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.
But we need something else too. We need to admit that we have failed at soft power. Joe Nye reminds us that soft power is the power to get others to want what we want. By that definition, we haven’t done so well. Soft power supporters have failed to use soft power to get others to want what we want - more soft power.
It’s easy to beat up on the current administration for failing to understand and deploy ‘smart power’ in their toolkit of foreign policy. But the previous Democratic campaigns have not done such a good job either. During the Kerry campaign there was pressure on the candidate to give a diplomacy/soft power speech. It would describe the ‘third leg’ of a triad of effective foreign policy instruments. Guess what? He never gave the speech. Whatever his campaign’s reasoning was, it demonstrated how little the Democratic candidate for president thought of the subject. Maybe he didn’t want what we wanted.
So here’s the question -- how do you convince those who will be in a position to determine such things, that after 2008 they should be smarter about their uses of hard and soft power, with a better balance between diplomacy and coercion?
I’ll have more to say about this, but for now let me ask: how do you use soft power to get soft power? Then you’ll be on the way toward building smart power.
Comments (1)
Well, I would suggest that framing the discussion in a way that gives individuals the impression they need to be “smarter” will probably not get you very far on a personal level. It suggests an incompetence that while it may be real, probably will be a non-starter in the discussion. I would suggest that this is a dissucussion that has to begin at where the candidates are “at” in their foreign policy thinking. They are thinking about the Global War on Terror (GWoT), but right now that is framed as primarily a physical war to be won in Iraq/Afganistan and only secondarily as a “battle for hearts and minds.”
By shifting the conversation to the GWoT in general and then thinking about, how do we “fight” the GWoT in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Germany. Clearly tanks and bombs won’t go over well. But by maintaining the war vocabulary and the concept of war footing one can then propose re-arming our public diplomacy machine in the same way that we talk about arming our troops. “Weaponizing” public diplomacy may have more traction at this moment than “soft power” or “smart power.” With a full arsenal of PD tools and resources then the US could really begin to fight for hearts and minds.
When we talk about “soft power” we can sound weak, when we talk about “smart power” we can sound arrogant. When dealing with candidates and the public let’s just talk about power, and let’s use the vocabulary of the day to get our point across. Let’s re-arm America’s public diplomacy. We can create weapons of mass persuasion but we have to invest in them
Posted by MY | February 16, 2007 10:29 AM
Posted on February 16, 2007 10:29