The Future Of Power

THE FUTURE OF POWER

Joseph Nye, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is one of the world's most influential foreign policy thinkers. This is partly due to his highly unusualdecision to not only mingle with policy makers, but to actually hold important positions in US government at several moments of his career, thus gaining insights that provide him with a unique perspective.Nye has also had the courage to try to expand his readership beyond academia, and several of his concepts such as soft power and smart power have turned into household concepts – even if thatachievement has earned him some criticism among fellow academics, who accuse him of overly targeting non-academic readers.

After “The Paradox of American Power” (2002), “Soft Power – The Means to Successin World Politics” (2004) and “The Power to Lead” (2008), this is Nye’s fourth and probably final book on the concept of power. In Chapter 1, the author reviews his overall idea, distinguishing betweenhard power (economic and military), soft power (“the ability to affect others through the co-optive means of framing the agenda, persuading, and eliciting positive attraction in order to obtainpreferred outcomes”), and smart power (the combination of the two). Anyone who has read his previous books (as has the vast majority of the IR community) will not find much news here, but it is certainly awelcome summary for first-timers. In Chapter 2 (“military power”), Nye argues that military power very much depends on the context, and that armies need to be increasingly versatile to deal with verydifferent kinds of issues, ranging from classic warfare, counterinsurgency, to humanitarian intervention and assistance. The authors repeats his basic argument when he declares that while militarypower remains crucial in world politics, it no longer is sufficient to prevail, as shown by NATO’s difficulties to win the hearts and minds of the Afghani people. In Chapter 3 on economic power, Nye...