CHAPTER ONE

The Changing Nature of Power

MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES AGO, Niccolo Machiavelli advised

princes in Italy that it was more important to be feared than to be loved. But
in today’s world, it is best to be both. Winning hearts and minds has always
been important, but it is even more so in a global information age.
Information is power, and modern information technology is spreading
information more widely than ever before in history. Yet political leaders
have spent little time thinking about how the nature of power has changed
and, more specifically, about how to incorporate the soft dimensions into
their strategies for wielding power.

WHAT IS POWER?

Power is like the weather. Everyone depends on it and talks about it, but few
understand it. Just as farmers and meteorologists try to forecast the weather,
political leaders and analysts try to describe and predict changes in power
relationships. Power is also like love, easier to experience than to define or
measure, but no less real for that. The dictionary tells us that power is the
capacity to do things. At this most general level, power means the ability to
get the outcomes one wants. The dictionary also tells us that power means
having the capabilities to affect the behavior of others to make those things
happen. So more specifically, power is the ability to influence the behavior
of others to get the outcomes one wants. But there are several ways to affect
the behavior of others. You can coerce them with threats; you can induce
them with payments; or you can attract and co-opt them to want what you
want.
 Some people think of power narrowly, in terms of command and coercion.
You experience it when you can make others do what they would otherwise
not do.1 You say “Jump!” and they jump. This appears to be a simple test of
power, but things are not as straightforward as they first appear. Suppose
those whom you command, like my granddaughters, already love to jump?
When we measure power in terms of the changed behavior of others, we
have first to know their preferences. Otherwise we may be as mistaken about
our power as a rooster who thinks his crowing makes the sun rise. And the
power may evaporate when the context changes. The playground bully who
terrorizes other children and makes them jump at his command loses his
power as soon as the class returns from recess to a strict classroom. A cruel
dictator can lock up or execute a dissident, but that may not prove his power
if the dissenter was really seeking martyrdom. Power always depends on the
context in which the relationship exists.2
Knowing in advance how others would behave in the absence of our
commands is often difficult. What is more, as we shall see, sometimes we
can get the outcomes we want by affecting behavior without commanding it.
If you believe that my objectives are legitimate, I may be able to persuade
you to do something for me without using threats or inducements. It is
possible to get many desired outcomes without having much tangible power
over others. For example, some loyal Catholics may follow the pope’s
teaching on capital punishment not because of a threat of excommunication
but out of respect for his moral authority. Or some radical Muslim
fundamentalists may be attracted to support Osama bin Laden’s actions not
because of payments or threats, but because they believe in the legitimacy of
his objectives.
Practical politicians and ordinary people often find these questions of
behavior and motivation too complicated. Thus they turn to a second
definition of power and simply define it as the possession of capabilities or
resources that can influence outcomes. Consequently they consider a country
powerful if it has a relatively large population and territory, extensive natural
resources, economic strength, military force, and social stability. The virtue
of this second definition is that it makes power appear more concrete,
measurable, and predictable. But this definition also has problems. When
people define power as synonymous with the resources that produce it, they
sometimes encounter the paradox that those best endowed with power do not
always get the outcomes they want.
Power resources are not as fungible as money. What wins in one game may
not help at all in another. Holding a winning poker hand does not help if the
game is bridge.3 Even if the game is poker, if you play your high hand poorly,
you can still lose. Having power resources does not guarantee that you will
always get the outcome you want. For example, in terms of resources the
United States was far more powerful than Vietnam, yet we lost the Vietnam
War. And America was the world’s only superpower in 2001, but we failed
to prevent September 11.
Converting resources into realized power in the sense of obtaining desired
outcomes requires well-designed strategies and skillful leadership. Yet
strategies are often inadequate and leaders frequently misjudge—witness
Japan and Germany in 1941 or Saddam Hussein in 1990. As a first
approximation in any game, it always helps to start by figuring out who is
holding the high cards. But it is equally important to understand what game
you are playing. Which resources provide the best basis for power behavior
in a particular context? Oil was not an impressive power resource before the
industrial age nor was uranium significant before the nuclear age.
In earlier periods, international power resources may have been easier to
assess. A traditional test of a Great Power in international politics was
“strength for war.”4 But over the centuries, as technologies evolved, the
sources of strength for war often changed. For example, in eighteenth-century
Europe, population was a critical power resource because it provided a base
for taxes and the recruitment of infantry. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in
1815, Prussia presented its fellow victors at the Congress of Vienna with a
precise plan for its own reconstruction with territories and populations to be
transferred to maintain a balance of power against France. In the
prenationalist period, it did not matter that many of the people in those
transferred provinces did not speak German. However, within half a century
popular sentiments of nationalism had grown greatly, and Germany’s seizure
of Alsace and Lorraine from France in 1870 became one of the underlying
causes of World War I. Instead of being assets, the transferred provinces
became liabilities in the changed context of nationalism. In short, power
resources cannot be judged without knowing the context. Before you judge
who is holding the high cards, you need to understand what game you are
playing and how the value of the cards may be changing.
For example, the distribution of power resources in the contemporary
information age varies greatly on different issues. We are told that the United
States is the only superpower in a “unipolar” world. But the context is far
more complex than first meets the eye. The agenda of world politics has
become like a three-dimensional chess game in which one can win only by
playing vertically as well as horizontally. On the top board of classic
interstate military issues, the United States is indeed the only superpower
with global military reach, and it makes sense to speak in traditional terms of
unipolarity or hegemony. However, on the middle board of interstate
economic issues, the distribution of power is multipolar. The United States
cannot obtain the outcomes it wants on trade, antitrust, or financial regulation
issues without the agreement of the European Union, Japan, China, and
others. It makes little sense to call this American hegemony. And on the
bottom board of transnational issues like terrorism, international crime,
climate change, and the spread of infectious diseases, power is widely
distributed and chaotically organized among state and nonstate actors. It
makes no sense at all to call this a unipolar world or an American empire—
despite the claims of propagandists on the right and left. And this is the set of
issues that is now intruding into the world of grand strategy. Yet many
political leaders still focus almost entirely on military assets and classic
military solutions—the top board. They mistake the necessary for the
sufficient. They are one-dimensional players in a three-dimensional game. In
the long term, that is the way to lose, since obtaining favorable outcomes on
the bottom transnational board often requires the use of soft power assets.

SOFT POWER

Everyone is familiar with hard power. We know that military and economic
might often get others to change their position. Hard power can rest on
inducements (“carrots”) or threats (“sticks”). But sometimes you can get the
outcomes you want without tangible threats or payoffs. The indirect way to
get what you want has sometimes been called “the second face of power.” A
country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other
countries—admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of
prosperity and openness—want to follow it. In this sense, it is also important
to set the agenda and attract others in world politics, and not only to force
them to change by threatening military force or economic sanctions. This soft
power—getting others to want the outcomes that you want—co-opts people
rather than coerces them.5
Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others. At the
personal level, we are all familiar with the power of attraction and
seduction. In a relationship or a marriage, power does not necessarily reside
with the larger partner, but in the mysterious chemistry of attraction. And in
the business world, smart executives know that leadership is not just a matter
of issuing commands, but also involves leading by example and attracting
others to do what you want. It is difficult to run a large organization by
commands alone. You also need to get others to buy in to your values.
Similarly, contemporary practices of community-based policing rely on
making the police sufficiently friendly and attractive that a community wants
to help them achieve shared objectives.6
Political leaders have long understood the power that comes from
attraction. If I can get you to want to do what I want, then I do not have to use
carrots or sticks to make you do it. Whereas leaders in authoritarian
countries can use coercion and issue commands, politicians in democracies
have to rely more on a combination of inducement and attraction. Soft power
is a staple of daily democratic politics. The ability to establish preferences
tends to be associated with intangible assets such as an attractive personality,
culture, political values and institutions, and policies that are seen as
legitimate or having moral authority. If a leader represents values that others
want to follow, it will cost less to lead.
Soft power is not merely the same as influence. After all, influence can
also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. And soft power is more
than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is
an important part of it. It is also the ability to attract, and attraction often
leads to acquiescence. Simply put, in behavioral terms soft power is
attractive power. In terms of resources, soft-power resources are the assets
that produce such attraction. Whether a particular asset is a soft-power
resource that produces attraction can be measured by asking people through
polls or focus groups. Whether that attraction in turn produces desired policy
outcomes has to be judged in particular cases. Attraction does not always
determine others’ preferences, but this gap between power measured as
resources and power judged as the outcomes of behavior is not unique to soft
power. It occurs with all forms of power. Before the fall of France in 1940,
Britain and France had more tanks than Germany, but that advantage in
military power resources did not accurately predict the outcome of the battle.
One way to think about the difference between hard and soft power is to
consider the variety of ways you can obtain the outcomes you want. You can
command me to change my preferences and do what you want by threatening
me with force or economic sanctions. You can induce me to do what you
want by using your economic power to pay me. You can restrict my
preferences by setting the agenda in such a way that my more extravagant
wishes seem too unrealistic to pursue. Or you can appeal to a sense of
attraction, love, or duty in our relationship and appeal to our shared values
about the justness of contributing to those shared values and purposes.7 If I
am persuaded to go along with your purposes without any explicit threat or
exchange taking place—in short, if my behavior is determined by an
observable but intangible attraction—soft power is at work. Soft power uses
a different type of currency (not force, not money) to engender cooperation—
an attraction to shared values and the justness and duty of contributing to the
achievement of those values. Much as Adam Smith observed that people are
led by an invisible hand when making decisions in a free market, our
decisions in the marketplace for ideas are often shaped by soft power—an
intangible attraction that persuades us to go along with others’ purposes
without any explicit threat or exchange taking place.
Hard and soft power are related because they are both aspects of the
ability to achieve one’s purpose by affecting the behavior of others. The
distinction between them is one of degree, both in the nature of the behavior
and in the tangibility of the resources. Command power—the ability to
change what others do—can rest on coercion or inducement. Co-optive
power—the ability to shape what others want—can rest on the attractiveness
of one’s culture and values or the ability to manipulate the agenda of political
choices in a manner that makes others fail to express some preferences
because they seem to be too unrealistic. The types of behavior between
command and co-option range along a spectrum from coercion to economic
inducement to agenda setting to pure attraction. Soft-power resources tend to
be associated with the co-optive end of the spectrum of behavior, whereas
hard-power resources are usually associated with command behavior. But
the relationship is imperfect. For example, sometimes countries may be
attracted to others with command power by myths of invincibility, and
command power may sometimes be used to establish institutions that later
become regarded as legitimate. A strong economy not only provides
resources for sanctions and payments, but can also be a source of
attractiveness. On the whole, however, the general association between the
types of behavior and certain resources is strong enough to allow us to
employ the useful shorthand reference to hard- and soft-power resources.8

Power
In international politics, the resources that produce soft power arise in
large part from the values an organization or country expresses in its culture,
in the examples it sets by its internal practices and policies, and in the way it
handles its relations with others. Governments sometimes find it difficult to
control and employ soft power, but that does not diminish its importance. It
was a former French foreign minister who observed that the Americans are
powerful because they can “inspire the dreams and desires of others, thanks
to the mastery of global images through film and television and because, for
these same reasons, large numbers of students from other countries come to
the United States to finish their studies.”9 Soft power is an important reality.
Even the great British realist E. H. Carr, writing in 1939, described
international power in three categories: military, economic, and power over
opinion.10 Those who deny the importance of soft power are like people
who do not understand the power of seduction.
During a meeting with President John F. Kennedy, the senior statesman
John J. McCloy exploded in anger about paying attention to popularity and
attraction in world politics: “‘World opinion’? I don’t believe in world
opinion. The only thing that matters is power.” But like Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy understood that the ability to attract others and
move opinion was an element of power.11 He understood the importance of
soft power.
As mentioned above, sometimes the same power resources can affect the
entire spectrum of behavior from coercion to attraction. A country that suffers
economic and military decline is likely to lose not only its hard-power
resources but also some of its ability to shape the international agenda and
some of its attractiveness. Some countries may be attracted to others with
hard power by the myth of invincibility or inevitability. Both Hitler and
Stalin tried to develop such myths. Hard power can also be used to establish
empires and institutions that set the agenda for smaller states—witness
Soviet rule over the countries of Eastern Europe. President Kennedy was
properly concerned that although polls showed the United States to be more
popular, they also showed a Soviet lead in perceptions of its space program
and the strength of its nuclear arsenal.12
But soft power does not depend on hard power. The Vatican has soft
power despite Stalin’s mocking question “How many divisions does the
Pope have?” The Soviet Union once had a good deal of soft power, but it lost
much of it after the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Soviet soft
power declined even as its hard economic and military resources continued
to grow. Because of its brutal policies, the Soviet Union’s hard power
actually undercut its soft power. In contrast, the Soviet sphere of influence in
Finland was reinforced by a degree of soft power. Similarly, the United
States’ sphere of influence in Latin America in the 1930s was reinforced
when Franklin Roosevelt added the soft power of his “good neighbor
policy.”13
 Sometimes countries enjoy political clout that is greater than their military
and economic weight would suggest because they define their national
interest to include attractive causes such as economic aid or peacemaking.
For example, in the past two decades Norway has taken a hand in peace talks
in the Philippines, the Balkans, Colombia, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and the
Middle East. Norwegians say this grows out of their Lutheran missionary
heritage, but at the same time the posture of peacemaker identifies Norway
with values shared by other nations that enhance Norway’s soft power.
Foreign Minister Jan Peterson argued that “we gain some access,” explaining
that Norway’s place at so many negotiating tables elevates its usefulness and
value to larger countries.14
Michael Ignatieff describes the position of Canada from a similar point of
view: “Influence derives from three assets: moral authority as a good citizen
which we have got some of, military capacity which we have got a lot less
of, and international assistance capability.” With regard to the United States,
“we have something they want. They need legitimacy.”15 That in turn can
increase Canada’s influence when it bargains with its giant neighbor. The
Polish government decided to send troops to postwar Iraq not only to curry
favor with the United States but also as a way to create a broader positive
image of Poland in world affairs. When the Taliban government fell in
Afghanistan in 2001, the Indian foreign minister flew to Kabul to welcome
the new interim government in a plane not packed with arms or food but
crammed with tapes of Bollywood movies and music, which were quickly
distributed across the city.16 As we shall see in chapter 3, many countries
have soft-power resources.
Institutions can enhance a country’s soft power. For example, Britain in the
nineteenth century and the United States in the second half of the twentieth
century advanced their values by creating a structure of international rules
and institutions that were consistent with the liberal and democratic nature of
the British and American economic systems: free trade and the gold standard
in the case of Britain; the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organization, and the United Nations in the case of the United States. When
countries make their power legitimate in the eyes of others, they encounter
less resistance to their wishes. If a country’s culture and ideology are
attractive, others more willingly follow. If a country can shape international
rules that are consistent with its interests and values, its actions will more
likely appear legitimate in the eyes of others. If it uses institutions and
follows rules that encourage other countries to channel or limit their
activities in ways it prefers, it will not need as many costly carrots and
sticks.

