Book Review - The Future of Power by Joseph S Nye Jr

Journal Edition

Written by: Joseph S Nye Jr

PublicAffairs, New York, 2011,

ISBN 9781586488918, 320 pp

Reviewed by: David Goyne

Joseph Nye has given eminent service to the US Government as a deputy undersecretary in the State Department, an assistant secretary in the Defense Department, and as chairman of the US National Intelligence Council. As an academic, he has been the dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, probably the premier global institute for studying and teaching how government works. He has written extensively on power in international relations and government and how to use that power. Foreign Policy placed him on their 2011 list of global thinkers (a respectable 64 out of 100), noting: ‘When Foreign Policy asked 10 prominent American political scholars what prospective 2012 presidential candidates should read, four picked books by Joseph Nye, the longtime Harvard University professor and former deputy undersecretary of state best known for coining the now-ubiquitous term “soft power”‘.¹ This track record makes a new book by Joseph Nye on what ‘power’ is and how it functions in the modern world particularly interesting.

In The Future of Power Nye extends his concept of ‘soft power’² (that part of national power based on attraction rather than compulsion) to the totality of what constitutes power, and how to apply it successfully. His perspective, naturally enough, is how the United States should use its power wisely to achieve its global ends. This US focus does not limit this book’s utility for others, who, as well as being able to use their own national power successfully, will need to understand the capacity and approach of what is still the dominant global superpower.

The first part of the book examines the question of how to define power, and then the elements that make up national power with a chapter each on military power, economic power and soft power. Here Nye shows the gap between power’s capability in any of its forms to affect someone for either good or ill, and the limited ability of power to persuade someone to do as you wish. This, however, is the necessary conversion you must make if you are to succeed in your purpose.

The second part of the book examines what Nye calls ‘power shifts’; that is, the changes in the way power is applied today and in the relative power of major global actors. He covers both ‘cyberpower’ and the question of ‘American decline’ in two separate 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 as diffusing power to a range of actors beyond the traditional states, while not ignoring the 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 United States the singularly most powerful nation, and then goes on to examine potential competitors, noting their respective strengths, but equally importantly, their limitations and weaknesses. He examines Europe, Japan, and the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as potential competitors or replacements for the United States as the pre-eminent global power. He ends up with the view that US preeminence is likely to endure, especially, but not only, if its current problems of debt, political gridlock and declining education standards are addressed. Only China represents a potential peer competitor to the United States, and even then only in the uncertain case it maintains its current growth trajectory into the future. That said, Nye sees there is a rebalancing of the relativities of power caused by ‘the rise of the rest’ rather than any US decline. He views this as leading to ‘... an increasing number of issues in which solutions will require power with others as much as power over others’ (italics in original).³

In the final part of the book, Joseph Nye lays out his policy prescriptions for applying power. He advocates an American ‘smart power’ strategy; smart power being his term for the judicious combination of hard power, both military and economic, and soft power to achieve desired outcomes. In this sense, his vision of ‘smart power’ is an evolution of his earlier thinking on soft power. This was the section of Nye’s book of which I had the most expectation, and where in the end I 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 recognise the need for a cohesive strategy that uses the different forms of power in the right combination to achieve the desired ends, rather than just accepting some incomplete and inadequate surrogate short of that final objective. Examples of this focus on using power effectively to achieve the desired end might include: not just attaining the military objective in a war, but really winning the war by building the right peace which all sides will accept into the future; or not just enforcing sanctions to punish a rogue state for its development of nuclear weapons, but actually persuading that state to change its objectives and eschew the acquisition of nuclear weapons. There has always been a problem converting means to ends in strategy, and I didn’t expect a simple formula for this. However, if it is hard to convert the blunt instruments of military and economic power into the right outcomes, it is much harder to convert the diffuse influence of soft power. Here I hoped Nye might have some concrete guidance that practitioners of strategy could follow, but I was left disappointed with only vague suggestions.

If you are interested in power, international relations or national strategy, don’t let this reservation stop you from reading Nye’s book. His concepts and ideas influence decision-makers particularly in the United States (perhaps he is a living example of soft power in action). If you want to understand the language these decision-makers will 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.