Joseph S. Nye
Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Contact:
Telephone: (617) 495-1123
Fax: (617)-496-3337
Email: Joseph_Nye@harvard.edu
May 2010
"Cyber Power"
Paper
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Power depends upon context, and the rapid growth of cyber space is an important new context in world politics. The low price of entry, anonymity, and asymmetries in vulnerability means that smaller actors have more capacity to exercise hard and soft power in cyberspace than in many more traditional domains of world politics. The largest powers are unlikely to be able to dominate this domain as much as they have others like sea or air. But cyberspace also illustrates the point that diffusion of power does not mean equality of power or the replacement of governments as the most powerful actors in world politics.
AP Photo
April 11, 2010
"Health of American Politics"
Op-Ed, The Korea Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"Power conversion — translating power resources into effective influence — is a long-standing problem for the U.S. The Constitution is based on an 18th-century liberal view that power is best controlled by fragmentation and countervailing checks and balances."
AP Photo
March 11, 2010
"China's Bad Bet Against America"
Op-Ed, Daily News Egypt
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...[T]he fact that China holds so many dollars is not a true source of power, because the interdependence in the economic relationship is symmetrical. True, if China dumped its dollars on world markets, it could bring the American economy to its knees, but in doing so it would bring itself to its ankles. China would not only lose the value of its dollar reserves, but would suffer major unemployment. When interdependence is balanced, it does not constitute a source of power."
AP Photo
March 4, 2010
"Restoring America's Reputation in the World and Why It Matters"
Testimony
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...[M]ilitary analysts trying to understand counter-insurgency have rediscovered the importance of struggles over soft power. In the words of General David Patreus, "we did reaffirm in Iraq the recognition that you don't kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency." More recently he warned against expedient measures that damage our reputation. "We end us paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are non-biodegradable. They don't go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick." In Afghanistan, the Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned one, to soften their image and win favor with local Afghans as they try to counter the Americans' new campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds.
AP Photo
February 15, 2010
"Smart Power Needs Smart Public Diplomacy"
Op-Ed, Daily Star
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...[E]ven the best advertising cannot sell an unpopular product. A communications strategy cannot work if it cuts against the grain of policy. Actions speak louder than words. All too often, policymakers treat public diplomacy as a bandage that can be applied after damage is done by other instruments. For example, China tried to enhance its soft power by successfully staging the 2008 Olympics, but its simultaneous domestic crackdown in Tibet — and subsequent repression in Xinxiang and arrests of human rights lawyers — undercut its gains."
AP Photo
January 26, 2010
"Davos: What's the Point?"
Op-Ed, Washington Post
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"What good does it do? After attending nearly a score of annual meetings over the years, I have noticed that the conventional wisdom — whether gloom and doom or rise and shine — that summarizes each meeting often proves misleading. But to the extent that this little village in the Alps gets top leaders to raise their eyes above their inboxes and spend even a little time on global and humanitarian issues, it probably helps."
AP Photo
January 13, 2010
"Is Military Power Becoming Obsolete?"
Op-Ed, The Korea Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"Armed groups view conflict as a continuum of political and violent irregular operations over a long period that will provide control over local populations. They benefit from the fact that scores of weak states lack the legitimacy or capacity to control their own territory effectively."
AP Photo
January 7, 2010
"An Alliance Larger Than One Issue"
Op-Ed, New York Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"This year is the 50th anniversary of the United States–Japan security treaty. The two countries will miss a major opportunity if they let the base controversy lead to bitter feelings or the further reduction of American forces in Japan. The best guarantee of security in a region where China remains a long-term challenge and a nuclear North Korea poses a clear threat remains the presence of American troops, which Japan helps to maintain with generous host nation support."
AP Photo
December 15, 2009
"Testing Obama's Foreign Policy"
Op-Ed, Business Daily, (Africa)
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...critics on the left have complained that he has not been able to get Congress to pass a tough energy bill before the Copenhagen conference on climate change. But Obama has helped to persuade China and India to announce useful efforts, and he will set an American target of reducing greenhouse emissions that should prevent the conference from being a failure."
AP Photo
November 11, 2009
"South Korea's Growing Soft Power"
Op-Ed, Daily Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...South Korea has the resources to produce soft power, and its soft power is not prisoner to the geographical limitations that have constrained its hard power throughout its history. As a result, South Korea is beginning to design a foreign policy that will allow it to play a larger role in the international institutions and networks that will be essential to global governance."