SOURCES OF SOFT POWER

The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in
places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up
to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as
legitimate and having moral authority.)
Let’s start with culture. Culture is the set of values and practices that
create meaning for a society. It has many manifestations. It is common to
distinguish between high culture such as literature, art, and education, which
appeals to elites, and popular culture, which focuses on mass entertainment.
When a country’s culture includes universal values and its policies
promote values and interests that others share, it increases the probability of
obtaining its desired outcomes because of the relationships of attraction and
duty that it creates. Narrow values and parochial cultures are less likely to
produce soft power. The United States benefits from a universalistic culture.
The German editor Josef Joffe once argued that America’s soft power was
even larger than its economic and military assets. “U.S. culture, low-brow or
high, radiates outward with an intensity last seen in the days of the Roman
Empire—but with a novel twist. Rome’s and Soviet Russia’s cultural sway
stopped exactly at their military borders. America’s soft power, though, rules
over an empire on which the sun never sets.”17
Some analysts treat soft power simply as popular cultural power. They
make the mistake of equating soft power behavior with the cultural resources
that sometimes help produce it. They confuse the cultural resources with the
behavior of attraction. For example, the historian Niall Ferguson describes
soft power as “nontraditional forces such as cultural and commercial goods”
and then dismisses it on the grounds “that it’s, well, soft.”18 Of course, Coke
and Big Macs do not necessarily attract people in the Islamic world to love
the United States. The North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is alleged to like
pizza and American videos, but that does not affect his nuclear programs.
Excellent wines and cheeses do not guarantee attraction to France, nor does
the popularity of Pokémon games assure that Japan will get the policy
outcomes it wishes.
This is not to deny that popular culture is often a resource that produces
soft power, but as we saw earlier, the effectiveness of any power resource
depends on the context. Tanks are not a great military power resource in
swamps or jungles. Coal and steel are not major power resources if a
country lacks an industrial base. Serbs eating at McDonald’s supported
Milosevic, and Rwandans committed atrocities while wearing T-shirts with
American logos. American films that make the United States attractive in
China or Latin America may have the opposite effect and actually reduce
American soft power in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. But in general, polls show
that our popular culture has made the United States seem to others “exciting,
exotic, rich, powerful, trend-setting—the cutting edge of modernity and
innovation.”19 And such images have appeal “in an age when people want to
partake of the good life American-style, even if as political citizens, they are
aware of the downside for ecology, community, and equality.”20 For
example, in explaining a new movement toward using lawsuits to assert
rights in China, a young Chinese activist explained, “We’ve seen a lot of
Hollywood movies—they feature weddings, funerals and going to court. So
now we think it’s only natural to go to court a few times in your life.”21 If
American objectives include the strengthening of the legal system in China,
such films may be more effective than speeches by the American ambassador
about the importance of the rule of law.
As we will see in the next chapter, the background attraction (and
repulsion) of American popular culture in different regions and among
different groups may make it easier or more difficult for American officials
to promote their policies. In some cases, such as Iran, the same Hollywood
images that repel the ruling mullahs may be attractive to the younger
generation. In China, the attraction and rejection of American culture among
different groups may cancel each other out.
Commerce is only one of the ways in which culture is transmitted. It also
occurs through personal contacts, visits, and exchanges. The ideas and values
that America exports in the minds of more than half a million foreign students
who study every year in American universities and then return to their home
countries, or in the minds of the Asian entrepreneurs who return home after
succeeding in Silicon Valley, tend to reach elites with power. Most of
China’s leaders have a son or daughter educated in the States who can
portray a realistic view of the United States that is often at odds with the
caricatures in official Chinese propaganda. Similarly, when the United States
was trying to persuade President Musharraf of Pakistan to change his
policies and be more supportive of American measures in Afghanistan, it
probably helped that he could hear from a son working in the Boston area.
Government policies at home and abroad are another potential source of
soft power. For example, in the 1950s racial segregation at home undercut
American soft power in Africa, and today the practice of capital punishment
and weak gun control laws undercut American soft power in Europe.
Similarly, foreign policies strongly affect soft power. Jimmy Carter’s human
rights policies are a case in point, as were government efforts to promote
democracy in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. In Argentina,
American human rights policies that were rejected by the military
government of the 1970s produced considerable soft power for the United
States two decades later, when the Peronists who were earlier imprisoned
subsequently came to power. Policies can have long-term as well as short-
term effects that vary as the context changes. The popularity of the United
States in Argentina in the early 1990s reflected Carter’s policies of the
1970s, and it led the Argentine government to support American policies in
the UN and in the Balkans. Nonetheless, American soft power eroded
significantly after the context changed again later in the decade when the
United States failed to rescue the Argentine economy from its collapse.
Government policies can reinforce or squander a country’s soft power.
Domestic or foreign policies that appear to be hypocritical, arrogant,
indifferent to the opinion of others, or based on a narrow approach to
national interests can undermine soft power. For example, in the steep
decline in the attractiveness of the United States as measured by polls taken
after the Iraq War in 2003, people with unfavorable views for the most part
said they were reacting to the Bush administration and its policies rather than
the United States generally. So far, they distinguish American people and
culture from American policies. The publics in most nations continued to
admire the United States for its technology, music, movies, and television.
But large majorities in most countries said they disliked the growing
influence of America in their country.22
The 2003 Iraq War is not the first policy action that has made the United
States unpopular. As we will see in the next chapter, three decades ago, many
people around the world objected to America’s war in Vietnam, and the
standing of the United States reflected the unpopularity of that policy. When
the policy changed and the memories of the war receded, the United States
recovered much of its lost soft power. Whether the same thing will happen in
the aftermath of the Iraq War will depend on the success of policies in Iraq,
developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and many other factors.
The values a government champions in its behavior at home (for example,
democracy), in international institutions (working with others), and in foreign
policy (promoting peace and human rights) strongly affect the preferences of
others. Governments can attract or repel others by the influence of their
example. But soft power does not belong to the government in the same
degree that hard power does. Some hard-power assets such as armed forces
are strictly governmental; others are inherently national, such as oil and
mineral reserves, and many can be transferred to collective control, such as
the civilian air fleet that can be mobilized in an emergency. In contrast, many
soft-power resources are separate from the American government and are
only partly responsive to its purposes. In the Vietnam era, for example,
American popular culture often worked at crosspurposes to official
government policy. Today, Hollywood movies that show scantily clad
women with libertine attitudes or fundamentalist Christian groups that
castigate Islam as an evil religion are both (properly) outside the control of
government in a liberal society, but they undercut government efforts to
improve relations with Islamic nations.

THE LIMITS OF SOFT POWER

Some skeptics object to the idea of soft power because they think of power
narrowly in terms of commands or active control. In their view, imitation or
attraction are simply that, not power. As we have seen, some imitation or
attraction does not produce much power over policy outcomes, and neither
does imitation always produce desirable outcomes. For example, in the
1980s, Japan was widely admired for its innovative industrial processes, but
imitation by companies in other countries came back to haunt the Japanese
when it reduced their market power. Similarly, armies frequently imitate and
therefore nullify the successful tactics of their opponents and make it more
difficult for them to achieve the outcomes they want. Such observations are
correct, but they miss the point that exerting attraction on others often does
allow you to get what you want. The skeptics who want to define power only
as deliberate acts of command and control are ignoring the second, or
“structural,” face of power—the ability to get the outcomes you want without
having to force people to change their behavior through threats or payments.
At the same time, it is important to specify the conditions under which
attraction is more likely to lead to desired outcomes, and under which it will
not. As we have seen, popular culture is more likely to attract people and
produce soft power in the sense of preferred outcomes in situations where
cultures are somewhat similar rather than widely dissimilar. All power
depends on context—who relates to whom under what circumstances—but
soft power depends more than hard power upon the existence of willing
interpreters and receivers. Moreover, attraction often has a diffuse effect,
creating general influence rather than producing an easily observable
specific action. Just as money can be invested, politicians speak of storing up
political capital to be drawn on in future circumstances. Of course, such
goodwill may not ultimately be honored, and diffuse reciprocity is less
tangible than an immediate exchange. Nonetheless, the indirect effects of
attraction and a diffuse influence can make a significant difference in
obtaining favorable outcomes in bargaining situations. Otherwise leaders
would insist only on immediate payoffs and specific reciprocity, and we
know that is not always the way they behave. Social psychologists have
developed a substantial body of empirical research exploring the
relationship between attractiveness and power.23
Soft power is also likely to be more important when power is dispersed in
another country rather than concentrated. A dictator cannot be totally
indifferent to the views of the people in his country, but he can often ignore
whether another country is popular or not when he calculates whether it is in
his interests to be helpful. In democracies where public opinion and
parliaments matter, political leaders have less leeway to adopt tactics and
strike deals than in autocracies. Thus it was impossible for the Turkish
government to permit the transport of American troops across the country in
2003 because American policies had greatly reduced our popularity in
public opinion and in the parliament. In contrast, it was far easier for the
United States to obtain the use of bases in authoritarian Uzbekistan for
operations in Afghanistan.
Finally, though soft power sometimes has direct effects on specific goals
—witness the inability of the United States to obtain the votes of Chile or
Mexico in the UN Security Council in 2003 after our policies reduced our
popularity—it is more likely to have an impact on the general goals that a
country seeks.24 Fifty years ago, Arnold Wolfers distinguished between the
specific “possession goals” that countries pursue, and their broader “milieu
goals,” like shaping an environment conducive to democracy.25 Successful
pursuit of both types of goals is important in foreign policy. If one considers
various American national interests, for example, soft power may be less
relevant than hard power in preventing attack, policing borders, and
protecting allies. But soft power is particularly relevant to the realization of
“milieu goals.” It has a crucial role to play in promoting democracy, human
rights, and open markets. It is easier to attract people to democracy than to
coerce them to be democratic. The fact that the impact of attraction on
achieving preferred outcomes varies by context and type of goals does not
make it irrelevant, any more than the fact that bombs and bayonets do not help
when we seek to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, slow global
warming, or create democracy.
Other skeptics object to using the term “soft power” in international
politics because governments are not in full control of the attraction. Much of
American soft power has been produced by Hollywood, Harvard, Microsoft,
and Michael Jordan. But the fact that civil society is the origin of much soft
power does not disprove its existence. In a liberal society, government
cannot and should not control the culture. Indeed, the absence of policies of
control can itself be a source of attraction. The Czech film director Milos
Forman recounts that when the Communist government let in the American
film Twelve Angry Men because of its harsh portrait of American institutions,
Czech intellectuals responded by thinking, “If that country can make this kind
of thing, films about itself, oh, that country must have a pride and must have
an inner strength, and must be strong enough and must be free.”26
It is true that firms, universities, foundations, churches, and other
nongovernmental groups develop soft power of their own that may reinforce
or be at odds with official foreign policy goals. That is all the more reason
for governments to make sure that their own actions and policies reinforce
rather than undercut their soft power. And this is particularly true since
private sources of soft power are likely to become increasingly important in
the global information age.
Finally, some skeptics argue that popularity measured by opinion polls is
ephemeral and thus not to be taken seriously. Of course, one must be careful
not to read too much into opinion polls. They are an essential but imperfect
measure of soft-power resources because answers vary depending on the
way that questions are formulated, and unless the same questions are asked
consistently over some period, they represent snapshots rather than a
continuous picture. Opinions can change, and such volatility cannot be
captured by any one poll. Moreover, political leaders must often make
unpopular decisions because they are the right thing to do, and hope that their
popularity may be repaired if the decision is subsequently proved correct.
Popularity is not an end in itself in foreign policy. Nonetheless, polls are a
good first approximation of both how attractive a country appears and the
costs that are incurred by unpopular policies, particularly when they show
consistency across polls and over time. And as we shall see in the next
chapter, that attractiveness can have an effect on our ability to obtain the
outcomes we want in the world.

