of just his talking about how he feels about her.

That's how I imagine those who are the intended targets of our Public Diplomacy-fueled-Soft Power-"Winning Hearts and Minds" campaign feel, albeit with much less humor or forgiveness.

Disclaimer: Not a rant about the solely horrible nature of hard power or pure negativity of brutality.

Military. An armed force, meant to be used solely for the purpose of warfare.

This may sound unconceivable or untruthful at first, but there was a time not too long ago when the intersection of arms, insecurity, the desire for 'unjust' power, and brutal competition were associated with a domain and reality other than the 'normal'.

In referring to the US as our point of analysis, it is key to remember that relative analysis is as essential as absolute. In leveraging criticism of US policy (if I may naively ever do so - smiles*), I do so not because the US is unique in its manipulation and methods of maintaining superpower status. I do so on the basis of what the US has projected of itself internationally since its inception - a (correction - 'the') beacon of 'liberty' (there are two other principles, but this would be primary, especially through the Cold War). That, too, as it defines liberty (the French and international administrations might define it differently). If other nations are adept at projecting certain images abroad of themselves in this day and age, they have learnt only from the best.

So... if the US now faces harsh criticism for its policies, it's not because their aspirations are different from other states (although, I wouldn't go as far as to propose that every nation-state wants to be the 'leader' - for good or for bad). This evergreen trend prevails mostly because international publics feel a sense of betrayal (and regional political entities utilize this public emotion/view to their advantage). There is a true discrepancy between the ideals of Disney's 'It's A Small World' and that of its profit networks. The same can be said for the US in general. The Americanization of international cultures and ethos has resulted in not just power for the US, but certain expectations on the part of international publics (no matter what strata of society to which they may 'belong'): People around the world expect 'America' (the US admin) to 'behave'.

We know the hard power budget exceeds the soft power budget, but what are the components of the US Defense Budget for 2008? The Center for Defense Information has the high level details:

If we are concerned with U.S. smart power, we have to recognize the importance of successful public diplomacy. If U.S. public diplomacy is ever to work, we Americans will have to meet the world half way. It simply will not be enough for us to send our message out to friends and foes and expect "them" to understand, respect or even recognize our positions. Instead, we must make a better effort to not only listen, but to also demonstrate to the world that we want to listen.

Accordingly, kudos to Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer and ABC News for broadcasting live from Damascus this morning. Sawyer interviewed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and gave viewers a valuable look into Syrian society.

Surely there are other areas of interest around the world, and surely this is just one small example (also, the coverage was no-doubt bookended by news on the latest celebrity gossip and this week's diet fad). Still, ABC News did their viewers a service this morning. Here's hoping the competition takes notice.

So often we complain about that big pie (chart) that is the federal budget. If only "we" could get a bigger piece of the pie, so much could be done in the soft power category. Indeed, in President Bush's proposed budget, the DoD gets more than $481.4 billion, while a mere $1.5 billion is set aside for broadcasting, exchanges and general public diplomacy activities. For all you non-mathmeticians out there, "their" slice is about 320 times larger than "ours."

There is hope, however, and I came across it in the transcript from a Naval War College forum from June 2001. MIT's Cindy Williams, perhaps even unintentionally, articulated a possible strategy for getting a bigger part of the pie.

More after the jump...

Reading the defintions of war, of diplomacy, of defense, of all those words...and I don't know why exactly I am so stuck on verbage these days---but all the explanations are so harsh, linear, and, so sure in their justification and meaning. No room for doubt. Written in stone. But policies are driven by these descriptions, graveyards are filled, governments are formed and re-formed.

There are lots of things that need to be done to get U.S. policy makers to take ‘Smart Power’ seriously. We need to define it better (beyond ‘smart’ combinations of hard and soft power.) We need concrete historical examples where smart power was effectively used.

You can just hear the jeers from the hard power acolytes. They fondle the handles of their $25 million remote controlled tazers and say "if soft power is so great, why don't you use some of it to make me care about it?"

