New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MIRRLEES: American Soft Power 211
multicultural society help him to distinguish his slogan of American soft
power from the critical discourse of U.S. cultural imperialism. Through
the discourse of American soft power, Nye rationalizes America’s global
superpower status and the U.S. state’s global promotion and extension of
American cultural values while attempting to distinguish his politics
and foreign policy prescriptions from the Bush administration’s neoconservatives.
By the conclusion of Nye’s text, the line between Nye and
neocons begins to blur:
We have been more successful in the domain of hard power, where
we have invested more, trained more, and have a clearer idea of
what we are doing. We have been less successful in the areas of soft
power, where our public diplomacy has been woefully inadequate
and our neglect of allies and institutions has created a sense of
illegitimacy that has squandered our attractiveness. . . . America’s
success will depend upon our developing a better balance of hard
and soft power in our foreign policy. 48
This statement reveals the realpolitik that, throughout Nye’s text, is
diluted by multilateralist and diplomatic posturing. Nye, like so many
neoliberal Democrats who distinguish their foreign policy tactics and
goals from the explicit power projections of the neoconservatives with
glossy diplomatic phrases such as “soft power” and “American leadership,”
does not do a good job of it at the end of his text. Nye supports
America’s global rule and issues a way to strengthen the imperial state’s
hegemonic goal of balancing strategies of coercion with strategies of
ideological suasion (or cultural imperialism).
LEIGH ARMISTEAD: AMERICAN SOFT POWER AS AMERICAN
INFORMATION OPERATIONS
Imperial powers have used propaganda (the deliberate effort to persuade
people to think and behave in a specific way) and a class of propagandists
(people that conduct propaganda campaigns) to achieve strategic goals. 49
Leigh Armistead was a former instructor of information warfare at the
Joint Forces Staff College. He thus worked as a military propagandist for
the U.S. empire. Currently, Armistead is a doctoral candidate at Edith
Cowan University, Perth, Australia, writing a dissertation on U.S. information
operations as American soft power. This is also the subject of an