THE CHANGING ROLE OF MILITARY POWER

In the twentieth century, science and technology added dramatic new

dimensions to power resources. With the advent of the nuclear age, the
United States and the Soviet Union possessed not only industrial might but
nuclear arsenals and intercontinental missiles. The age of the superpowers
had begun. Subsequently, the leading role of the United States in the
information revolution near the end of the century allowed it to create a
revolution in military affairs. The ability to use information technology to
create precision weapons, real-time intelligence, broad surveillance of
regional battlefields, and improved command and control allowed the United
States to surge ahead as the world’s only military superpower.
But the progress of science and technology had contradictory effects on
military power over the past century. On the one hand, it made the United
States the world’s only superpower, with unmatched military might, but at the
same time it gradually increased the political and social costs of using
military force for conquest. Paradoxically, nuclear weapons were acceptable
for deterrence, but they proved so awesome and destructive that they became
muscle-bound—too costly to use in war except, theoretically, in the most
extreme circumstances.27 Non-nuclear North Vietnam prevailed over nuclear
America, and non-nuclear Argentina was not deterred from attacking the
British Falkland Islands despite Britain’s nuclear status.
A second important change was the way that modern communications
technology fomented the rise and spread of nationalism, which made it more
difficult for empires to rule over socially awakened populations. In the
nineteenth century, Britain ruled a quarter of the globe with a tiny fraction of
the world’s population. As nationalism grew, colonial rule became too
expensive and the British empire collapsed. Formal empires with direct rule
over subject populations such as Europe exercised during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries are simply too costly in the twenty-first century.
In addition to nuclear and communications technology, social changes
inside the large democracies also raised the costs of using military power.
Postindustrial democracies are focused on welfare rather than glory, and they
dislike high casualties. This does not mean that they will not use force, even
when casualties are expected—witness Britain, France, and the United States
in the 1991 Gulf War, and Britain and the United States in the 2003 Iraq War.
But the absence of a prevailing warrior ethic in modern democracies means
that the use of force requires an elaborate moral justification to ensure
popular support, unless actual survival is at stake. For advanced
democracies, war remains possible, but it is much less acceptable than it
was a century, or even a half century, ago.28 The most powerful states have
lost much of the lust to conquer.29
 Robert Kagan has correctly pointed out that these social changes have
gone further in Europe than the United States, although his clever phrase that
Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus oversimplifies the
differences.30 After all, Europeans joined in pressing for the use of force in
Kosovo in 1999, and the Iraq War demonstrated that there were Europeans
from Mars and Americans who preferred Venus. Nonetheless, the success of
the European countries in creating an island of peace on the continent that had
been ravaged by three Franco-German wars in less than a century may
predispose them toward more peaceful solutions to conflict.
However, in a global economy even the United States must consider how
the use of force might jeopardize its economic objectives. After its victory in
World War II the United States helped to restructure Japan’s economy, but it
is hard to imagine that the United States today could effectively threaten force
to open Japanese markets or change the value of the yen. Nor can one easily
imagine the United States using force to resolve disputes with Canada or
Europe. Unlike earlier periods, islands of peace where the use of force is no
longer an option in relations among states have come to characterize
relations among most modern liberal democracies, and not just in Europe.
The existence of such islands of peace is evidence of the increasing
importance of soft power where there are shared values about what
constitutes acceptable behavior among similar democratic states. In their
relations with each other, all advanced democracies are from Venus.
Even nondemocratic countries that feel fewer popular moral constraints on
the use of force have to consider its effects on their economic objectives.
War risks deterring investors who control flows of capital in a globalized
economy.31 A century ago, it may have been easier to seize another state’s
territory by force than “to develop the sophisticated economic and trading
apparatus needed to derive benefit from commercial exchange with it.”32
But it is difficult to imagine a scenario today in which, for example, Japan
would try to or succeed in using military force to colonize its neighbors. As
two RAND analysts argue, “In the information age, ‘cooperative’ advantages
will become increasingly important. Moreover, societies that improve their
abilities to cooperate with friends and allies may also gain competitive
advantages against rivals.”33
 None of this is to suggest that military force plays no role in international
politics today. On the contrary, the information revolution has yet to
transform most of the world, and many states are unconstrained by
democratic societal forces. Civil wars are rife in many parts of the world
where collapsed empires left failed states and power vacuums. Even more
important is the way in which the democratization of technology is leading to
the privatization of war. Technology is a double-edged sword. On the one
hand, technological and social changes are making war more costly for
modern democracies. But at the same time, technology is putting new means
of destruction into the hands of extremist groups and individuals.

TERRORISM AND THE PRIVATIZATION OF WAR

Terrorism is not new, nor is it a single enemy. It is a long-standing method of

conflict frequently defined as deliberate attack on noncombatants with the
objective of spreading fear and intimidation. Already a century ago, the
novelist Joseph Conrad had drawn an indelible portrait of the terrorist mind,
and terrorism was a familiar phenomenon in the twentieth century. Whether
homegrown or transnational, it was a staple of conflicts throughout the
Middle East, in Northern Ireland, Spain, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, South Africa,
and elsewhere. It occurred on every continent except Antarctica and affected
nearly every country. September 11, 2001, was a dramatic escalation of an
age-old phenomenon. Yet two developments have made terrorism more lethal
and more difficult to manage in the twenty-first century.
One set of trends grows out of progress in science and technology. First,
there is the complex, highly technological nature of modern civilization’s
basic systems. As a committee of the National Academy of Sciences pointed
out, market forces and openness have combined to increase the efficiency of
many of our vital systems such as those that provide transportation,
information, energy, and health care. But some (though not all) systems
become more vulnerable and fragile as they become more complex and
efficient.34
At the same time, progress is “democratizing technology,” making the
instruments of mass destruction smaller, cheaper, and more readily available
to a far wider range of individuals and groups. Where bombs and timers
were once heavy and expensive, plastic explosives and digital timers are
light and cheap. The costs of hijacking an airplane are sometimes little more
than the price of a ticket.
In addition, the success of the information revolution is providing
inexpensive means of communication and organization that allow groups
once restricted to local and national police jurisdictions to become global in
scope. Thirty years ago, instantaneous global communication was sufficiently
expensive that it was restricted to large entities with big budgets like
governments, multinational corporations, or the Roman Catholic church.
Today the Internet makes global communication virtually free for anyone with
access to a modem. 35 Similarly, the Internet has reduced the costs of
searching for information and making contacts related to instruments of wide-
scale destruction. Terrorists also depend on getting their messages out
quickly to a broad audience through mass media and the Internet—witness
the widespread dissemination of bin Laden’s television interviews and
videotapes after September 11. Terrorism depends crucially on soft power
for its ultimate victory. It depends on its ability to attract support from the
crowd at least as much as its ability to destroy the enemy’s will to fight.
The second set of trends reflects changes in the motivation and
organization of terrorist groups. Terrorists in the mid-twentieth century
tended to have relatively well-defined political objectives, which were often
ill served by mass destruction. They were said to want many people
watching rather than many people killed. Such terrorists were often
supported and covertly controlled by governments such as Libya or Syria.
Toward the end of the century, radical groups grew on the fringes of several
religions. Most numerous were the tens of thousands of young Muslim men
who went to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. There they
were trained in a wide range of techniques, and many were recruited to
organizations with an extreme view of the religious obligation of jihad. As
the historian Walter Laquer has observed, “Traditional terrorists, whether
left-wing, right-wing, or nationalist-separatists, were not greatly drawn to
these opportunities for greater destruction. . . . Terrorism has become more
brutal and indiscriminate since then.”36
 This trend is reinforced when motivations change from narrowly political
to unlimited or retributive objectives reinforced by promises of rewards in
another world. Fortunately, unlike communism and fascism, Islamist ideology
has failed to attract a wide following outside the Islamic community, but that
community provides a large pool of over a billion people from which to
recruit. Organization has also changed. For example, Al Qaeda’s network of
thousands of people in loosely affiliated cells in some 60 countries gives it a
scale well beyond anything seen before. But even small networks can be
more difficult to penetrate than the hierarchical quasi-military organizations
of the past.
Both trends, technological and ideological, have created a new set of
conditions that have increased both the lethality of terrorism and the
difficulty of managing terrorism today. Because of September 11 and the
unprecedented scale of Al Qaeda, the current focus is properly on terrorism
associated with Islamic extremists. But it would be a mistake to limit our
attention or responses to Islamic terrorists, for that would be to ignore the
wider effects of the democratization of technology and the broader set of
challenges that must be met. Technological progress is putting into the hands
of deviant groups and individuals destructive capabilities that were once
limited primarily to governments and armies. Every large group of people
has some members who deviate from the norm, and some who are bent on
destruction. It is worth remembering that the worst terrorist act in the United
States before September 11 was the one committed by Timothy McVeigh, a
purely homegrown antigovernment fanatic. Similarly, the Aum Shinrykio cult,
which released sarin in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, had nothing to do
with Islam. Even if the current wave of Islamic terrorism turns out to be
generational or cyclical, like terrorist waves in the past, the world will still
have to confront the long-term secular dangers arising out of the
democratization of technology.
Lethality has been increasing. In the 1970s, the Palestinian attack on Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics or the killings by the Red Brigades that
galvanized world attention cost dozens of lives. In the 1980s, Sikh extremists
bombed an Air India flight and killed over 300 people. September 11, 2001,
cost several thousand lives—and all of this escalation occurred without the
use of weapons of mass destruction. If one extrapolates this lethality trend
and imagines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or
nuclear materials within the coming decade, it is possible to imagine
terrorists being able to destroy millions of lives.
In the twentieth century, a pathological individual like Hitler or Stalin or
Pol Pot required the apparatus of a totalitarian government to kill large
numbers of people. Unfortunately, it is now all too easy to envisage extremist
groups and individuals killing millions without the instruments of
governments. This is truly the “privatization of war,” and it represents a
dramatic change in world politics. Moreover, this next step in the escalation
of terrorism could have profound effects on the nature of our urban
civilization. What will happen to the willingness of people to locate in cities,
to our ability to sustain cultural institutions, if instead of destroying two
office buildings, a future attack destroys the lower half of Manhattan, the City
area of London, or the Left Bank of Paris?
The new terrorism is not like the 1970s terrorism of the IRA, the ETA (the
military wing of the Basque separatist movement), or Italy’s Red Brigades,
nor is the vulnerability limited to any one society. A “business as usual”
attitude toward curbing terrorism is not enough. Force still plays a role in
world politics, but its nature has changed in the twenty-first century.
Technology is increasing terrorists’ access to destructive power, but they
also benefit greatly from increased capacities to communicate—with each
other across jurisdictions, and with global audiences. As we will see in
chapter 3, many terrorists groups also have soft as well as hard power. The
United States was correct in altering its national security strategy to focus on
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction after September 11, 2001. But the
means the Bush administration chose focused too heavily on hard power and
did not take enough account of soft power. And that is a mistake, because it is
through soft power that terrorists gain general support as well as new
recruits.

