Many Americans, Joseph Nye says, still think of their country’s role in the world as “the Lone Ranger riding into town and shooting the bad guys.” It’s a notion that he argues is not only hopelessly out of date but harmful to international relations.

“There’s something wrong when we can’t think more creatively and more flexibly about power,” he told a standing room-only crowd at the RAND Corporation campus in Santa Monica.

Nye, a political scientist at Harvard and author of the new book The Future of Power, began his lecture by defining three types of power: payment, or “carrots”; threats, or “sticks”; and soft power, which relies on neither. A successful nation must be able to use both hard and soft power – or, smart power – in order to accomplish his goals, he said.

Power Transition

Anyone can see that the balance of power in the world has shifted, Nye said, but too few understand the shift or its ramifications. He asked the audience to consider the state of the world in 1800, when Asia contained a little more than half of the globe’s population and produced slightly more than half of its goods. A hundred years later, Asia still held more than half the world population but produced just 20 percent of its products because of the industrial revolution in Europe and North America.

Thus, the current shift of power to nations like China and India is not sudden, Nye said, but “the recovery of Asia, a return to normal proportions.”

Furthermore, he argued, people misinterpret what other nations’ rise means for the United States, too often concluding that the U.S. is declining.

“One poll shows that the majority of American people think China is a larger economy than the U.S.,” he said. “This factually doesn’t have any relation to reality.”

In fact, the U.S. economy is more than three times the size of China’s, he said.

Instead, Nye said, nations on the rise are simply narrowing the gap between the United States’ world standing and their own. This isn’t necessarily a threat to the U.S., but it changes the way the American government must interact with others.

Power Diffusion

The most unappreciated way that international relations is changing, Nye said, is what he termed “power diffusion.” Power is shifting not just to other nations, but to non-state actors like nonprofits, terrorist groups and corporations. There are examples in all three groups that actually outspend many nations, and their share in the balance of power has increased accordingly.
Al-Qaeda, a non-state actor, has killed more Americans in 2011 than the Japanese government did at Pearl Harbor, he said, drawing murmurs from the crowd.

These non-state actors have been empowered by the democratization of information. When Nye served in President Carter’s administration, he worked on a top-secret project that allowed the U.S. to take a picture of any place on earth, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

“Now,” he said, “anyone can do it on Google Earth for free. It’s making it possible for others to play the game who were previously priced out of the game.”

Power Online

In discussing how the rise of the Internet has changed the world’s balance of power, Nye referred to a favorite cartoon from The New Yorker from several years ago. In it, two dogs sit at a computer. “Don’t worry,” one tells the other. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The punchline drew a hearty laugh, and Nye said it’s been quite prescient. The advantage of cyber-attacks is that it is tremendously difficult to know who has perpetrated them, and thus nearly impossible to respond appropriately.

The precedent for this phenomenon stretches back to Gutenberg’s printing press, he said. And, remarkably, the price of computing dropped a thousand-fold over the last quarter of the 20th century.

“A way to register that, to fix it in your mind,” he said, “is if the price of an automobile had dropped as quickly as the price of computing, you’d be able to buy a car today for five dollars.”

That price drop has led to complicated situations for the U.S., like the presence of Wikileaks. The American government must become more adept at showing its smart power not only to foreign governments, but to people like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, he said.

Issues of the Day

Unsurprisingly, world events played a large role both in Nye’s lecture and in the questions he was asked afterward. His discussion of the different ways of displaying power segued into a topical example about climate change. He asked the audience to consider how the U.S. should address the fact that China is building two new coal-fired power plants every week, causing significant harm to the environment.

Sending missiles to destroy the plants would be a hard power option, as would putting tariffs on Chinese goods or calling for a boycott. Yet both of those possibilities would harm the United States and its allies. Instead, he argued, the U.S. government should work with China to reduce its carbon intensity, thus helping both countries at once.

One audience member asked about the role of smart power in Libya, specifically in relation to President Obama’s actions there. Nye endorsed the President’s decisions, saying he has struck a good balance between helping other nations and refusing to get U.S. troops deeply involved.

“He thinks of himself not as king of the mountain, but as the center of the circle,” Nye said. “That, to me, is the right kind of leadership.”

See event photos here.
See full video here.
For an excerpt from The Future of Power, please click here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photos by Aaron Salcido