Heg Impact-A2: Soft Power Good

Heg Impact-A2: Soft Power Good

Stephen G. Brooks & William C. Wohlforth, Professors of Government- Dartmouth, 2002, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4, July/August, p. 31

Historically, the major forces pushing powerful states toward restraint and magnanimity have been the limits of their strength and the fear of overextension and balancing. Great powers typically checked their ambitions and deferred to others not because they wanted to but because they had to in order to win the cooperation they needed to survive and prosper. It is thus no surprise that today’s champions of American moderation and international benevolence stress the constraints on American power rather than the lack of them. Political scientist Joseph Nye, for example, insists that “[the term] unipolarity is misleading because it exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get the results it wants in some dimensions of world politics. ... American power is less effective than it might first appear.” And he cautions that if the United States “handles its hard power in an overbearing, unilateral manner,” then others might be provoked into forming a balancing coalition. Such arguments are unpersuasive, however, because they fail to acknowledge the true nature of the current international system. The United States cannot be scared into meekness by warnings of inefficacy or potential balancing. Isolationists and aggressive unilateralists see this situation clearly, and their domestic opponents need to as well. Now and for the foreseeable future, the United States will have immense power resources it can bring to bear to force or entice others to do its bidding on a case-by-case basis.
Hard power doesn’t trade-off

William H. Thornton, Professor Cultural Studies National Cheng Kung University, 2005, New World Empire, p. 6-7

9/11 changed all that in a flash. The 1990s turned out to have been at best a respite between two warring ages. It was made abundantly clear that order would not simply unfold, but would have to be imposed. In the White House this revelation was so far from bad news that the challenge was not smiling too broadly in front of the cameras. At home and abroad, security took full priority over all the things the administration wanted to dispose of anyway. Securitization also enhanced the comparative advantage of America’s military supremacy—this is at a time when its economic supremacy was flagging. That gain in hard power was not offset by any major loss in soft power, since America was still swimming with the global tide. Just to make a point however, Washington let the fact be known that it could go it alone or even swim against the tide if need be. NATO responded to 9/11 by invoking for the first time a provision of its founding treaty that construes an attack on any member as an attack on all. But, as if to put multilateralism in mothballs, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz curtly vetoed that collective action, saying that if the United States needed help, it would ask for it.
Libya proves necessity of hard power to make soft power effective

Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London, 2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 133-4

For others, including ourselves, coercive diplomacy played the more decisive role. Neoconservatives argued that the example of regime change in Iraq forced Qadaffi’s U-turn—“Saddam was deposed, eight months ago, on flimsy evidential grounds,” observed the Libyan leader, “just think what will become of me when the Americans have absolute knowledge of my WMD capacity,” [F]ive days after we captured Saddam Hussein,” noted Dick Cheney pointedly, “Qadaffi came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all of his nuclear materials to the United States.” This “Libyan surrender,” concurred Charles Krauthammer, was the product of “a clearly enunciated policy – now known as the Bush Doctrine – of targeting, by preemptive war if necessary, hostile regimes engaged in terror and/or refusing to come clean on WMDs …Hussein did not get the message and ended up in a hole. Qaddafi got the message.” Ronald Reagan had, after all, bombed Tripoli in April 1986 in reprisal for its sponsorship of terrorism. Precedent therefore tended to support the conclusion, no doubt shared by the Libyan regime, that, through a 9/11-three Ts prism, the US would not balk at doing so again, and more decisively. The Libyan case is a classic example of liberal internationalists assuming everyone thinks like them. The regime, according to them, responded to inducements to rejoin “the society of nations” rather than to the fear of American violence. It was not the war on terror that accounted for Qadaffis’s conversion but his empathy with, or threatened exclusion from, a liberal project. Bush was more realistic about why Libya changed course. “Actions by the United States and our allies,” he said, “have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction: Those weapons do not bring influence or prestige. They bring isolation or otherwise unwelcome consequences.” These “unwelcome consequences” are perennially undervalued, even eschewed, in liberal statecraft when, in reality, they are a form of hard power that makes soft power possible. Neither works in isolation, both are only effective in tandem. As Jentleson and Whytock conclude, “there is greater potential complementarity between force and diplomacy than more singular advocates of one ore the other tend to convey.”

Heg Impact-A2: Anti-Americanism Turn

Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London, 2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 198

Such perceptions reflect and reinforce a widespread view of America that is untroubled by dispassion and balance. Any objective analysis of American military interventions can hardly cast Washington as a regional villain or Islamophobic power. During the last half-century, in eleven of twelve major conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, the US sided with the Muslim/Arab groups. American backing for Israel has been the sole significant exception, with the US helping Israel to survive efforts from Arab states and terrorists to remove it from the map. As Barry Rubin notes: “It has been the United States’ perceived softness in recent years, rather than its bullying behavior, that has encouraged anti-Americans to act on their beliefs. After the United States failed to respond aggressively to many terrorist attacks against its citizens, stood by while Americans were seized as hostages in Iran and Lebanon, let Saddam Hussein remain in power while letting the shah fall, pressured its friends and courted its enemies, and allowed its prized Arab-Israeli peace process to be destroyed, why should anyone have respected its interests or fear its wrath?...further concessions will only encourage even more contempt for the United States and make the anti-American campaign more attractive…If Arab anti-Americanism turns out to be grounded in domestic maneuvering rather than American misdeeds, neither launching a public relations campaign nor changing Washington’s policies will affect it… Only when the systems that manufacture and encourage anti-Americanism fail will popular opinion also change.”
Soft power net more likely to provoke anti-Americanism

Thomas J. Lynch & Robert S. Singh, Lecturer and Professor Foreign Policy, University of London, 2008, After Bush: the case for continuity in American foreign policy, p. 199

The tenacity with which febrile notions of American designs and influence win currency in the Islamic world is remarkable. Indeed, this should be factored into discussions of American “soft” power winning “hearts and minds.” As Bernard Lewis noted, when Khomeini and other fanatics labeled America the “Great Satan” they chose their term carefully. Satan is a seducer more than he is a warrior. It is the power to tempt “good Muslims” into a degenerate, infidel mindset and lifestyle that is the devil’s greatest threat. It is not what America does that accounts for Muslim rage. To parrot this notion as a rational explanation, demanding a change in policy that will then lead to cordial relations, is to ignore the reality that, for Islmaists, what America is generates resentment, anger, and envy. It is this paradox (“Yankee go home! And take me with you!) that, among other problems, precludes the success of a “hearts and minds”-based strategy. As Lewis observed: “from the writings of Khomeini and other ideologists of Islamic fundamentalism, it is cleat that it is the seductive appeal of American culture, far more than any possible hostile acts by American governments, that they see as offering the greatest menace to the true faith and the right path as they define them. By denouncing America as the Great Satan, the late Ayatollah Khomeini was paying an unconscious tribute to that seductive appeal.” Given this, and the societal, economic, and political deficiencies that generate anti-Americanisms in the region, what can feasibly be done?
Radicalism not driven by US primacy

Robert J. Lieber, Government Professor GWU, 2009, International Politics, Vol. 46, p. 123-4