THE INTERPLAY OF HARD AND SOFT POWER

Hard and soft power sometimes reinforce and sometimes interfere with each
other. A country that courts popularity may be loath to exercise its hard
power when it should, but a country that throws its weight around without
regard to the effects on its soft power may find others placing obstacles in the
way of its hard power. No country likes to feel manipulated, even by soft
power. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, hard power can create myths
of invincibility or inevitability that attract others. In 1961, President John F.
Kennedy went ahead with nuclear testing despite negative polls because he
worried about global perceptions of Soviet gains in the arms race. Kennedy
“was willing to sacrifice some of America’s ‘soft’ prestige in return for
gains in the harder currency of military prestige.”37 On a lighter note, it is
amusing that in 2003, just a few months after massive antiwar protests in
London and Milan, fashion shows in those cities used models in U.S. military
commando gear exploding balloons. As one designer put it, American
symbols “are still the strongest security blanket.”38
Throughout history, weaker states have often joined together to balance
and limit the power of a stronger state that threatens. But not always.
Sometimes the weak are attracted to jumping on the bandwagon led by a
strong country, particularly when they have little choice or when the large
country’s military power is accompanied by soft power. Moreover, as we
saw earlier, hard power can sometimes have an attractive or soft side. As
Osama bin Laden put it in one of his videos, “When people see a strong
horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”39 And to
deliberately mix the metaphor, people are more likely to be sympathetic to
underdogs than to bet on them.
The 2003 Iraq War provides an interesting example of the interplay of the
two forms of power. Some of the motives for war were based on the
deterrent effect of hard power. Donald Rumsfeld is reported to have entered
office believing that the United States “was seen around the world as a paper
tiger, a weak giant that couldn’t take a punch” and determined to reverse that
reputation.40 America’s military victory in the first Gulf War had helped to
produce the Oslo process on Middle East peace, and its 2003 victory in Iraq
might eventually have a similar effect. Moreover, states like Syria and Iran
might be deterred in their future support of terrorists. These were all hard
power reasons to go to war. But another set of motives related to soft power.
The neoconservatives believed that American power could be used to export
democracy to Iraq and transform the politics of the Middle East. If
successful, the war would become self-legitimizing. As William Kristol and
Lawrence Kaplan put it, “What is wrong with dominance in the service of
sound principles and high ideals?”41
Part of the contest about going to war in Iraq became a struggle over the
legitimacy of the war. Even when a military balance of power is impossible
(as at present, with America the only superpower), other countries can still
band together to deprive the U.S. policy of legitimacy and thus weaken
American soft power. France, Russia, and China chafed at American military
unipolarity and urged a more multipolar world. In Charles Krauthammer’s
view, Iraq “provided France an opportunity to create the first coherent
challenge to that dominance.”42 Even without directly countering the
superpower’s military power, the weaker states hoped to deter the U.S. by
making it more costly for us to use our hard power.43 They were not able to
prevent the United States from going to war, but by depriving the United
States of the legitimacy of a second Security Council resolution, they
certainly made it more expensive.
Soft balancing was not limited to the UN arena. Outside the UN,
diplomacy and peace movements helped transform the global debate from the
sins of Saddam to the threat of American empire. That made it difficult for
allied countries to provide bases and support and thus cut into American hard
power. As noted earlier, the Turkish parliament’s refusal to allow transport
of ground troops and Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to allow American use of air
bases that had been available in 1991 are cases in point.
Since the global projection of American military force in the future will
require access and overflight rights from other countries, such soft balancing
can have real effects on hard power. When support for America becomes a
serious vote loser, even friendly leaders are less likely to accede to our
requests. In addition, bypassing the UN raised the economic costs to the
United States after the war, leading the columnist Fareed Zakaria to observe,
“The imperial style of foreign policy is backfiring. At the end of the Iraq war
the administration spurned any kind of genuine partnership with the world. It
pounded away at the United Nations.”44
In the summer of 2003, the Bush administration’s initial resistance to a
significant role for the United Nations in the reconstruction of Iraq is
estimated to have cost the United States more than $100 billion, or about
$1,000 per American household. In most major peacekeeping missions, the
UN covers most of the expenses for countries that contribute troops. In the
1991 Gulf War, the broad coalition assembled by President George H. W.
Bush covered 80 percent of the costs, and during the Clinton interventions
abroad, the United States shouldered only 15 percent of the reconstruction
and peacekeeping costs.45 But without a UN mandate, some countries
refused to participate in peacekeeping in Iraq, and for those who did—
countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and
others—it was estimated that the United States would have to spend $250
million to help underwrite their participation.46
Some neoconservatives argued that the solution was to avoid the UN and
to deny its legitimacy. For some, thwarting the UN was a gain.47 They
viewed the Iraq War as a “twofer”: it removed Saddam and damaged the UN.
Some urged the creation of an alliance of democracies to replace the UN. But
such responses ignore the fact that the key divisions were among the
democracies, and the United States can influence but not alone determine
international views of the legitimacy of the UN. Moreover, soft balancing that
puts pressure on parliaments in democracies can be conducted outside the
framework of the UN. The Internet has allowed protests to be quickly
mobilized by free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than hierarchical
organizations. In the Vietnam era, planning a protest required weeks and
months of pamphlets, posters, and phone calls, and it took four years before
the size of the protest rallies, 25,000 at first, reached half a million in 1969.
In contrast, 800,000 people turned out in the United States and 1.5 million in
Europe on one weekend in February 2003 before the start of the war.48
Protests do not represent the “international community,” but they do often
affect the attitudes of editorial writers, parliamentarians, and other influential
people in important countries whose views are summarized by that vague
phrase.49 Though the concept of an international community may be
imprecise, even those who dismissed international concerns about how the
United States entered the war seem to appeal to such opinion when they
argue that the legitimacy of American actions will be accepted after the fact
if we produce a better Iraq. Such post hoc legitimization may help to restore
American soft power that was lost on the way in, but it also shows that
legitimacy matters. And in the difficult cases of Iran and North Korea, it is
worth noting that President Bush appealed to the views of the “international
community” that some of his advisors dismissed as “illusory.”50 The
continual contest for legitimacy illustrates the importance of soft power.
Morality can be a power reality.
The initial effect of the Iraq War on opinion in the Islamic world was quite
negative. Al Jazeera television (the soft-power resource owned by the same
government of Qatar that provided headquarters for American hard power)
showed bloody pictures of civilian casualties night after night. An Egyptian
parliamentarian observed, “You can’t imagine how the military strikes on
Baghdad and other cities are provoking people every night.”51 In Pakistan, a
former diplomat reported that “the US invasion of Iraq is a complete gift to
the Islamic parties. People who would otherwise turn up their noses at them
are now flocking to their banner.”52 American intelligence and law
enforcement officials reported that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups
intensified their recruitment on three continents by “tapping into rising anger
about the American campaign for war in Iraq.”53 After the war, polls found a
rise in support for bin Laden and a fall in the popularity of the United States
even in friendly countries such as Indonesia and Jordan.54 Meanwhile, in
Europe polls showed that the way the United States went about the Iraq War
had dissipated the outflow of sympathy and goodwill that had followed the
September 11 events. It is still too soon to tell whether the hard-power gains
from the war in Iraq will in the long run exceed the soft-power losses, or
how permanent the latter will turn out to be, but the war provided a
fascinating case study of the interaction of the two types of power.
Looking to the future, much will depend on the effectiveness of American
policies in creating a better Iraq and moving the Middle East peace process
forward. In addition, much will depend on whether the intelligence failures
and political exaggeration of intelligence evidence will have a permanent
damaging effect on the credibility of the American government when it
approaches other countries for help on cases like Iran and North Korea, as
well as in the war on terrorism. As the British weekly The Economist
observed, “The spies erred and the politicians exaggerated.... The war, we
think, was justified. But in making the case for it, Mr Bush and Mr Blair did
not play straight with their people.”55
Skeptics argue that because countries cooperate out of self-interest, the
loss of soft power does not matter much. But the skeptics miss the point that
cooperation is a matter of degree, and that degree is affected by attraction or
repulsion. They also miss the point that the effects on nonstate actors and
recruitment to terrorist organization do not depend on government attitudes.
Already in 2002, well before the Iraq War, reactions against heavy-handed
American policies on the Korean peninsula had led to a dramatic drop over
the past three years in the percentage of the Korean population favoring an
American alliance, from 89 to only 56 percent.56 That will complicate
dealing with the dangerous case of North Korea. Whether in the Middle East
or in East Asia, hard and soft power are inextricably intertwined in today’s
world.

POWER IN A GLOBAL INFORMATION AGE

Power today is less tangible and less coercive among the advanced
democracies than it was in the past. At the same time, much of the world
does not consist of advanced democracies, and that limits the global
transformation of power. For example, most African and the Middle Eastern
countries have preindustrial agricultural economies, weak institutions, and
authoritarian rulers. Failed states such as Somalia, Congo, Sierra Leone, and
Liberia provide venues for violence. Some large countries such as China,
India, and Brazil are industrializing and may suffer some of the disruptions
that analogous parts of the West encountered at similar stages of their
development early in the twentieth century.57 In such a diverse world, all
three sources of power—military, economic, and soft—remain relevant,
although in different degrees in different relationships. However, if the
current economic and social trends of the information revolution continue,
soft power will become more important in the mix.
The information revolution and globalization of the economy are
transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, these two forces have enhanced American power. But with time,
technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America’s
relative preeminence will diminish. Today Americans represent one
twentieth of the global population total, but nearly half of the world’s Internet
users. Though English may remain the lingua franca, as Latin did after the ebb
of Rome’s might, at some point in the future, perhaps in a decade or two, the
Asian cyber-community and economy may loom larger than the American.
Even more important, the information revolution is creating virtual
communities and networks that cut across national borders. Transnational
corporations and nongovernmental actors (terrorists included) will play
larger roles. Many of these organizations will have soft power of their own
as they attract citizens into coalitions that cut across national boundaries.
Politics then becomes in part a competition for attractiveness, legitimacy, and
credibility. The ability to share information—and to be believed—becomes
an important source of attraction and power.

Three Types of Power

This political game in a global information age suggests that the relative
importance of soft power will increase. The countries that are likely to be
more attractive and gain soft power in the information age are those with
multiple channels of communication that help to frame issues; whose
dominant culture and ideas are closer to prevailing global norms (which now
emphasize liberalism, pluralism, and autonomy); and whose credibility is
enhanced by their domestic and international values and policies. These
conditions suggest opportunities for the United States, but also for Europe
and others, as we shall see in chapter 3.
The soft power that is becoming more important in the information age is
in part a social and economic by-product rather than solely a result of
official government action. Nonprofit institutions with soft power of their
own can complicate and obstruct government efforts, and commercial
purveyors of popular culture can hinder as well as help the government
achieve its objectives. But the larger long-term trends can help the United
States if it learns to use them well. To the extent that official policies at home
and abroad are consistent with democracy, human rights, openness, and
respect for the opinions of others, America will benefit from the trends of
this global information age. But there is a danger that the United States may
obscure the deeper message of its values through arrogance. As we shall see
in the next chapter, American culture high and low still helps produce soft
power in the information age, but government actions also matter, not only
through programs like the Voice of America and Fulbright scholarships, but,
even more important, when policies avoid arrogance and stand for values
that others admire. The larger trends of the information age are in America’s
favor, but only if we learn to stop stepping on our best message. Smart power
means learning better how to combine our hard and soft power.
 CHAPTER TWO

Sources of American Soft Power

THE UNITED STATES has many resources that can potentially provide soft
power, particularly when one considers the ways in which economic
prowess contributes not only to wealth but also to reputation and
attractiveness. Not only is America the world’s largest economy, but nearly
half of the top 500 global companies are American, five times as many as
next-ranked Japan.1 Sixty-two of the top 100 global brands are American, as
well as eight of the top ten business schools.2
Social indices show a similar pattern. Consider the following:
• The United States attracts nearly six times the inflow of foreign
immigrants as second-ranked Germany.3
• The United States is far and away the world’s number one exporter of
films and television programs, although India’s “Bollywood” actually
produces more movies per year.4
• Of the 1.6 million students enrolled in universities outside their own
countries, 28 percent are in the United States, compared to the 14
percent who study in Britain.5
• More than 86,000 foreign scholars were in residence at American
educational institutions in 2002.6
Other measures show that the United States . . .
• . . . publishes more books than any other country.
• . . . has more than twice as many music sales as next-ranked Japan.
• . . . has more than 13 times as many Internet website hosts as Japan.
• . . . ranks first in Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, and economics.
• . . . places a close second to France for Nobel prizes in literature.
 • . . . publishes nearly four times as many scientific and journal articles
as the next runner-up, Japan.7
Of course, the United States does not rank at the top in all measures of
potential attraction. According to the 2003 United Nations Development
Program’s quality-of-life index (which takes into account not only income but
also education, health care, and life expectancy), Norway, Iceland, Sweden,
Australia, the Netherlands, and Belgium rank ahead of the United States as
the best countries in which to live.8 Japan outranks the U.S. in the number of
patents granted to residents and the percentage of GNP it spends on research
and development. Britain and Germany rank ahead as havens for asylum
seekers. France and Spain attract more tourists than the United States (though
the U.S. ranks higher in revenues from tourism). When it comes to
“unattractive indicators,” the United States ranks near the bottom of the list of
rich countries in the level of development assistance it gives, but at the top in
the percentage of its population that is incarcerated.9
Even more important for power than some high unattractiveness ratings is
the fact that, as we saw in the previous chapter, potential power resources do
not always translate into realized power in the sense of achieving desired
outcomes. For that to happen, the objective measure of potential soft power
has to be attractive in the eyes of specific audiences, and that attraction must
influence policy outcomes. In this chapter we shall look at several examples
of how such attraction has affected important policy outcomes. But first, let’s
look at some causes of change in the attractiveness of the United States and
how that can affect policy outcomes.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ANTI-AMERICANISM