In one sense this is a fair question. But in another sense, this question defines soft power in a way that misunderstands how soft power works, and thus a simple answer to this question cannot be given without undermining the appropriate use of soft power. But we can answer the question...

This post will be fairly brief compared to my posts thus far due to the my inability of integrating my views on intelligence in a tangible manner. However, this integration is currently in progress, and I will have more to say soon. For now, I have been able to identify 2 concepts with regards to the discussion of the so-called RMA (Rev. in Military Affairs) and RIA (Rev. in Intelligence Affairs) that have not been as obvious as there being a need for integration and dramatic rethinking of institutional culture..

Not fully formulated, but presented here for your consideration:

I felt from content and approaches in the readings on bot military and intelligence that the relationship between the two seems to be viewed as more or less linear: RMA has enabled an RIA. Wouldn't it be wise to avoid such linear projection, since intelligence structures and approaches can and have possibly been reformed more frequently than military structures and approaches, just in less visible ways, because of the inherent difference in nature of the military and of intelligence - intelligence, I would say, is a comparatively less...tangible. Often less visible...often intentionally. Military entities are also easily captured visually than those of intelligence - visibility can be seen as key to power, its purpose, its execution, what it achieves, and how it changes and builds on itself.

Public diplomacy is just as imperative as state-to-state diplomacy became a few centuries ago. Publics are here, they have power, they must be engaged in a sensible way.

I attended a session today (along with some of my "smart power" colleagues) on how to make public diplomacy a bigger part of the 2008 presidential campaign. It was a productive and interesting session, but I couldn't help but feel like it missed the mark in one important way.

As we've discussed on this blog before, public diplomacy is fundamentally about communicating with foreign publics. I would like to argue that there are basically two reasons we should bother doing this: the imperfect power of foreign governments, and the enormous expense of military action...

I couldn't help but notice the contrast between two global news stories about Africa from the past couple of weeks. A quick review, as I'm headed to Colorado to build soft power with my in-laws.

On the one hand, French President Jacques Chirac hosted a two-day summit for African leaders in Cannes. Discussions ranged from international trade and the world image of Africa to the fight against AIDS and the crisis in Sudan.

What did the United States do? Well, it announced the "Department of Defense Unified Combatant Command for Africa."

More after the jump

Round 1: Went to a screening of "Beyond The Gates" a few days ago. Yet another movie about the failure of the rest of the World to get their hands dirty to prevent--because it was well publicized in advance, nor curtail---because it was well known what was happening once it started---nor do anything to stop---because hundreds of thousands were being killed, the Rwandan genocide in April of 1994. Lots of hand-wringing by those who could have done something...lots of mouthing of apologies by the very same who dutifully recite the slogan "Never Again" when they have to make an appearance at those tiresome Holocaust Memorials each year.

Last week Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remembered the Cold Was as a "less complex time" and said that he was "almost nostalgic" for it. Gates was responding to comments made by President Vladimir Putin, who blamed U.S. foreign policy for causing countries to seek out nuclear arms in order to defend themselves from the U.S. and an "almost uncontained use of military force."

Why is Gates nostalgic for the "good old days" of the Cold War? It was a simpler time in terms of U.S. foreign policy and the definition of threats. Problems were more manageable than they are today. During that time, the world was divided in to "us" and "them"- the US and the USSR. Of course this is an over simplification, and there were some surrogate wars. But overall, the problem was defined in terms of this dichotomy. Given the structure of world power during this time, diplomats, policy makers and defense were trained with certain cognitive, linguistic and cultural skills and followed certain career paths. Indeed, Defense Secretary Gates served in the CIA for 27 years. Perhaps he is "almost nostalgic" for the Cold War days because he was trained to handle problems as defined in the framework of us vs. them.

