Power is the ability to affect others to produce the outcomes one wants. This can be accomplished by coercion and payment or by attraction and persuasion. What resources will produce such power in this century? In the 16th century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; the 17th-century Netherlands profited from trade and finance; 18th-century France benefited from its large population and army; 19th-century Britain relied on the Industrial Revolution and its navy for primacy. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in the information age of the 21st century, it may be the state (or nonstates) with the best story that wins. It is no longer clear how to measure the global balance of power, much less how to develop successful strategies to survive in this new world.
Two great power shifts are under way—power transition and power diffusion. Power transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical process, and many analysts explain it with a narrative of American decline, replete with historical analogies to Britain and Rome. But Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after its apogee, and even then it did not succumb to the rise of another state, but died a death of a thousand cuts inflicted by internecine conflict and external attacks by barbarian tribes. Indeed, for all the fashionable predictions of China’s, India’s, or Brazil’s surpassing the United States in the next decades, the greater threat may be modern barbarians and nonstate actors.
The second shift is power diffusion. While states will remain the dominant actors on the world stage, that stage will become more crowded and difficult to control. More and more people have access to more and more information. What we see in the Middle East today is an example of how fast and affordable communication technology can empower previously disenfranchised elements in societies. International affairs are no longer the sole province of governments. Individuals and private organizations—corporations, NGO’s, terrorists—now play a direct role in world politics.
Today, 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 China, Europe, Japan, and the United States as the major players. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations, where multinational corporations transfer vast sums of money, terrorists transfer weapons, and hackers threaten cybersecurity. There is also the challenge of pandemics and climate change. On this bottom board, power is diffused, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, hegemony, or empire.
When it comes to transnational politics—the bottom chessboard—the information revolution has significantly reduced barriers to entry in global politics. Forty years ago, instantaneous global communication was possible but costly, and restricted to governments and large corporations. Today it is free on Skype. When I served in the State Department, in the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union spent billions on satellite photographs with one-meter resolution. Today anyone can download higher-quality pictures from Google Earth, free. In 2001 a nonstate group killed more Americans than the government of Japan killed at Pearl Harbor. A pandemic spread by birds or airplane travelers could kill more people than perished in World War I or II. And increasingly, power will be exercised in the diffuse domain of cyber interactions.
In this environment, America cannot achieve its goals by acting alone. For example, international financial stability is vital to American prosperity, but it’s impossible to maintain without the cooperation of others. The same goes for climate change. As international borders become more porous, nations must use soft power to build networks and institutions to respond to shared threats. In this sense, power becomes a positive-sum game. It is no longer sufficient to think exclusively of wielding power over others. We must instead think of using power to accomplish goals with others.
In the United States, we tend to focus on the hard power of coercion and payment. This is partly a reflection of American political culture and institutions. No politician wants to appear “soft,” and Congress finds it easier to increase the budget of the Pentagon than of the State Department. This bias has been reinforced by prevailing scholarship. The dominant approach to international affairs is realism, which boasts a lineage that stretches back to Thucydides and Machiavelli. To realists, the world is anarchic, and sovereign states must rely on their own devices, including military force, to ensure their independence. Realists come in many sizes and shapes, but all tend to view global politics as power politics. In this they’re right. But they conceive of power too narrowly. A pragmatic or common-sense realism should take into account the full spectrum of power resources, including ideas, persuasion, and attraction that derive from a country’s culture, values, and policies that are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others. Many classical realists of the past understood the role of soft power better than some of their modern academic progeny do.
Realism adequately represents some aspects of international relations. But states are no longer the only important actors in global affairs; military security is not the only major outcome that they seek; and force is not the only or always the best instrument available to achieve desired outcomes. Indeed, the relationship among advanced postindustrial countries is one of complex interdependence. This deep network of transnational ties among democratic societies means that the absence of any overarching government has very different effects in such contexts than realism predicts.
It is not solely in relations among advanced countries that soft power plays an important role. In an information age, communications become more important, and outcomes are shaped not merely by whose army wins but also by whose story wins. In combating terrorism, for example, it is essential to have a narrative that appeals to mainstream Muslims. It was necessary to use hard military force against Osama bin Laden. We could not attract him, but soft-power instruments are necessary to shape the preferences (“win the hearts and minds”) of the majority in the Muslim world, reducing the likelihood of radicalization.
In the 21st century, a smart foreign policy will combine the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of attraction and persuasion. It’s no longer adequate to define a “great power” as a country able to prevail in war (in the words of the historian A.J.P. Taylor). Success depends not only on whose army wins but also on whose story wins. American political leaders and many scholars have not yet adjusted to this new reality. It is time that they do.