Despite its impressive resources, the attractiveness of the United States

declined quite sharply in 2003. In the run-up to the Iraq War, polls showed
that the United States lost an average of 30 points of support in most
European countries. Levels of support were even lower in Islamic countries.
After the war, majorities of the people held unfavorable images of the United
States in nearly two-thirds of 19 countries surveyed. Most of those who held
negative views said they blamed the policies of the Bush administration
rather than America in general.10
Opposition to American policies is not the same as general opposition to
the United States. Reactions to policies are more volatile than underlying
reactions to culture and values. The image or attractiveness of a country is
composed of foreigners’ attitudes on a variety of levels and types, of which
reactions to American policy constitute only one.
Figure 2.1, which is based on the results of a 2002 poll of 43 countries,
indicates the extent to which the United States is admired for its
technological and scientific advances as well as its music, movies, and
television. At the same time, majorities in 34 of those 43 countries said they
disliked the growing influence of America in their country.11
The Iraq War was not the first time that a controversial security policy
reduced the attractiveness of the American image in other countries. There
have been four prior periods when U.S. attractiveness was reduced in
Europe: after the 1956 Suez Canal crisis; during the “ban the bomb”
movement of the late fifties and early sixties (though this was primarily in
Britain and France, not in Germany and Italy); during the Vietnam War era in
the late sixties and early seventies; and during the deployment of
intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Germany in the early eighties.
Figure 2.1 Dimensions of American Attractiveness
 Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures of 43 countries surveyed
The Vietnam War was broadly opposed in Britain, France, Germany, and
Italy. Although there was a decline in the overall popularity of the United
States from 1965 to 1972 (by about 23 points in Britain, 32 in Germany, 19
in Italy, 7 in France), majorities in all but France continued to express
positive opinions of the United States throughout the major operations of the
war and right up to the Paris Peace Talks of 1972.12 Nevertheless, the slide
in popularity did have effects on the ability of the American government to
achieve its desired policy outcomes. Loss of attractiveness hindered
President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to obtain support from other countries for
the war in Vietnam, and the drop in soft power hurt other policies as well. In
France, for example, Vietnam “contributed to the popular support that
sustained de Gaulle’s increasingly anti-NATO and anti-U. S. stance.”13
Figure 2.2 Percentage of Western Europeans Who Say They Have a Very or
Somewhat Favorable Opinion of the United States, 1982 to 2003

In the early 1980s, the nuclear weapons policies of the first Reagan
Administration aroused considerable concern. In a 1983 Newsweek poll,
pluralities of around 40 percent of the people polled in France, Britain,
Germany, and Japan disapproved of American policies. At the same time,
majorities in all those countries approved of the American people.14
President Reagan was able to get European agreement for deployment of
intermediate-range nuclear forces, but there was considerable European
resistance to his policy efforts to isolate the Soviet Union economically.
Figure 2.2 indicates how over the years the attractiveness of the United
States has varied. Unpopular policies are the most volatile element of the
overall image, and there seems to be more stability in the reservoir of
goodwill that rests on culture and values.
Nonetheless, there has also been anti-Americanism in the sense of a
deeper rejection of American society, values, and culture. It has long been a
minor but persistent strand in the image, and it goes back to the earliest days
of the republic, when Europeans turned America into a symbol in their own
internal culture wars. Already in the eighteenth century, some Europeans
were absurdly arguing that the excessive humidity in the New World led to
degenerate forms of life.15 Although some nineteenth-century Europeans saw
America as a symbol of freedom, others, such as the author Charles Dickens,
saw only “a clamorous gang of fakes, fools, and tricksters.”16 In the early
twentieth century, even as sensitive a writer as Virginia Woolf treated
America with a mixture of disdain and disinterest. For many on the European
Left, America was a symbol of capitalist exploitation of the working class,
while those on the right saw it as degenerate because of its racial impurity.17
Some conservatives disliked the egalitarian nature of American popular
culture. In 1931, a former viceroy of India complained to Conservative MPs
that Hollywood had helped to shatter “the white man’s prestige in the East,”
and Belgium banned Africans in its colony the Congo from attending
American films.18 Even today, as the London-based Economist points out,
anti-Americanism is partly a class issue: “Poorer and less-educated Britons
like America a lot more than their richer compatriots.... Upper class anti-
Americanism may be surrogate snobbery.”19 Intellectual snobbery should be
added to the list. European elites have always grumbled about America’s
lack of sophistication, but polls show that America’s pop culture resonates
widely with the majority of the people across the continent.
 Another source of anti-Americanism is structural. The United States is the
big kid on the block and the disproportion in power engenders a mixture of
admiration, envy, and resentment. Indeed, as the United States emerged as a
global power at the beginning of the twentieth century, a British author, W. T.
Stead, had already written a book called The Americanization of the World,
published in 1902. Similarly, in the mid-1970s majorities across Western
Europe told pollsters they preferred an equal distribution of power between
the United States and the USSR rather than U.S. dominance.20 But those who
dismiss the recent rise of anti-Americanism as simply the inevitable result of
size are mistaken in thinking nothing can be done about it.
Policies can soften or sharpen hard structural edges, and they can affect the
ratio of love to hate in complex love-hate relationships. The United States
was even more preeminent than now at the end of World War II, when it
represented more than a third of the world economy and was the only country
with nuclear weapons, but it pursued policies that were acclaimed by allied
countries. Similarly, American leadership was welcome to many even when
the end of the Cold War meant there was no longer any country that could
balance American power. For example, the Yugoslav intellectual Milovan
Djilas argued in 1992 that if the power of the U.S. weakened, “then the way
is open to everything bad.” And on the other side of the world, in 1990,
Naohiro Amaya, a high official in a then-buoyant Japan, said, “Whether we
like it or not, there will be no free world and no free trading system if the
U.S. does not preserve them for us. The best Japan can aspire to is ‘vice
president.’”21 Size may create a love-hate relationship, but since in recent
decades size is a constant, it cannot explain why anti-Americanism is higher
or lower at some times than at others.
In addition to its size, the United States has long stood for modernity,
which some people regard as threatening to their cultures. In the nineteenth
century, Europeans on the Right who resisted industrial society and those on
the Left who wanted to reshape it pointed with fear or scorn at America. A
similar phenomenon is true today with the growth of globalization. In some
areas, there is not only a resentment of American cultural imports, but also of
American culture itself. Polls in 2002 found that majorities in 34 of 43
countries agreed with the statement “It’s bad that American ideas and
customs are spreading here.”22
 It is probably inevitable that those who resent American power and the
cultural impact of economic globalization confuse the two and use
nationalism to resist both. Jose Bové, a French sheep farmer, earned fame by
destroying a McDonald’s restaurant in his local region in France.23 No one
forces people to eat at McDonald’s, but Bové’s ability to attract global
media attention reflects the cultural ambivalence toward things American. As
Iran’s president complained in 1999, “The new world order and
globalization that certain powers are trying to make us accept, in which the
culture of the entire world is ignored, looks like a kind of
neocolonialism.”24 A writer for the German magazine Der Spiegel
commented that it is time to fight back “before the entire world wears a
Made in USA label.”25
It is much too simple to equate globalization with Americanization. Other
cultures contribute mightily to global connections. English, the lingua franca
of modern commerce, was originally spread by Britain, not the United
States.26 As we will see in the next chapter, the globally significant ties
between French-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-speaking countries, respectively,
have nothing to do with the United States. AIDS originated in Africa and
SARS in Asia. Soccer is far more popular internationally than American
football. The most popular sports team in the world is not American: it is
Britain’s soccer behemoth, Manchester United, with 200 fan clubs in 24
countries. The global stardom of the player David Beckham was such that he
was able to carry it with him after he was traded to the Madrid club. The
Beatles and Rolling Stones were imports to America. Three of the leading
“American” music labels have British, German, and Japanese owners. Japan
leads in the creation of animation and the most popular video games around
the world.27 The rise of reality programming in television entertainment in
recent years spread from Europe to the United States, not vice versa. Even
Mc-Donald’s is drawing lessons from France for the redesign of some of its
American restaurants.28 Globalization’s contours are not solely American,
though quite naturally its current effects reflect what happens in the world’s
largest economy. To equate globalization with Americanization is to
oversimplify a complex reality.
 Nonetheless, several characteristics of the United States make it a center
of globalization. America has always been a land of immigration, and its
culture and multiethnic society reflect many different parts of the world.
America has borrowed freely from a variety of traditions and immigration
keeps it open to the rest of the world. This makes the United States a
laboratory for cultural experimentation where different traditions are
recombined and exported. In addition, because of the size of the American
economy, the United States is the largest marketplace in which to test whether
a film or song or game will attract large and diverse audiences. Ideas and
products flow into the United States freely, and flow out with equal ease—
often in commercialized form. Pizza in Asia seems American.29
The effects of globalization, however, depend upon the receiver as well as
the sender. Already a half century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that “in reality,
the process which Europeans dread as ‘Americanization’ is the emergence of
the modern world with all its perplexities and implications.” She speculated
that the modernization process that appeared to be American would be
accelerated, not halted, by European integration.30 In Nigeria, where
American programs provided more than half the content on television in
1997, “The heavy direct and indirect presence in virtually every key area of
Nigerian life assures continued Americanization, not just of television, but of
other facets of Nigerian culture.”31 The experience in Japan, however, was
very different. “On the surface, the Japanese may appear to be tireless and
indiscriminate cultural consumers. But the foreignness of imported culture,
and particularly American culture, is filtered through the careful hands of
cultural brokers.... American culture is deconstructed and re-contextualized
into the everyday experience of the people. American popular culture is not
the monopoly of Americans: it is a medium through which people around the
world constantly reorganize their individual and collective identities.”32
Many of the mechanisms driving globalization are characteristic features
of the U.S. culture and economy. Much of the information revolution
originated in the American economy, and a large part of the content of global
information networks is currently created in the United States. American
standards are sometimes hard to avoid, as in Microsoft’s Windows or in the
rules governing the Internet (though the World Wide Web was invented in
Europe). On the other hand, some U.S. standards and practices—from the
measurement system of pounds and feet (rather than the metric system) to
capital punishment—have encountered puzzlement or even outright hostility.
Globalization is more than Americanization, but for those in the
antiglobalization movement who want to resist or reshape globalization, anti-
Americanism is often a useful weapon and thus its conflation with
globalization is to some extent inevitable.
Figure 2.3 Dimensions of American Attractiveness in the Islamic World

Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures in seven countries with majority Muslim populations
Of particular concern is the role of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world.
Compare figure 2.3 with figure 2.1 and you will see that the dimensions of
American attraction are different in the Muslim world. A bipartisan panel
report issued in October 2003 stated, “Hostility toward America has reached
shocking levels. What is required is not merely tactical adaptation, but
strategic and radical transformation.”33
Moreover, the image of the United States has declined there more than
elsewhere. In 2003, less than 15 percent of the public in Turkey, Indonesia,
Pakistan, and Jordan, and less than 27 percent in Lebanon and Morocco, had
a favorable opinion of the United States.34
This is a matter of particular concern because some Islamist extremists are
willing to use terror to force a return to what they portray as a purer,
premodern version of their religion. In some areas, such as the Arab
countries, anti-Americanism may be a cover for a more general inability to
respond to modernity—witness the slow progress of economic growth and
democratization as described in a recent report of the United Nations
Development Programme, “Arab Human Development Report 2003.”35
Fouad Ajami, an American academic of Lebanese origin, is correct in saying
that America will be resented because our burden is “to come bearing
modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to
represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears.” But
he is wrong to conclude from this that “Americans need not worry about
hearts and minds in foreign lands.”36 The situation he describes has been
constant for a number of years, and thus cannot explain the recent downward
trajectory of America’s reputation in economically successful Muslim
countries like Malaysia. The failure of Arab countries to adjust to modernity
cannot fully explain the changes in U.S. attractiveness. They are also related
to unpopular U.S. policies regarding Iraq and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The effects of the Iraq War should not be exaggerated. “Dire predictions
notwithstanding, Arabs did not rise up to destroy American interests in the
Middle East . . . because many of them knew Saddam Hussein’s record.”37
As mentioned earlier, images of a country are composed of several elements,
and respondents to polls showed a greater dislike of American policies than
of American people. 38 Nonetheless, there have been boycotts of American
products, and the American share of merchandise exported to the Middle
East had already dropped from 18 to 13 percent from the late 1990s to 2001
partly in response to America’s “perceived loss of foreign policy
legitimacy.”39 Extreme Islamists had already opposed the American
campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Iraq merely increased their
opportunities to whip up hatred. But such hatred is increasingly important in
a world where small groups can use the Internet to find, recruit, and mobilize
like-minded people who previously had greater difficulty in locating each
other. As the author Robert Wright has observed, Osama bin Laden’s
recruiting videos are very effective, “and they’ll reach their targeted
audience much more efficiently via broadband.”40
The recent decline in the reported attractiveness of the United States
illustrates the point I made in the previous chapter: It is not enough just to
have visible power resources. In the case of soft power, the question is what
messages are sent and received by whom under which circumstances, and
how that affects our ability to obtain the outcomes we want. Messages and
images are conveyed partly by government policies at home and abroad, and
partly by popular and higher culture. But the same messages are
“downloaded” and interpreted with different effects by different receivers in
different settings. Soft power is not a constant, but something that varies by
time and place.

