GET SMART: COMBINING HARD AND SOFT POWER
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65163/joseph-s-nye-jr/get-smart
By Joseph S. Nye, author of The Powers to Lead
Reviewed by William P. Kiehl, Editor

In this “Response” from the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Harvard University’s Distinguished Service Professor Joseph S. Nye takes issue with Leslie Gelb’s May/June Foreign Affairs article “Necessity, Choice and Common Sense,” which is largely drawn from Gelb’s new book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy. (Readers may find a review of Gelb’s book elsewhere in this journal; see: www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2009/0709/book/book_teixeira_power.html).

Nye, the author of the term “smart power,” accuses Gelb of confusing “actions to achieve outcomes” with the resources used to produce them. The professor also points out that many types of resources, including military and economic ones, can contribute to “soft power.” Criticizing Gelb’s narrow definition of power (“getting people or groups to do something they don’t want to do”), Nye lauds the importance of soft power and notes that even if soft power is often insufficient, it can create “an enabling or disabling context for policy.” For Professor Nye, “contextual intelligence is the intuitive diagnostic skill that helps policymakers align tactics with objectives to create smart strategies” or to combine hard (military) power with soft (public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance etc.) power in an integrated strategy. The fact that the United States spends several hundred times as much on hard power as on soft power troubles Nye as he points out that in the information age, success is not just the result of “whose army wins but also of whose story wins."