The Future of Power by Joseph S Nye Jr - Australian Army

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Book review • David GoyneThe second part of the book examines what Nye calls ‘power shifts’; that is, thechanges in the way power is applied today and in the relative power of major globalactors. He covers both ‘cyberpower’ and the question of ‘American decline’ in twoseparate chapters; both are worth reading as standalone discussions of these issues.He is cognizant of the growing reach and importance of cyberpower which he sees asdiffusing power to a range of actors beyond the traditional states, while not ignoringthe concentration of resources and, hence capacity, that a state represents.His coverage of the question of American ‘decline’ is particularly thoughtful.Without any jingoism, he notes all the elements that continue to make the UnitedStates the singularly most powerful nation, and then goes on to examine potentialcompetitors, noting their respective strengths, but equally importantly, their limitationsand weaknesses. He examines Europe, Japan, and the so-called BRICs (Brazil,Russia, India and China) as potential competitors or replacements for the UnitedStates as the pre-eminent global power. He ends up with the view that US preeminenceis likely to endure, especially, but not only, if its current problems of debt,political gridlock and declining education standards are addressed. Only Chinarepresents a potential peer competitor to the United States, and even then only inthe uncertain case it maintains its current growth trajectory into the future. Thatsaid, Nye sees there is a rebalancing of the relativities of power caused by ‘the riseof the rest’ rather than any US decline. He views this as leading to ‘… an increasingnumber of issues in which solutions will require power with others as much aspower over others’ (italics in original). 3In the final part of the book, Joseph Nye lays out his policy prescriptions forapplying power. He advocates an American ‘smart power’ strategy; smart powerbeing his term for the judicious combination of hard power, both military andeconomic, and soft power to achieve desired outcomes. In this sense, his visionof ‘smart power’ is an evolution of his earlier thinking on soft power. This was thesection of Nye’s book of which I had the most expectation, and where in the endI was a little disappointed. I accept that soft power is real, not just a polite fiction,and a necessary complement to the unabashed use of hard power. I also recognisethe need for a cohesive strategy that uses the different forms of power in the rightcombination to achieve the desired ends, rather than just accepting some incompleteand inadequate surrogate short of that final objective. Examples of this focus onusing power effectively to achieve the desired end might include: not just attainingthe military objective in a war, but really winning the war by building the right peacewhich all sides will accept into the future; or not just enforcing sanctions to punisha rogue state for its development of nuclear weapons, but actually persuading thatstate to change its objectives and eschew the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Therehas always been a problem converting means to ends in strategy, and I didn’t expecta simple formula for this. However, if it is hard to convert the blunt instruments ofpage 148 • Volume IX, Number 1 • Australian Army Journal
The Future of Powermilitary and economic power into the right outcomes, it is much harder to convertthe diffuse influence of soft power. Here I hoped Nye might have some concreteguidance that practitioners of strategy could follow, but I was left disappointed withonly vague suggestions.If you are interested in power, international relations or national strategy, don’t letthis reservation stop you from reading Nye’s book. His concepts and ideas influencedecision-makers particularly in the United States (perhaps he is a living example ofsoft power in action). If you want to understand the language these decision-makerswill use, then you will need to understand the concepts of ‘soft’ and ‘smart’ power,and there is no better guide than the person who coined these terms—Joseph Nye.Endnotes1 See http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers, accessed on 14 December 20112 Joseph S. Nye Jr, Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics, PublicAffairs,New York, 2005.3 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Future of Power, PublicAffairs, New York, 2011, p. 204.Australian Army Journal • Volume IX, Number 1 • page 149

The Future of Power by Joseph S Nye Jr - Australian Army

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