CULTURE AS A SOURCE OF SOFT POWER

As we know, cultural critics often distinguish between high culture and

popular culture. Many observers would agree that American high culture
produces significant soft power for the United States. For example, Secretary
of State Colin Powell has said, “I can think of no more valuable asset to our
country than the friendship of future world leaders who have been educated
here.”41 International students usually return home with a greater
appreciation of American values and institutions, and, as expressed in a
report by an international education group, “The millions of people who have
studied in the United States over the years constitute a remarkable reservoir
of goodwill for our country.”42 Many of these former students eventually
wind up in positions where they can affect policy outcomes that are important
to Americans.
The distinguished American diplomat and writer George Kennan is a
traditional realist in his concern with balance-of-power politics, but he
placed great importance on “cultural contact as a means of combating
negative impressions about this country that mark so much of world opinion.”
Kennan said he would “willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of
political propaganda for the results that could be achieved by such means
alone.” And President Dwight Eisenhower argued for the need “to work out
not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually
learn a little bit more about each other.” Indeed, high cultural contacts often
produced soft power for the United States during the Cold War. Scores of
nongovernmental institutions such as theaters, museums, and opera
companies performed in the Soviet Union. One Soviet musician observed
that they had been trained to believe in the decadent West, yet year after year
great symphony orchestras came from Boston, Philadelphia, New York,
Cleveland, and San Francisco. “How could the decadent West produce such
great orchestras?”43
Academic and scientific exchanges played a significant role in enhancing
American soft power. Even while some American skeptics at the time feared
that visiting Soviet scientists and KGB agents would “steal us blind,” they
failed to notice that the visitors vacuumed up political ideas along with
scientific secrets. Many such scientists became leading proponents of human
rights and liberalization inside the Soviet Union. Starting in the 1950s, the
Ford Foundation, the Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science
Research Council worked with eventually 110 American colleges and
universities in student and faculty exchanges. Though the Soviet Union
demanded a governmental agreement to limit the scope of such exchanges,
some 50,000 Soviets visited the United States between 1958 and 1988 as
writers, journalists, officials, musicians, dancers, athletes, and academics.
An even larger number of Americans went to the Soviet Union.
In the 1950s, only 40 to 50 college and graduate students from each
country participated in exchanges, but over time, powerful policy effects can
be traced back to even those small numbers. Because cultural exchanges
affect elites, one or two key contacts may have a major political effect. For
example, Aleksandr Yakovlev was strongly influenced by his studies with the
political scientist David Truman at Columbia University in 1958. Yakovlev
eventually went on to become the head of an important institute, a Politburo
member, and a key liberalizing influence on the Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. A fellow student, Oleg Kalugin, who became a high official in
the KGB, said in looking back from the vantage point of 1997, “Exchanges
were a Trojan Horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in
the erosion of the Soviet system.... They kept infecting more and more people
over the years.”44 The attraction and soft power that grew out of cultural
contacts among elites made important contributions to American policy
objectives.
It is easier to trace specific political effects of high-cultural contacts than
to demonstrate the political importance of popular culture. Alexis de
Toqueville pointed out in the nineteenth century that in a democracy there are
no restrictions of class or guild on artisans and their products. Popular taste
prevails. In addition, commercial interests in a capitalist economy seek
broad markets that often result in cultural lowest common denominators.
Some believe that American popular culture seduces through sheer force of
marketing and promise of pleasure.45 Many intellectuals and critics disdain
popular culture because of its crude commercialism. They regard it as
providing mass entertainment rather than information and thus having little
political effect. They view popular culture as an anesthetizing and apolitical
opiate for the masses.
Such disdain is misplaced, however, because popular entertainment often
contains subliminal images and messages about individualism, consumer
choice, and other values that have important political effects. As the author
Ben Wattenberg has argued, American culture includes glitz, sex, violence,
vapidity and materialism, but that is not the whole story. It also portrays
American values that are open, mobile, individualistic, anti-establishment,
pluralistic, voluntaristic, populist, and free. “It is that content, whether
reflected favorably or unfavorably, that brings people to the box office. That
content is more powerful than politics or economics. It drives politics and
economics.” 46 Or as the poet Carl Sandburg put it in 1961: “What,
Hollywood’s more important than Harvard? The answer is, not as clean as
Harvard, but nevertheless, further reaching.”47
Even popular sports can play a role in communicating values. “An
America is created that is neither military hegemon nor corporate leviathan
—a looser place, less rigid and more free, where anyone who works hard
shooting a ball or handling a puck can become famous and (yes) rich.”48
And the numbers are large. National Basketball games are broadcast to 750
million households in 212 countries and 42 languages. Major league baseball
games flow to 224 countries in 11 languages. The National Football League’s
Super Bowl attracted an estimated 800 million viewers in 2003. The number
of sports viewers rivals the 7.3 billion viewers worldwide who went to see
American movies in 2002.
The line between information and entertainment has never been as sharp as
some intellectuals imagine, and it is becoming increasingly blurred in a
world of mass media. Some lyrics of popular music can have political
effects. For example, in the 1990s, the dissident radio station B-92 in
Belgrade played over and over the American rap group Public Enemy’s lyric
“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death—we got to fight the powers that
be.”49 Political messages can also be conveyed by the way sports teams or
stars conduct themselves, or in the multiple images portrayed by television or
cinema. Pictures often convey values more powerfully than words, and
Hollywood is the world’s greatest promoter and exporter of visual symbols.
50 Even the consumption of fast food can make an implicit statement about
rejecting traditional ways. One Indian family described their visit to
McDonald’s as stepping out for “a slice of America.”51 On the negative
side, in the aftermath of the Iraq War a number of Muslims boycotted Coca-
Cola and turned to imitations such as Mecca Cola or Muslim Up as “an
alternative for all who boycott Zionist products and big American brands.”52
The political effects of popular culture are not entirely new. The Dutch
historian Rob Kroes points out that posters produced for shipping lines and
emigration societies in nineteenth-century Europe created an image of the
American West as a symbol of freedom long before the twentieth-century
consumption revolution. Young Europeans “grew up constructing meaningful
worlds that drew upon American ingredients and symbols.” American
commercial advertisements in 1944 referred to and expanded upon Franklin
Roosevelt’s four freedoms, thereby reinforcing the official civics lesson.
“Generation upon generation of youngsters, growing up in a variety of
European settings, West and East of the Iron Curtain, have vicariously
enjoyed the pleasures of cultural alternatives.... Simple items like blue jeans,
Coca-Cola, or a cigarette brand acquired an added value that helped these
younger generations to give expression to an identity all their own.”53
 This popular-cultural attraction helped the United States to achieve
important foreign policy goals. One example was the democratic
reconstruction of Europe after World War II. The Marshall Plan and NATO
were crucial instruments of economic and military power aimed at achieving
that outcome. But popular culture also contributed. For example, the Austrian
historian Reinhold Wagnleitner argues that “the fast adaptation of American
popular culture by many Europeans after the Second World War certainly
contributed positively to the democratization of these societies. It
rejuvenated and revitalized European postwar cultures with its elementary
connotations of freedom, casualness, vitality, liberality, modernity and
youthfulness.... Submission to the dictates of the market and business also
contained an element of liberation from the straitjackets of traditional
customs and mores.”54 The dollars invested by the Marshall Plan were
important in achieving American objectives in the reconstruction of Europe,
but so also were the ideas transmitted by American popular culture.
Popular cultural attraction also contributed to another major American
foreign policy objective—victory in the Cold War. The Soviet Union had
impressive military capabilities poised to threaten Western Europe, and in
the early postwar period it also possessed important soft-power resources
from the appeal of Communist ideology and its record of standing up to Nazi
Germany. However, it squandered much of this soft power through its
repression at home and in Eastern Europe,55 and its inept economic
performance in its later years (even as its military power increased). Soviet
state-run propaganda and culture programs could not keep pace with the
influence of America’s commercial popular culture in flexibility or
attraction. Long before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it had been pierced by
television and movies. The hammers and bulldozers would not have worked
without the years-long transmission of images of the popular culture of the
West that breached the Wall before it fell.
Even though the Soviet Union restricted and censored Western films, those
that made it through the filters were still capable of having devastating
political effects. Sometimes the political effects were direct, although
unintended. One Soviet journalist commented after a restricted showing of
On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove (both films were critical of American
nuclear weapons policies), “They absolutely shocked us. . . . We began to
understand that the same thing would happen to us as to them in a nuclear
war.” Other unintended political effects were conveyed indirectly. Soviet
audiences watching films with apolitical themes nonetheless learned that
people in the West did not have to stand in long lines to purchase food, did
not live in communal apartments, and owned their own cars. All this
invalidated the negative views promulgated by the Soviet media.
Even rock-and-roll music played a part despite Soviet efforts to
discourage it. As one of Gorbachev’s aides later testified, “The Beatles were
our quiet way of rejecting ‘the system’ while conforming to most of its
demands.” Georgi Shaknazarov, a high Communist official, summarized the
political effects well: “Gorbachev, me, all of us were double-thinkers. We
had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time.” The corrosive
effects on Soviet selfconfidence and ideology became clear in their actions
when that generation finally came to power in the mid-1980s.56
Similarly, Czech Communist officials sentenced a group of young people
to prison in the 1950s for playing tapes of “decadent American music,” but
their efforts turned out to be counterproductive. Milos Forman described
how, in the 1960s, “You are listening, you know, to Bill Haley and Elvis
Presley and you love it, and then a stern face on the Czech television tells
you, ‘These apes escaping from the jungle—they are representing the pride of
humanity?’. . . Finally you lost total, total, you know, respect.” In 1980, after
John Lennon was assassinated, a monument to him spontaneously appeared in
Prague, and the anniversary of his death was marked by an annual procession
for peace and democracy. In 1988, the organizers founded a Lennon Peace
Club whose members demanded the removal of Soviet troops.57 With the
passage of time, Lennon trumped Lenin.
As one historian summarized the situation, “However important the
military power and political promise of the United States were for setting the
foundation for the American successes in Cold War Europe, it was the
American economic and cultural attraction that really won over the hearts
and minds of the majorities of young people for Western democracy....
Whenever real consumption climbed into the ring, chances were high that
real socialism had to be counted out.”58 The Cold War was won by a
mixture of hard and soft power. Hard power created the stand-off of military
containment, but soft power eroded the Soviet system from within. Not all the
soft power resources were American—witness the role of the BBC and the
Beatles. But it would be a mistake to ignore the role that the attraction of
American popular culture played in contributing to the soft part of the
equation.
Not only was popular culture relevant to the achievement of American
policy goals in Western Europe but it also has been important for a number of
other policy goals, including the undercutting of the apartheid regime in South
Africa, the increase in the number of democratic governments in Latin
America and parts of East Asia, the overthrow of the Milosevic regime in
Serbia, pressure for liberalization in Iran, and the consolidation of an open
international economic system, to name just a few. Indeed, when South Africa
in 1971 was debating whether to allow television into the country, Albert
Hertzog, a conservative former minister of Posts and Telegraphs, rejected it
as a symbol of Western degeneracy that “would lead to the demoralization of
South African civilization and the destruction of apartheid.”59 He turned out
to be right.
Similarly, in 1994 Iran’s highest-ranking cleric issued a fatwa against
satellite television dishes because they would introduce a cheap alien culture
and spread the moral diseases of the West.60 He also turned out to be
correct. A decade later, mass demonstrations in Teheran followed the spread
of private American TV broadcasts. The stations got their start broadcasting
in the Farsi language to the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles, but they later
turned to covering Iran’s politics 24 hours a day, and broadcast information
to Iran that was not otherwise available there.61 It was not merely a
reactionary minority that was infected by Western ideas. As one professor
reported, “In less than a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, these
illuminated revolutionaries—the former young veterans of war and
revolution—were demanding more freedoms and political rights.”62
In China, despite censorship, American news seeps across the border to
Chinese elites through the Internet, other media, and educational exchanges.
In 1989, student protesters in Tiananmen Square constructed a replica of the
Statue of Liberty. One dissident told a foreign reporter that when she was
forced to listen to local Communist Party leaders rage about America, she
would hum Bob Dylan tunes in her head as her own silent revolution.
Another reporter observed that “many believe that the recent trickle of
Hollywood films into Chinese theatres, along with those illegal DVDs, has
played a role in spurring yearnings for accelerated change among ordinary
Chinese citizens.”63
As we learned in chapter 1, popular culture, because it is not under direct
control of government, does not always produce the exact policy outcomes
that the government might desire. For example, during the Vietnam War, the
American government had multiple policy objectives that included both
military victory over Communism in Vietnam and political victory over
Communism in Central Europe. Popular culture did not help to produce the
desired outcomes with regard to the former objective, but it did help to
achieve the latter. For example, Reinhold Wagnleitner describes student
demonstrations in Austria against the Vietnam War: “We demonstrated in blue
jeans and T-shirts and attended sit-ins and teach-ins. What’s more, quite a
few of us understood what it meant to be able to demonstrate against a war in
wartime without being court-martialed. Some of us were also aware that we
had learned our peaceful tactics of democratic protest and opposition from
the American civil rights movement and the anti-nuclear armament
movement. After all, we did not intone the ‘Internationale’ but instead sang
‘We Shall Overcome.’”64 Protest movements are a part of popular culture
that can attract some foreigners to the openness of the United States at the
same time that official policies are repelling them.
Popular culture can have contradictory effects on different groups within
the same country. It does not provide a uniform soft-power resource. The
videos that attract Iranian teenagers offend Iranian mullahs. Thus the
repulsion of American popular culture may make it more difficult for the
United States to obtain its preferred policy outcomes from the ruling group in
the short term, while the attraction of popular culture encourages desired
change among younger people in the long term. And sometimes the effects
can undercut longer-term American objectives. In Turkey, according to a
Turkish journalist, “The spread of American popular culture, primarily
among the upper-middle-class and peripherally among the lower-class
Turkish population has created in its wake an opposition to the ideology
behind it. The resurgence of fundamentalism in recent years which poses a
serious threat to secularism, is responsible for creating the rift that has
opened up between the Americanized privileged class, the lower middle
class, and poor.”65 Yet even in the tense period after 9/11, and despite visa
restrictions, a survey conducted by the British Council among 5,000 students
in nine Muslim countries showed that the United States was still the first
choice for youngsters in Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia as a location for
pursuing education abroad.66 Ambivalence is a common reaction to the
United States, and where there is ambivalence there is scope for policy to try
to improve the ratio of the positive to the negative dimensions.
Finally, the instruments of popular culture are not static. Whether the
influence of American culture will increase or decrease in the future is
uncertain. In part the outcome will depend on whether unpopular policies
eventually spill over and make general reactions to American culture more
negative. It will also depend on independent market changes that have
nothing to do with politics. For example, American films continue to rake in
nearly 80 percent of the film industry’s worldwide revenues, but American
TV has seen a decline in its international market share in recent years.
Television appeals to a more segmented market and local content has proved
to be more important in reaching national audiences than the peek into U.S.
culture provided by the typical American product. 67 Nielson Media
Research has found that 71 percent of the top ten programs in 60 surveyed
countries were locally produced, representing a steady increase over the
preceding years. The causes seem related more to market changes and
economies of scale in satisfying local tastes than to political reactions.68
Moreover, the absorption of American popular culture by foreign
audiences may make it appear less exotic over time, and thus less fascinating
to them. Something similar happened with the European reception of
American Wild West shows in the nineteenth century, and already American
MTV has lost ground to local imitators. One expert speculates that
“globalization of American popular culture, as we know and debate it today,
may well prove to be a temporary phenomenon, an issue internationally only
so long as it takes to generate a local response that tests which premises can
be successfully adapted to local circumstances and expectations.”69 Whether
the loss of exoticism will be serious in terms of soft-power resources or not
is difficult to predict.
 In television news, however, there has been a clear political change.
During the Gulf War, CNN and BBC had the field largely to themselves as
they framed the issues. For example, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August
1991 was described in terms of Iraqi aggression rather than recovering the
lost province of Kuwait, which is how the Iraqis saw it. (India framed its
invasion of its ancient province of Goa the same way, and there was little
significant international reaction.) By the time of the Iraq War, Al Jazeera and
others were active competitors in framing the issues. For instance, the same
image of moving forces could accurately be described by CNN as “coalition
forces advance” or by Al Jazeera as “invading forces advance.” The net
effect was a reduction in American soft power in the region when 2003 is
compared with 1991.
Now France has decided to create its own multilingual television news
channel. It concluded that “Al Jazeera is proof that this monopoly can be
broken and that there is a real demand for news that is not Anglo-
American.”70 Some analysts believe that “the American dominance in the
global communication flow is less powerful than it was in the past. On the
contrary, a growing concern is not the old complaint of excessive American
cultural influence around the world, but the astonishing speed with which the
United States is selling off its popular culture industries to foreign
buyers.”71
It is worth noting that while American companies still dominate in terms of
global brands, market changes have produced an increased fragmentation of
brands. A decade ago it was assumed that as barriers to trade came down,
brands with global scale would drive out local brands. In fact, as concerns
about local autonomy have intersected with technologies that allow
economies of scale to be achieved in production of discrete specialized
products, the standardization of brands has come under challenge. Coca-Cola
owns more than 200 brands (often not openly linked to the parent company),
McDonald’s varies its menus by regions, and MTV has responded with
different programs for different countries.72 Even before the political
boycotts that followed the Iraq War, market trends were reducing the
dominance of American brands. The popular cultural resources that can
produce American soft power are important, but they are far from static.
 DOMESTIC VALUES AND POLICIES

