The Evolution of Power

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 It’s a notion that he argues is not only hopelessly out of date but harmful to international relations.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 …