Today, everything has changed - the threat, the power structure and the set of skills needed to deal with the new global challenges. It is no longer just us vs. them. There is not just a single threat that we can fight. There are various problems, which take different shapes and that change over time. If the world has changed and the threat has changed, it follows that our foreign policy should adapt as well. Because we no longer know what will be politically salient at any given time, there is a need to be flexible. In a network society, new competencies and organizational designs are needed. Unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy has not adapted. Herein lies the problem. The current administration is operating in the frame of mind that existed during the Cold War and during times when the threat was defined as us vs. them. The current administration has failed due to the militaristic frame of mind. It's the law of the hammer. If all you have in your toolbox is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

There is an over-reliance on one instrument of state power; the military, and as Putin put it, "an almost uncontained use of military force." Of course it is not only Putin who disagrees with the reliance on hard power; the U.S. public also thinks that the Bush administration has gone too far in terms of hard power. Opinion polls shows that the U.S. public would prefer a multinational approach to foreign policy. Use of solely hard power is a failing strategy to pursue U.S. national interests, and a balance must be restored to state power. It is clear that hard power alone will not work. Nor will only soft power. Instead, an integrated approach is needed - smart power.

The challenge is that many current military, defense and intelligence people were trained with the Cold War frame of reference and probably share Secretary of Defense Gates' belief that the Cold Was as a less complex time. This is because they are trained to deal with the problems of that time, not today's environment. Therefore, the struggle for those who believe a balance to state power must be restored will be to make a sophisticated argument of the need for an integrated approach. The hard power side must be understood and an argument must be made, taking the major issues as seen from that perspective in to mind. Gates' nostalgia for the Cold Was days must be understood in terms of the Cold War frame of mind and the skill sets that were necessary and developed during that time. The world has changed structurally in a way that makes soft power more important. But the military and hard power and their strengths and weaknesses must be understood in order to make a convincing argument that whether or not you believe twenty or thirty years ago our problems were more manageable and more stable, times have changed. And so too must U.S. foreign policy and state power.

Two news stories this week have highlighted the difficulty of employing state power – be it soft, hard, or smart – in contemporary inter-state relations. The first story is the US assertion that a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been arming militias inside Iraq. "What we do know is that the Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq," said Bush. His follow-up was more telling. “I don't think we know who picked up the phone and said, ‘The Quds Force, go do this.’” Many, including Bush, see this as troubling. However, it is simply indicative of international relations today. It is not given that a government has complete control over actors and forces under their authority. Therefore, changing policy towards Iran may not stop the Quds Force’s flow of weapons to Iraq.

Similarly, in Pakistan – a major US ally – the government is still unable to suppress the al-Qaeda presence in areas which border Afghanistan. Actors within the Pakistan government may not be trying that hard. For example, the Waziristan Accord saw the 2006 release of more than 2500 Taliban and al-Qaeda members. Yet it is not clear that by the government trying harder, al-Qaeda would magically disappear from the region. This is because, as with Iran, central government may lack control of forces under its authority. The U.S. administration has identified threats from the Quds Force and from al-Qaeda. Yes it is not clear that these threats will be resolved through diplomacy with other states governments who may lack control over these forces. In short, getting other states to do what you want them to do is power. Ensuring they succeed is a miracle.

[This is a descriptive, not prescriptive, note – which is not saying that diplomacy with the states mentioned should not be undertaken. After all, in this complex world, diplomacy is often the only means by which a government can attempt to influence international politics. Yet government should be aware of diplomacy’s limitations.]

Cross posted at MountainRunner

This is the first post in a multi-part series about the design and application of "smart power".

Counterinsurgency, much like international relations, is about the right amount of power in just the right places. However, in the macro scheme of international relations, there is room for fudging and fine grain controls aren't as necessary. Counterinsurgency requires, as I see it, requires greater finesse to be successful.  

Bridging the ideas of hard power (generally kinetic use of force) with soft power (non-coercive persuasion), we arrive at the somewhat new and fashionable term Smart Power (side note: see the Smart Power Blog for one of the few overt discussions on the topic under the banner "smart power"). To counterinsurgency, this isn't new. 

Tom Griffin has an interesting post on US covert action against Britain to influence their politics.

Looks like the United States might.

Check out this news from the Horn of Africa in this morning's New York Times.