The United States, like other countries, expresses its values in what it does
as well as what it says. Political values like democracy and human rights can
be powerful sources of attraction, but it is not enough just to proclaim them.
During the Cold War, President Eisenhower worried that the practice of
racial segregation in the American South was alienating the newly
independent countries in Africa. Others watch how Americans implement our
values at home as well as abroad. A Swedish diplomat recently told me,
“All countries want to promote the values we believe in. I think the most
criticized part of the U.S.’s (and possibly most rich countries’) soft-power
‘packaging’ is the perceived double standard and inconsistencies.” 73
Perceived hypocrisy is particularly corrosive of power that is based on
proclaimed values. Those who scorn or despise us for hypocrisy are less
likely to want to help us achieve our policy objectives.
Even when honestly applied, American values can repel some people at
the same time that they attract others. Individualism and liberties are
attractive to many people, but repulsive to some, particularly
fundamentalists. For example, American feminism, open sexuality, and
individual choices are profoundly subversive in patriarchal societies. One of
the terrorist pilots who spent time in the United States before the attack on
September 11 is reported to have said he did not like the United States
because it is “too lax. I can go anywhere I want and they can’t stop me.”74
Some religious fundamentalists hate the United States precisely because of
our values of openness, tolerance, and opportunity. More typical, however, is
the reaction of a Chinese writer who disagreed with his government’s
criticism of the United States in 2003: “Amid this fog of nationalist emotion,
it is all the more remarkable that so many Chinese have managed to keep
their faith in American-style democracy. They yearn for a deeper change in
their own country’s political system.”75
Admiration for American values does not mean that others want to imitate
all the ways by which Americans implement them. Despite admiration for the
American practice of freedom of speech, countries like Germany and South
Africa have histories that make them wish to prohibit hate crimes that could
not be punished under the American First Amendment. And while many
Europeans admire America’s devotion to freedom, they prefer policies at
home that temper neoliberal economic principles and individualism with a
greater concern for society and community. In 1991, two out of three Czechs,
Poles, Hungarians, and Bulgarians thought the United States was a good
influence on their respective countries, but fewer than one in four in each
country wanted to import the American economic model.76 If anything, the
Iraq War sharpened the perceived contrast in values between the United
States and Europe. A poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund in June
2003 found agreement on both sides of the Atlantic that Europeans and
Americans have different social and cultural values.77
As Figure 2.1 showed, half of the populations of the countries polled in
2002 liked American ideas about democracy, but only a third thought it good
if American ideas and customs spread in their country. Although two-thirds
of Africans liked American ideas about democracy, only one-third of the
populations of Muslim countries like them.78 This is not entirely new. In the
1980s, public opinion in four major European countries rated the United
States as performing well in economic opportunities, rule of law, religious
freedom, and artistic diversity. But fewer than half of British, German, and
Spanish respondents felt the United States was a desirable model for other
countries.79 How America behaves at home can enhance its image and
perceived legitimacy, and that in turn can help advance its foreign policy
objectives. It does not mean that others need or want to become American
clones.
American performance on implementing our political values at home is
mixed. As noted earlier, the United States ranks at or near the top in health
expenditure, higher education, books published, computer and Internet usage,
acceptance of immigrants, and employment. But America is not at the top in
life expectancy, primary education, job security, access to health care, or
income equality. And high rankings in areas like the incidence of homicide
and the percentage of the population in jail reduce attractiveness. On the
other hand, there is little evidence for the cultural decline that some
pessimists proclaim, and many American domestic problems are shared by
other postmodern societies.
 Crime, divorce rates, and teenage pregnancy are worse today than in the
1950s, but all three measures improved considerably in the 1990s, and,
writes a former president of Harvard University, “There is no reliable
evidence that American students are learning less in school, or that the
American Dream is vanishing, or that the environment is more polluted.”80
Health, environment, and safety conditions have improved.81 Most children
still live with both natural parents, and the divorce rate has stabilized.
Trust in government has declined over recent decades, and that has led
some observers to worry about American democracy. But the polling
evidence is not matched in all behaviors. For example, the Internal Revenue
Service reports no increase in cheating on taxes.82 By many accounts,
government officials and legislators have become less corrupt than they were
a few decades ago.83 Voluntary mail return of census forms increased to 67
percent in 2000, reversing a 30-year decline in return rates since 1970. 84
Voting rates have declined from 62 percent to 50 percent over the past 40
years, but the decline stopped in 2000, and the current rate is not as low as it
was in the 1920s. Moreover, polls show that nonvoters are no more alienated
or mistrustful of government than voters are.85
Despite predictions of institutional crisis expressed in the aftermath of the
tightly contested 2000 presidential election, constitutional procedures were
widely accepted and the incoming Bush administration was able to govern
effectively. Nor does the decline of trust in government seem to have greatly
diminished American soft power, if only because most other developed
countries seem to be experiencing a similar phenomenon. Canada, Britain,
France, Sweden, and Japan have experienced a loss of confidence in
institutions that seems to be rooted in the greater individualism and
diminished deference to authority that are characteristic of postmodern
societies.86
Similarly, while there have been changes in participation in voluntary
organizations, changes in social participation do not seem to have eroded
American soft power. For one thing, the absolute levels of engagement
remain remarkably high on many indicators. Threequarters of Americans feel
connected to their communities, and say the quality of life here is excellent or
good. According to a 2001 poll, over 100 million Americans volunteered
their time to help solve problems in their communities, and 60 million
volunteer on a regular basis.87 Americans remain more likely than citizens
of most other countries, with the exception of a few small nations of Northern
Europe, to be involved in voluntary organizations.88
Even after 9/11, America remains a country of immigration. People want
to come to America, and they often do well here. By 1998, Chinese and
Indian engineers were running one-quarter of Silicon Valley’s high-
technology businesses,89 and such upward mobility makes America a
magnet. Foreigners can envisage themselves as Americans, and many
successful Americans “look like” them. Moreover, connections of
individuals in the diasporas such as the Indian and Chinese with their
countries of origin help to convey accurate and positive information about the
United States.
Certainly a decline in the quality of American society or unattractive
policies at home could reduce our attractiveness and that could damage our
soft power. But when other countries share similar problems, comparisons
are less invidious and less damaging to our soft power. As a Population
Council report pointed out, “Trends like unwed motherhood, rising divorce
rates, smaller household and the feminization of poverty are not unique to
America, but are occurring worldwide.”90 Similarly, respect for authority
and institutions has declined since 1960 throughout the Western world, and
American levels are not much different than those of other advanced Western
societies. In fact, American levels of charitable giving and community
service are generally higher.91 Problems that are shared with other societies
are less likely to cut into our soft-power resources.
American soft power is eroded more by policies like capital punishment
or the absence of gun control, where we are the deviants in opinion among
advanced countries. American support for the death penalty, for example,
meets disapproval from two-thirds of the public in Great Britain, France,
Germany, and Italy.92 Similarly, the American domestic response to
terrorism after 9/11 runs some risk of reducing our soft-power resources.
Attitudes toward immigration have hardened, and new visa procedures have
discouraged some foreign students. A decline in religious tolerance toward
Muslims hurts the image of the United States in Muslim countries such as
Pakistan and Indonesia as well as in the Arab world.
Although President Bush wisely included Muslim clerics in the mourning
ceremony at the National Cathedral and invited them to the White House after
9/11, the Pentagon chose Franklin Graham, a Christian evangelist who
branded Islam a “very wicked and evil religion,” to conduct its Good Friday
service in 2003.93 Some Americans have cast Islam in the role that was once
played by Communism and the Soviet Union. The past president of the
Southern Baptist Convention described Muhammad as “a demon-possessed
pedophile.” Such fringe views are often magnified abroad, particularly when
they appear to have official sanction. The result, in the experience of Dr.
Clive Calver of World Relief, is that such comments are “used to indict all
Americans and used to indict all Christians. It obviously puts lives and
livelihoods of people overseas at risk.”94 Religion is a double-edged sword
as an American soft-power resource, and how it cuts depends on who is
wielding it.
Also damaging to American attractiveness is the perception that the United
States has not lived up to its own profession of values in its response to
terrorism. It is perhaps predictable when Amnesty International referred to
the Guantanamo Bay detentions as a “human rights scandal,” and Human
Rights Watch charged the United States with hypocrisy that undercuts its own
policies and puts itself in “a weak position to insist on compliance from
others.”95 Even more damaging perhaps is when such criticism came from
conservative pro-American sources. The Financial Times worried that “the
very character of American democracy has been altered. Most countries have
chosen to adjust the balance between liberty and security since September
11. But in America, the adjustment has gone beyond mere tinkering to the
point where fundamental values may be jeopardised.” Meanwhile The
Economist argued that President Bush “is setting up a shadow court system
outside the reach of either Congress or America’s judiciary, and answerable
only to himself.... Mr. Bush rightly noted that American ideals have been a
beacon of hope to others around the world. In compromising those ideals in
this matter, Mr. Bush is not only dismaying America’s friends, but also
blunting one of America’s most powerful weapons against terrorism.” 96
Pictures of prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison achieved iconic status
after being published around the world. It remains to be seen how lasting
such damage will be to America’s ability to obtain the outcomes it wants
from other countries. At a minimum, it tends to make our preaching on human
rights policies appear hypocritical to some people.

