The Future of Power by Joseph S. Nye Jr.

This paper is based on the speech of Joseph S. Nye Jr. at the Harvard University about his book, The Future of Power. He is a University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard and he is also the author of The Power to Lead.

Joseph on his speech mainly talks about some of the key issues that he has mentioned in his book, The Future of Power. He describes power in a simple way as the ability to affect others to get the things you want and further points out the three ways that one can use the power i.e. Coercion, Payment and Attraction and Persuasion. Coercion and Payment in other term are also known as Sticks and Carrots simultaneously and falls under the category of hard power and Attraction and Persuasion as soft power.

Jospeh developed a term “Smart Power” in 2003 which is the combination of the tools of both soft and hard powers. He argues that, it is a big challenge to any of the actors in global politics in 21^st century to combine the soft and hard power to create a smart power.

Power or the use of power is contextual. Hence he talks about the two great power shifts in 21^st century. One is Power transition from West to East and the other is Power diffusion from state to non state actors. Talking about the power transition, Joseph criticizes people using the term “Rise of Asia” and rather he argues saying it is a “Recovery of Asia”. He focuses on how Asia was powerful during 1800s with half of the population being in Asia and more than half of the product in Asia. Despite of some decrement on the product in the Asia during 1900s, there is a symptom of Asia getting back on the right proportion somewhere in 21^st century.  He criticizes or does not agree with how power was seen during the tenure of Theodore Roosevelt. They view that power would migrate around world from East to West which Joseph claim to be a typical America view. Joseph argues that the power keeps migrating around the globe. He claims that we will see more of the world economic activity in Asia. However, he also says that US will continue to be the most powerful state for some decades because of its allies and use of soft power. Hence, China cannot surpass US despite of it s increasing GDP.

The second shift is the power diffusion which means the movement of power from governments to non government or non state actors. He uses the terminology “information revolution” which is an extra ordinary decrease in the cost of computing and is one of the major causes of rapid and much spread of power diffusion. With the decrease in the cost of computing the excess has increased and it has decreased the barrier to enter or act in the global politics. Joseph provides an example of use of the software Google Earth to view the geographical location of any place in the world for free which otherwise took a huge amount of money to do so in previous decades. However, he argues that while the states and the governments remain to be the most powerful actors in the global politics, they have to share the stage with many new actors which will become crowded and difficult to control. The regime changes in Egypt and Middle East is an example of power diffusion. He also talks about the web and the cyber and how its use is increasing rapidly. US Government depends on cyber a lot hence it is equally vulnerable. He drags the attention towards developing a broader awareness among public and policy makers to develop sensible strategies for cyber.

        

Joseph states that in order to sustain in the world of diffusion of power, one has to consciously balance the use of soft and hard power according to the need and this is smart power. He says that, in today's information age, success is the result not merely of whose army wins but also of whose story wins. Hence he urge that US has to equally give priority to the use of soft power as it has been much focused on use of hard power. For instance, killing of Osama Bin Laden or finishing the Al-Qaida by the use of hard power is not just the answer, minds and hearts of the people also has to be won with soft power.

Joseph says that in today’s world global power resources are distributed in a pattern that resembles a three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is unipolar, and the United States will remain supreme for the foreseeable future. But on the middle chessboard, economic power has been multipolar for more than a decade, with Europe. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations, where things are cross borders and outside of the control of governments whether be it terrorist or pandemics and climate change. On this bottom board, power is diffused, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity or multipolarity. This bottom part can be only dealt with cooperation and that is where the soft power plays a big role.

To sum up his speech, he focuses on the need of understanding the changing dynamics of the power and he also argues that power itself is not good or bad but getting the right dimension of power and the right strategy for using it is important. It is necessary to understand that not necessarily rise of the rest means decline of yours.