News came in late December of U.S. operations in Somalia and elsewhere, but what hadn't been reported was the level of U.S. involvement with Ethiopian operations.

It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported. The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.

When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.

Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.

U.S. power is alive and well in Africa. But is it smart enough???

There's a new wiki in town: ConflictWiki. The purpose is to create a repository for both hard and soft power folks that's more community specific with terminology, categories, and entries than what Wikipedia can offer. The goal is to provide an open source collection of information, data, and links aimed at the cointerinsurgency / irregular warfare, public diplomacy, smart power, private military, and terrorism communities. These groups are intricately linked together and require greater or at least different details on these topics than can be found in one place today.

As it's a community tool, create entries related to Smart Power aimed at the Smart Power community (pretty much anyone interested in relations beyond the border). The easiest way to start is by going to the wiki, searching for a term and then creating a page if what you're looking for does not exist.

Much thanks to MountainRunner for the post using an audio equalizer as a way to think about the smart power. It seems an important aspect of calibrating smart power via such a method is understanding how each lever works in relation to time. For example, a series of bombing runs by planes can be executed within a couple of hours of their order, perhaps sooner depending on the targets. An all out invasion of another nation appears to take several months to prepare. Negotiating a treaty can take just as long if not longer. Building a cultural affinity between two nations is likely to take a generation.

This fact -- that different levers of power are effective at different rates or paces -- seems to me to suggest three more considerations for the implementing the audio equalizer model:

1. An assessment of how close we are, in terms of both time and energy, to having the power to achieve that objective.
2. An assessment of the time pressure of the objective: how quickly do we need results?
3. An assessment of what is likely to happen in the "interim" time between our initiation of action and the completion of our goal. Time is, after all, the most unstoppable force known to man. It always moves in the same direction and no one can stop it.

Sticking within the metaphor of listening to music, we might think of it this way...

Last week in class we started to discuss definitions of various forms of diplomacy and where to draw the line. Traditional diplomacy is government to government communication, public diplomacy is government to public. Someone raised the question if corporations should be included somewhere in the mix. Yes!

Public diplomacy is traditionally thought of in terms of how governments communicate their image to other countries and peoples in order to inform and influence foreign audiences. Public diplomacy impacts a country’s image as well as national interests, such as foreign policy, national security, trade, and tourism. A government may sponsor educational exchange programs, international broadcasts, art exhibits, and various cultural programs, to promote their country’s interests abroad. Governments still play these roles, but it is becoming increasingly clear that perceptions of a country are built upon a much broader range of actions and actors. Increasingly, these include the impact of private activities - from sports to fashion to food to science to popular culture.

Due to economic globalization, there is a tremendous increase in the flow of goods and services, especially commercial and cultural products, between countries. As a result, countries are increasingly known world-wide for their products. When Orson Welles joked in The Third Man that all Switzerland ever did for the world was to give it the cuckoo clock, he hit this concept on the nose. Coca Cola and McDonald’s are inextricably tied with the United States. The same is true of Ikea and Sweden, Sony and Japan, and Nokia and Finland. The actions of businesses, which operate independently from government, are now affecting how a country is seen abroad. The traditional axiom states that how a government is perceived abroad affects the selling of its corporations’ products. But now we must also consider how a corporation’s products affect how a country is perceived, as, for example, Beaujolais Nouveau wine evokes the French art de vivre and BMWs bring to mind German efficiency.

Corporations and governments alike must recognize their mutual interdependence. Positive brand identification can elevate a country’s profile in the eyes of foreign publics. Conversely, poor national images abroad are bad for business. For example, a 2004 survey documents the negative effect of anti-American sentiments on American businesses operating abroad, specifically McDonalds and Coca Cola. Similarly, the Danish cartoon controversy negatively impacted Danish exports in the Middle East. Globalization, by blurring the lines between public and private actors, has permanently linked the two worlds.