FOREIGN POLICY SUBSTANCE AND STYLE

The attractiveness of the United States also depends very much upon the
values we express through the substance and style of our foreign policy. All
countries pursue their national interest in foreign policy, but there are choices
to be made about how broadly or narrowly we define our national interest, as
well as the means by which we pursue it. After all, soft power is about
mobilizing cooperation from others without threats or payments. Since it
depends on the currency of attraction rather than force or payoffs, soft power
depends in part on how we frame our own objectives. Policies based on
broadly inclusive and far-sighted definitions of the national interest are
easier to make attractive to others than policies that take a narrow and
myopic perspective.
Similarly, policies that express important values are more likely to be
attractive when the values are shared. The Norwegian author Geir Lundestad
has referred to America’s success in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth
century as an empire by invitation. “On the value side, federalism,
democracy and open markets represented core American values. This is what
America exported.”97 And because of far-sighted policies like the Marshall
Plan, Europeans were happy to accept. But the resulting soft power depended
in part on the considerable overlap of culture and values between the United
States and Europe.
In the twenty-first century the United States has an interest in maintaining a
degree of international order. It needs to influence distant governments and
organizations on a variety of issues such as proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, terrorism, drugs, trade, resources, and ecological damage that
affect Americans as well as others. The United States, like nineteenth-century
Britain, also has an interest in keeping international markets and global
commons, such as the oceans, open to all. To a large extent, international
order is a public good—something everyone can consume without
diminishing its availability to others.98 Of course, pure public goods are
rare. And sometimes things that look good to Americans may not look good
to everyone else, and that is why consultation is important.
A large country like the United States gains doubly when it promotes
public goods: from the goods themselves, and from the way that being a
major provider legitimizes and increases its soft power. Thus when the Bush
administration announced that it would increase its development assistance
and take the lead in combating HIV/AIDS, it meant the United States would
not only benefit from the markets and stability that might be produced, but
also by enhancing its attractiveness or soft-power resources. International
development is also an important global public good. Nonetheless, American
foreign aid was .1 percent of GDP, roughly one-third of the European levels,
and protectionist trade measures, particularly in agriculture and textiles, hurt
poor countries more than the value of the aid provided. According to one
index that tries to evaluate how well rich countries help the poor by
including trade, environment, investment, migration, and peacekeeping along
with actual aid, the United States ranks twentieth out of 21 (just ahead of
Japan).99 Despite the Bush administration’s efforts, the United States has a
distance to go to gain soft-power resources in the development area.
Foreign policies also produce soft power when they promote broadly
shared values such as democracy and human rights. Americans have wrestled
with how to integrate our values with other interests since the early days of
the republic, and the main views cut across party lines. Realists like John
Quincy Adams warned that the United States “goes not abroad in search of
monsters to destroy,” and we should not involve ourselves “beyond the
power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue.”100 Others
follow the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and emphasize democracy and
human rights as foreign policy objectives. As we shall see in chapter 5,
today’s neoconservatives are, in effect, right-wing Wilsonians, and they are
interested in the soft power that can be generated by the promotion of
democracy.
During the 2000 election campaign, when George W. Bush frequently
expressed traditional realist warnings that the United States should not
become overextended, leading neoconservatives urged him to make human
rights, religious freedom, and democracy priorities for American foreign
policy and “not to adopt a narrow view of U.S. national interests.”101 After
9/11, Bush’s policy changed and he spoke of the need to use American power
to bring democracy to the Middle East. As Lawrence Kaplan and William
Kristol put it, “When it comes to dealing with tyrannical regimes like Iraq,
Iran and, yes, North Korea, the U.S. should seek transformation, not
coexistence, as a primary aim of U.S. foreign policy. As such, it commits the
U.S. to the task of maintaining and enforcing a decent world order.”102
The neoconservatives are correct that such a world order could be a
global public good, but they are mistaken to assume that their vision will be
shared by all those affected by it. Whether the neoconservative approach
creates rather than consumes American soft power depends not only on the
results but also on who is consulted and who decides. The neoconservatives
pay less heed than traditional Wilsonians to consultation through international
institutions. But because the currency of soft power is attraction, it is often
easier to generate and wield in a multilateral context.
In recent years, other countries have increasingly complained about the
unilateralism of American foreign policy. Of course such differences are a
matter of degree, and there are few countries that are pure unilateralists or
multilateralists. International concerns about unilateralism began well before
George W. Bush became president, and involved Congress as well as the
executive branch. The president has disclaimed the label but most observers
describe his administration as divided between traditional pragmatists and a
more ideological school that the columnist Charles Krauthammer celebrated
as “the new unilateralism.”103
The “new unilateralists” advocate an assertive approach to promoting
American values. They worry about a flagging of internal will and a
reluctance to turn a unipolar moment into a unipolar era.104 American
intentions are good, American hegemony is benevolent, and that should end
the discussion. To them, multilateralism means “submerging American will
in a mush of collective decision-making—you have sentenced yourself to
reacting to events or passing the buck to multilingual committees with fancy
acronyms.”105 They deny that American “arrogance” is a problem. Rather,
the problem is “the inescapable reality of American power in its many
forms.”106 Policy is legitimized by its origins in a democracy and by the
outcome—whether it results in an advance of freedom and democracy. That
post hoc legitimization will more than compensate for any loss of legitimacy
through unilateralism.
Unfortunately, the approach of the new unilateralists is not very convincing
to other countries whose citizens observe that Americans are not immune
from hubris and self-interest. Americans do not always have all the answers.
As one realist put it, “If we were truly acting in the interests of others as well
as our own, we would presumably accord to others a substantive role and, by
doing so, end up embracing some form of multilateralism. Others, after all,
must be supposed to know their interests better than we can know them.”107
Since the currency of soft power is attraction based on shared values and the
justness and duty of others to contribute to policies consistent with those
shared values, multilateral consultations are more likely to generate soft
power than mere unilateral assertion of the values.
There is increasing evidence that the policies and tone of the new
unilateralists were directly responsible for the decline of America’s
attractiveness abroad. A survey conducted a month before September 11,
2001, found that Western Europeans already described the Bush
administration’s approach to foreign policy as unilateralist. Nearly two years
later, the Iraq War hardened these perceptions: pluralities of respondents
said that American foreign policy had a negative effect on their views of the
United States.108 In a dramatic turnabout from the Cold War, strong
majorities in Europe now see U.S. unilateralism as an important international
threat to Europe in the next ten years. Nearly nine in ten French and Germans
share this point of view, perceiving the threat of U.S. unilateralism as
comparable to the threats represented by North Korea’s or Iran’s developing
weapons of mass destruction. Even among the Iraq coalition allies, Britain
and Poland, two-thirds of these countries’ populations agree that U.S.
unilateralism is an important threat.109
The struggle between multilateralists and unilateralists in the Congress
created a schizophrenic American foreign policy even before the current
administration. The United States negotiated multilateral projects such as the
Law of the Seas Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mines
Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change, but Congress failed to ratify them. In some cases, such as the Kyoto
Protocol, President Bush simply pronounced it “dead” without offering any
alternatives. Whatever the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol, the way Bush’s
policy toward it was handled resulted in foreign reactions that undermined
American soft power. And in the run-up to the Iraq War, many other countries
felt that although the pragmatists prevailed in seeking Security Council
resolution 1441 aimed at removing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the
fall of 2002, the unilateralists had already decided on going to war. The
result was a stalemated diplomacy that turned into a dispute about American
power.
Ever since Athens transformed the Delian League into an empire in the
fifth century B.C., smaller allies have been torn between anxieties over
abandonment or entrapment. The fact that American allies have been able to
voice their concerns helps to explain why American alliances persisted so
long after Cold War threats receded. Membership in a web of multilateral
institutions ranging from the UN to NATO has been called a constitutional
bargain.110 Seen in the light of a constitutional bargain, the multilateralism
of American preeminence was a key to its longevity, because it reduced the
incentives for constructing countervailing alliances.
But giving others a voice also tempered American objectives and made
them more acceptable to others. Former Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War, subsequently
concluded, “If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the
merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning. If we’d followed
that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies
supported us.”111 Multilateralism helps to legitimate American power, but
paying attention to allies also shapes our policies, and the new unilateralists
felt that those costs outweighed the soft-power benefits. Vice President Dick
Cheney warned, “Strength, and resolve and decisive action defeat attacks
before they can arrive on our shore.” It is dangerous to rely too heavily on
reaching international consensus, asserted Cheney, because that approach
“amounts to a policy of doing exactly nothing.”112
 By and large, the American public has supported U.S. involvement in
multilateral institutions and appreciated the legitimacy that participation has
conferred on U.S. foreign policy. As we will see in chapter 3, support for the
United Nations has had its ups and downs over the past 50 years, but in the
aftermath of the Iraq War, two-thirds of Americans still voiced favorable
opinions of the United Nations.113 Before the war, polls consistently showed
that public support for military action was strongest if the U.S. acted with the
backing of the Security Council. There is further evidence that unilateralism
makes a majority of Americans uncomfortable: after the war, two-thirds (67
percent) said that the tendency to go it alone was an important threat to the
United States over the next ten years.114
Of course, not all multilateral arrangements are good, and a general
presumption in favor of multilateralism need not be a straitjacket. When the
United States occasionally goes it alone in pursuit of public goods, the nature
of the broadly shared value of the ends can sometimes compensate for the
means in legitimizing the action and preserving soft power. But the new
unilateralists’ efforts in recent years to elevate unilateralism from an
occasional tactic to a fullfledged strategy has been costly to American soft
power. That loss of soft power can be costly for hard power. For example, in
July 2003, when the United States encountered more resistance in Iraq than it
had planned for, it had half the Army’s 33 active-duty combat brigades tied
down there. It sought peacekeeping and policing forces from India, Pakistan,
France, and other countries, but India, France, Germany, and others
responded that they would send forces only under UN auspices.115
Regardless of what tactics are used, style also matters, and humility is an
important aspect of foreign-policy style. During the 2000 political campaign,
George W. Bush described American power well: “Our nation stands alone
right now in the world in terms of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be
humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.... If we are
an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re a humble nation,
they’ll respect us.”116 His statement was perceptive, yet polls show that
foreign nations consider his administration arrogant. Within a few months of
Bush’s address, for the first time America’s European allies joined other
countries in refusing to reelect the United States to the UN Human Rights
Commission. One observer noted that at the start of his administration,
President Bush “contrived to prove his own theory that arrogance provokes
resentment for a country that, long before his arrival, was already the world’s
most conspicuous and convenient target.”117
A sampling of public opinion in 11 countries by the BBC in 2003 found
that many people saw the United States as an arrogant superpower that poses
a greater danger to world peace than North Korea does. Sixty-five percent
overall—and a majority in every country, including the United States—said
that America was arrogant. 118 Writing in Britain’s Financial Times, Philip
Stephens stated, “This shift in world opinion has much to do with rhetoric
and tone of voice. Time after time the quiet diplomacy of Colin Powell’s
State Department and the cautious deliberations of George W. Bush himself
have been undercut by the bellicose statements of Mr. Rumsfeld and of Dick
Cheney, the Vice President. The loud-hailer rhetoric often turns out to be at
odds with the pragmatic policy choices.”119
After the Iraq War, Irwin Stelzer, an American conservative living in
London, reported “an erosion of support for the US from British friends who
cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered anti-American. The
swagger of the US Defence Department inclines them to give credence to
charges that unconstrained American power exists, and is likely to be
deployed in a manner that threatens the security of America’s allies.”120 One
reporter observed about a meeting with Europeans that Undersecretary of
State John Bolton seemed to enjoy unnecessarily insulting other
countries.121 Yet former President George H. W. Bush had advised after the
Iraq War, “You’ve got to reach out to the other person. You’ve got to
convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity.”
Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, warned that “ad hoc
coalitions of the willing can give us the image of arrogance, and if you get to
the point where everyone hopes that the US gets a black eye because we’re
so obnoxious, then we’ll be totally hamstrung.”122 A century ago Teddy
Roosevelt noted, when you have a big stick, it is wise to speak softly.
Otherwise you undercut your soft power. In short, though it is true that
America’s size creates a necessity to lead and makes it a target for
resentment as well as admiration, both the substance and style of our foreign
policy can make a difference to our image of legitimacy, and thus to our soft
power.

THE IMAGE OF THE UNITED STATES and its attractiveness to others is a

composite of many different ideas and attitudes. It depends in part on culture,
in part on domestic policies and values, and in part on the substance, tactics,
and style of our foreign policies. Over the years, these three resources have
often produced soft power—the ability to get the outcomes America wanted
by attracting rather than coercing others. All three are important, but policy
substance and style are both the most volatile and the most susceptible to
government control. In any event, we have seen that soft power is not static.
Resources change with the changing context. They have varied in the past and
will continue to do so in the future. Historical trends from the Cold War era
may not prove reliable guides when forecasting the ebb and flow of
American soft power in the war on terrorism. In chapter 4 we will discuss
the extent to which policies of public diplomacy can enhance that soft power.
But first, we should look at the soft power of others besides the United
States.

APPENDIX

Figure 2.4 Dimensions of American Attractiveness in Europe

 Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures in ten European countries
Figure 2.5 Dimensions of American Attractiveness in Southeast Asia

Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures in six Asian countries (non-Muslim majority populations)
Figure 2.6 Dimensions of American Attractiveness in Africa
 Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures in ten African countries
Figure 2.7 Dimensions of U.S. Attractiveness in the Americas

Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
Median measures in nine North and South American countries (excluding the
U.S.)