Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Date: 16 March, 2004   —   $15.75   —   Book product page Rating:

The first part of this book is an introduction to soft power and why it's important. Nye is preaching to the choir with me, so I really wanted to skip ahead, but I'm not that kind of reader so I forced myself to plow through it.

The short definition of soft power is the ability to get the outcome you want without using coercion or bribery, using instead "an attraction to shared values and the justness and duty of contributing to the achievement of those values."

Despite a slow start, I was really impressed with the book. Nye does an excellent job of describing the resources that can be used to generate soft power, and provides plenty of examples of how soft power can alternately be enhanced or undermined by hard power.

Especially interesting are the sections that cover the use of soft power by other countries, and how the United States can and does generate and wield soft power. While the concept seems a bit ethereal, in creating long-term solutions, it's far more powerful than carrots and sticks. Carrots and sticks cost money and require constant maintenance, soft power merely requires the strength of values, truth, and openness.

Obviously, the invasion of Iraq is an excellent example. The United States spent more than 250 million dollars to underwrite the participation of countries like Poland, Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras - and Turkey would have cost billions more. The cost in US tax-payer dollars for the war and reconstruction is already more than $100 billion, or about $1,000 per American household. A concerted appeal to soft power at the UN would have made the operation orders of magnitude cheaper and much more likely to succeed.

"Soft Power" is a very well thought out book about a somewhat fuzzy subject. The clear examples Nye provides covering all aspects of soft power, its generation, maintenance, and employment, are invaluable in understanding how important and powerful a force it can be for an administration or organization that realizes it's available.

I'm not a big Newt Gingrich fan, but he's a pretty bright guy and absolutely correct when he says of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts, "The real key is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow. And that is a very important metric that they just don't get."

Freedom, democracy, and true allies are not gained by threats, bribes, or at the end of a bayonet, they're secured through the seduction of soft power.