Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
The New Hard-Soft Power by James Traub 
NYT, January 30, 2005 IDEA LAB The New Hard-Soft Power By JAMES TRAUB In his 2002 book, ''The Paradox of American Power,'' Joseph S. Nye Jr., the scholar and former Pentagon official, famously distinguishes between ''hard'' and ''soft'' power. The first is the power to coerce, largely through military might; the second, the power to co-opt through such ''intangible'' factors as culture, values and institutions (the media, churches, schools and so forth). In an era of globalized information, Nye observes, the power to persuade has become almost as important as the power to compel, and he criticizes American policy makers for their single-minded focus on brute force. Where, in this taxonomy, do we put the images we saw in recent weeks of United States Navy helicopter pilots aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln ferrying supplies to victims of the tsunami in the Indonesian province of Aceh? Is that hard power with a human face? Soft power in a flak jacket? Whatever it is, it produces an inherently attractive narrative. I arrived in Indonesia 11 days after the disaster hit, and in that day's Jakarta Post, the capital's chief English-language daily, I read a long and reverent profile of the American pilots bearing the headline, ''U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Enjoys Aceh Humanitarian Mission.'' As the Bush administration tries to blunt the hostility fostered by four years of swaggering belligerence, it should think about reconfiguring Nye's parlor-game-cum-political-theory to its own purposes. We know all too well that this administration does not do soft. Nye himself once told me Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to the concept: ''I don't know what 'soft power' is.'' President Bush's chintzy initial response to the tsunami implies that he doesn't know quite what it is either. The problem with the hard-soft dichotomy itself is that it fails to take account of the soft-power potential of military helicopters and aircraft carriers. We live in an era not only of globalized information but also of the nearly $450 billion defense budget. The United States military is now an instrument of absolutely everything -- warfare, diplomacy, social policy, humanitarianism. It just depends how we deploy it. The critical attributes that make the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln an instrument of persuasion rather than of coercion are, first, that it is being put to nonlethal use and, second and no less important, that it is advancing humanitarian ends -- that it is not directly serving American self-interest. ''This was an act of God,'' the Jakarta Post reporter quotes an American serviceman. ''We are here and happy to help.'' Soft power, in short, need not be squishy soft. And this hard-jacketed form of persuasion may actually be more effective than the classic instruments of soft power, at least as they are embodied in popular culture. Nye argues that, whatever its flaws, our culture projects the core values of ''democracy, personal freedom, upward mobility and openness.'' Well, maybe that's the subtext of ''The Day After Tomorrow'' and ''The Apprentice,'' but you could make at least as good a case that our coarse entertainment products have proved even more frighteningly hegemonic than our military. Of course we should have exchange programs and American libraries abroad and all the other tools of public diplomacy. But it will not be easy for even the best expressions of American culture to escape the overwhelming suspicion that now dogs all things American. The same is true, naturally, of humanitarian helicopter missions. But at least these are acts, with an unambiguously positive outcome. And the use of our immense hard power for soft purposes has the additional benefit of humanizing the fierce image inevitably projected by that power: the same military that shocks and awes can also save and heal. This isn't true for only our Armed Forces. Consider the example of Singapore, a tiny country with a small but professional military. While the little Seahawks flying off the deck of the Abraham Lincoln carried modest loads, six giant Chinooks, provided by the Singapore Armed Forces with little fanfare, did a good deal of the heavy lifting: when a cargo plane ran into a water buffalo and blocked the landing strip at Banda Aceh, it was a Chinook that lowered the earth-moving machinery that shoved the plane out of the way. Singapore is, by tradition, a hard-power country, though its stature is not military but economic (which Nye recognizes as a third, autonomous dimension of power). When I stopped off there on my way home, a friend said to me, ''The irony is that Lee Kuan Yew would never have done this.'' The tough-minded former prime minister thought, like Donald Rumsfeld seems to think, that charitable gestures were for sissies. But Lee's very new successor, Lee Hsien Loong, has publicly committed Singapore to the task of rehabilitating the region. The United States will never win as much gratitude as feisty little Singapore. And in the age of global terrorism, our soldiers must always be prepared to fight. At the moment, in fact, the war in Iraq has put a huge strain on our forces. But reducing that commitment will make other choices possible. The need to respond to another epic disaster will not, God willing, come along for a good many years; if we are to continue to deploy our hard-power resources in soft-power settings, it will mostly take the more familiar form of peacekeeping. President Bush arrived in office so profoundly opposed to peacekeeping that he scarcely bothered with post-conflict planning in Iraq. He has, however, lived to rue that decision. And he has not withdrawn American peacekeepers from the ongoing NATO operation in Kosovo. Of course, you can't get much publicity value from an operation scarcely anyone knows about. And in any case peacekeepers can't cure what ails Kosovo in the way that air-dropped medical supplies can solve the immediate problems of Aceh. But I wouldn't simply dismiss the soft-power virtues of peacekeeping. Last year I spent a day on patrol with the American contingent in Kosovo. I had been told that the Americans never unshouldered their weapons, doffed their wraparound sunglasses, broke formation and so on. And yet the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Mike Chirdon, a 32-year-old carpenter from Altoona, Pa., passed an hour teaching an impromptu civics class in a school he regularly visited and then hung out in a cafe to glean intelligence from the locals. Neither the Italian nor the French soldiers I also spent time with had anything like the relationship with ordinary people that Chirdon had; he was a wildly popular figure. It occurred to me that peacekeeping might be something to which Americans -- or at least the citizen-soldier reservists who are expected to fulfill these tasks -- might be peculiarly suited. Chirdon certainly had no doubt about the value of the work. ''I don't know how there could be a better mission in the world than this,'' he said. The world is going to be seeing a lot of the American military in the coming years. Shouldn't we want people -- including the American people -- to see our soldiers without their guns or their body armor, to see that they have faces and even feelings? Isn't that worth the price of peacekeeping entanglements? Call me crazy, but I think people like Mike Chirdon constitute a more precious international currency than ''Desperate Housewives.'' James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, is at work on a book about the United Nations |