Brian: How does the internet, or more specifically, the rise of cultural phenomena across social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) reshape – if at all – our understanding of soft power? We’ve seen how big a role Twitter played during the Arab Spring, but would you say that, in light of the increasing prevalence of governmental figures employing social media (e.g. Trump), social media platforms have increasingly become platforms of legitimation and propaganda for powerful state actors?
Joseph Nye: The early years of the Internet were marked by a libertarian optimism about its decentralizing and democratizing effects. Information would be widely available and undercut the monopolies of authoritarian governments. Big Brother would be defeated. President Clinton believed that China would liberalize and that Communist Party efforts to control the Internet were like trying to “nail jello to the wall.” The Bush and Obama administrations shared this optimism and promoted an Internet Freedom Agenda that included subsidies and technologies to assist dissidents in authoritarian states to communicate.
Today, in the face of successful Chinese control of what citizens can see and say on the Internet and Russian use of the Internet to interfere in the 2016 American election, the United States (and allied democracies) find themselves on the defensive. The expected asymmetries seem to have been reversed. Autocracies are able to protect themselves by controlling information flows, while the openness of democracies creates vulnerabilities that autocracies can exploit via information warfare. Ironically, one cause of the vulnerabilities has been the rise of social media and mobile devices in which American companies have been the global leaders. Citizens voluntarily carry Big Brother and his relatives in their pockets. Along with big data and artificial intelligence, technology has made the problem of defending democracy from information warfare far more complicated than foreseen two decades ago. Some call this “sharp power” and it is a subset of hard power. It rests on the use of information for disruption and destruction and it must not be confused with soft power which rests on attraction and voluntarism.
Brian: You’ve mentioned previously (at an interview at Oxford) that you were rather surprised by how (relatively) popular and well-known your coined term “smart power”/”soft power” has become amongst political circles; which events or structural forces contributed most significantly to the historical relevance or prominence of the term?
Joseph Nye: I invented the terms as analytical tools to help understand power transitions which had previously been built on calculations of military and economic power alone. It seemed to me that ideational power of attraction had been neglected. The Berlin Wall collapsed not under a barrage of artillery but hammers and bulldozers wielded by those whose minds had been changed by ideas that penetrated the Iron Curtain. I was surprised by the political uptake of the concept of soft power, which was first primarily in the EU and China, where it obviously served the uses of the political elites.
Brian: Steven Lukes argues that power manifests in three forms – in shaping decisions, non-decisions, and values or preferences that guide decisions. In distinct contrast, Foucault argues that power plays out as an immanent and omnipresent force – that to escape power is futile. As an international relations scholar, how much of your work touches upon political theory, and what is your stance regarding the Lukes-Foucault dialectic?
Joseph Nye: I associate myself with Lukes’ approach. I found Foucault fascinating to read and very insightful, but hard to apply in my approach to international relations. He may be right that everything is infused with power, but that level of abstraction does not help provide analytic distinctions that are useful to policy choices.
Brian: One view of power argues that soft power is ultimately dictated by the possession of hard power (even if the causal relationship is neither particularly determinate nor overridingly binding). Do you think that this is the case? Are there ways for soft power to create or entrench hard power?
Joseph Nye: Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants and it can be accomplished by coercion, payment or attraction. These tools can reinforce or contradict each other. And there can be subtle interactions. Successful use of hard power can create a reputation that attracts as well as repels as I spell out in some detail in The Future of Power.
Section Two: Practical Politics
Brian: Many have argued that China’s rise or development has taken a pivotal turn since the rise of Xi Jinping to power. Comparing Xi to Hu or Wen (or indeed, Jiang), what would you say are the starkest changes to China’s foreign policy under Xi?
Joseph Nye: The main change I see is that Xi departed from Deng Xiaoping’s wise advice of biding one’s time which his predecessors had largely followed. Xi’s China Dream was more assertively nationalistic as were programs like building artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarizing them. In addition, Xi reversed Deng’s term limits for power transition within the party, and this affected international as well as domestic perceptions.
Brian: What is your view of the (recent) US withdrawal of troops from Syria? Is the Syrian Civil War intractable, and has the difficulty of resolving the War been exacerbated or ameliorated by the rise of Trump?
Joseph Nye: At some point, US troops were likely to be withdrawn by any president and the ugly reality of Assad’s persistence recognized. But the timing and manner of withdrawal were typical Trump in terms of shock, clumsiness, and lack of consultation. Ideally, the decisions could have been more gradual and with greater diplomatic consultation, and not involved the abandonment of the Kurdish forces who had been so effective in fighting ISIS.
Brian: The recent arrest of a senior ranking official of Huawei has led to speculation that a trade or diplomatic war may well be reignited between China and the US. Is there a high chance that the two countries would reenter a Cold War of some sort, and if so, what’s your anticipated time frame for its occurrence?
Joseph Nye: We have entered a new phase in our relationship, but the Cold War metaphor is misleading. During the Cold War the US and Soviets targeted tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at each other and we had virtually no trade or social contact. China has a more limited nuclear force; we share over a half trillion dollars in two-way trade and more than 350,000 Chinese students and three million tourists are in the US each year. A better description of this new phase is “cooperative rivalry.”
Neither China nor the United States pose an existential threat to each other the way that Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union did. China is not about to invade the US and it is unable to expel us from the Western Pacific where most countries welcome an American presence. Japan, a major part of the so-called “first island chain” pays nearly three quarters of the host nation costs to keep 50,000 American troops based there. The prospects are slight that China can drive the U.S. from the Western Pacific, much less dominate the world. If the strategic rivalry is portrayed as a poker game, the US still holds the higher cards.
There is another dimension, however, that makes this phase a “cooperative rivalry” rather than a Cold War. China and the US face transnational challenges that are impossible to resolve without the cooperation of the other. Environmental globalization will increase. Climate change and rising sea levels obey the laws of physics, not politics. As borders become more porous to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, it will be important for the two largest economies to cooperate to cope with these threats.
Brian: Would you say that the rise of Trump, le Pen etc. signifies a fundamental and necessary crisis within the notion of liberal (capitalist) democracy (thus perhaps suggesting the undesirability of it as a political system), or is their rise merely a temporary setback in a long and overarching arc trending towards liberal democracy in the world?
Joseph Nye: In the US, at least, I tend to see current trends in cyclical terms rather than a secular trend toward the end of democracy. The US went through a similar populist reaction to high immigration and economic setbacks in the 1920s and 30s. It was a nasty period but democracy survived the Great Depression. I suspect it will also survive the 2008 Great Recession and its aftermath. One should not read too much into the 2016 election. Trump lost the popular vote. Moreover, the latest Chicago Council on Global Affairs polls show growing support for internationalism.
Brian: Are we at the end of ‘history’ of a different sort? The end of ‘history’ as guided by rationality or rationalism, that is – as opposed to Fukuyama’s thesis.
Joseph Nye: I was never captured by either Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history nor Sam Huntington’s clash of civilizations. To me the interesting questions about the next stages in history relate to cyber conflict, artificial intelligence and big data, and the revolution in bio-technology. These issues grow out of scientific rationality. But one of my greatest concerns is whether we will cope with climate change where we are suffering from science denial. Politicians can decry “globalism” but that is a political slogan. Ecological globalization is a process that responds to the laws of physics, not politics.