Commercial brands are performing the role of transmitting national culture and affecting a country’s image abroad. Increasingly, brands are the means by which consumers form opinions about a country. In some ways, Microsoft and McDonald's are among the most visible U.S. diplomats, just as IKEA is Sweden’s envoy to the world and Nokia is an ambassador for Finland. As brands become leading channels of communication for a nation’s image, it is important for governments to recognize the role commercial products play in public diplomacy.

I was just reading Schneider’s’(2004) ‘Culture Communicates: US Diplomacy that Works,’ and was reminded of a basic point, but one which must always be kept in mind.
Diplomacy that works is where a mutual dialogue occurs. There must be listening and respect, but just pushing one’s message. The second point is questioning the relationship between public diplomacy and the government.

Schneider discusses cultural diplomacy as an attempt of a nation to ‘explain itself to the world’ and she illustrates this attempt of the U.S. to explain its culture to the world through soft power. Why some programs were so successful was due to their reciprocal nature. For example, programs during the Cold War where American and Russian writers met seemed to be successful because both parties listened to each other. Most striking was how Russian counterparts were most persuaded about American culture, at least according to accounts by the American writers, who recalled that the Russians were stuck by the freedom of speech accorded to the American writers as they criticized their government. Through witnessing American writers openly speak their mind about the government, Russians understood the freedom of the US. This same realization could not have been attained, I argue, simply by the US government telling Russians about freedom of speech and how great the US is; this is pure propaganda. Instead, Russians truly saw the reality of free speech by witnessing for themselves American writers such as Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck. This can only occur through mutual exchanges where both parties listen to each other.

Today, the U.S. has a ‘utilitarian approach’ to cultural diplomacy. The current trend is that cultural diplomacy programs in the U.S. are funded and supported by the government more when they can be used to achieve a policy goal. Such short-sightedness is extremely problematic, and one can argue for the need for cultural diplomacy programs to have independence from foreign policy. Cultural diplomacy programs are there to share a country’s culture, not only government. The British Council is seen as existing at an arms’ length from the government and is there to share UK culture despite whichever party is in power in the government. With great distrust towards the U.S., U.S. sponsored public diplomacy programs may also be distrusted. Remember how the revelation of CIA support for cultural diplomacy programs led to immediate distrust of these programs.

If the U.S. could adopt a similar approach to the British Council, it may have a better chance to begin to slowly rebuild public opinion of the U.S., or at least begin to opinion that the U.S. is solely interested in its own policy agenda (which perhaps sadly it is).

The U.S. government appears to believe in cultural diplomacy the most when there is a crisis, such as the Nazi threat, the Cold War, and 9/11. However, this reflects the aforementioned view of cultural diplomacy as simply a means to achieve policy goals. Cultural diplomacy and soft power effects are not immediate, but take years to develop and are difficult to measure. It is difficult to quantify and measure the value of the arts, for example, but keep in mind a telling comment made by the president of South Africa that his USIA-sponsored visit to the U.S. was the ‘defining event’ that changed his ideas about blacks and whites living together.

The U.S needs long term cultural diplomacy programs which are to some degree independent from the government.

Finally, in a situation desperate for some good news - we finally got some. In the middle of what has become an annual hike to the Hill to ask for more money for Iraq, Secretary of State Rice dropped a little surprise on us all:

I am pleased to tell Members of Congress that there is now being formed a neighbors conference to support Iraq. This conference is being spearheaded, and properly so, by the government of Iraq. Invitees will include Iraqs immediate neighbors, as well as representatives from other regional states, multilateral organizations, and the UN Permanent Five (the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China). I would note that both Syria and Iran are among Iraqs neighbors invited to attend.

It would appear that this was an announcement that the Administration wanted to be heard. The excerpts of Rice's prepared remarks posted on State's Web site focused exclusively on this area of her remarks. Immediate reactions from Iran seem to be positive, so despite the fact that this is something the U.S. might have done about three years ago, we'll all have to file this in the "we'll take what we can get at this point" folder.

(An about face of this magnitude is almost enough to get us to ignore that in the Administration's $5.99 billion supplemental request, only $20 mil is slotted for public diplomacy.)