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- THE LIFE OF JOSEPH NYE, JR.
- NYE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
JOSEPH NYE, JR.Joseph Nye, Jr. is one of the most influential modern voices in American governance and political science. Well versed in foreign policy, he is also an influential thinker on the domestic scene. Name a qualification that holds weight in the policy wonk world, and Nye’s likely got it. Written for the heavy-hitter journals? Check. Longtime professor? Check. Intellectual chops that are unquestioned? Check. Nye is currently Dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. You might think that Nye is merely another old, bald white guy that has worked in the government and worked with universities. And, well, you’d sort of be right. But the guy is a pretty sharp old, bald white establishment guy, and his viewpoints are refreshing in their lack of ideological predisposition. Just look at the wide variety of sources that have praised his work: from Machiavellian realists like Henry Kissinger to loose cannons like George Soros, from the Democratic establishment sources like Strobe Talbott and Madeleine Albright to academics of all kinds. If we are to think of American politics in terms of the left wing and the right wing, and imagine the wings praising Nye as belonging to some giant bird, those are some big outstretched wings. I wouldn’t want to wash my car while that seagull is flying overhead. That’s not to say there is something in Nye for everyone. It’s hard to imagine the left cozying up to him very much. The further right won’t like his reluctance to use American power in every situation. However, to the extent that Nye is reluctant to adopt the ideological fabric of any particular pigeonhole, he is an intriguing thinker who appears to approach each problem as a fresh challenge. While he is certainly a product of his upbringing and intellectual culture, he is at least apparently willing to try to step outside that rigid intellectual framework as he explores the issues of today. Speaking of his upbringing and intellectual culture, let’s look at where Nye has come from in order to understand where he is today. THE LIFE OF JOSEPH NYE, JR.Joseph Nye, Jr. was born in 1937. Nye grew up on a farm in Northwest New Jersey, and received his bachelor’s degree in an interdisciplinary major from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1958. He is a Rhodes Scholar, doing his post-graduate work at Oxford University, and a graduate of the Ph.D program in government at Harvard. After Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election, Nye was recruited to join his transition team as a consultant on nuclear proliferation. When Cyrus Vance was appointed secretary of state, he asked Nye to serve as deputy undersecretary in charge of Carter's nonproliferation initiatives. He stayed on in that capacity from 1977-1979, after which he returned to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to teach. He fluttered between governmental work and university work over the next several years. All the while, Nye kept up his prolific writing on international security issues, serving as an editorial board member of Foreign Policy and International Security magazines. He has written more than one hundred articles in professional journals. The fact that Nye is neither a lifelong government official nor a lifelong academic may have some influence on his thinking. He seems decidedly less dogmatic than a great deal of his contemporaries who have spent their entire careers in the Beltway or the Ivory Tower. As Nye himself has observed in truth my career is one in which I have traveled two roads, both the academic and the governmental. Some who pursued only one road have gone further in achieving a high position or in the length of their list of publications, but I would not trade with them. I have found both halves of my career satisfying and cannot imagine my life without either. I would like to recommend such a course to others, but I must confess that it is not easy to plan to take two roads. In my case, serendipity played a large role. I certainly had no fixed plan to take the roads I did. This lack of a fixed plan mirrors his thinking -- always reacting to emerging situations rather than viewing emerging phenomena through a fixed lens. NYE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSWhile technically Nye falls under the school of “realism” in international relations, his views of power and global politics is much more nuanced than the big-stick diplomats that dominate the scene today. Nye coined the marvelously efficient phrase “soft power” to refer to those non-military forms of exerting influence -- cultural, economic, etc. He meditates on the differences between soft and hard power in his book The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone. "Soft Power is your ability to attract others to get the outcomes you want," Nye has said. "Hard power is when I coerce you--if I the use a carrot or a stick to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn't do, that's hard power. But if I get you to want what I want, and I don't have to use a carrot or a stick, that's the ultimate because it costs me almost nothing but I get the outcomes I want." This has not changed since September 11, despite the United States so-called “war on terrorism.” Nye wrote an insightful article with a global focus in the Guardian on March 31, 2002, which included the following: Traditionally, the test of a great power was 'strength for war'. War was the ultimate game in which the cards of international politics were played and estimates of relative power were proven. Over the centuries, as technologies evolved, the sources of power have shifted. Today, the foundations of power have been moving away from the emphasis on military force. A combination of factors - nuclear weapons that are too awesome to use, the difficulties of building empires in an age of nationalism, the unwillingness of western societies to send their troops into battle - have conspired to make war a last resort for most advanced countries. In the words of British diplomat Robert Cooper, 'A large number of the most powerful states no longer want to fight or conquer.' War remains possible, but it is much less acceptable now than it was even half a century ago. For most of today's great powers, the use of force would jeopardise their economic objectives. Even non-democratic countries that feel moral constraints on the use of force have to consider its effects on their economic objectives ... Force remains important as we saw on September 11, 2000 and in Afghanistan. But it is also important to mobilise international coalitions and build institutions to address shared threats and challenges. Soft power is an important concept to understand, particularly in the post Cold War world. If we disagree with Japan’s trade policy, for example, we aren’t going to invade them. We’re going to either negotiate with them or flex our own economic muscles (as George W. Bush did by imposing steel tariffs recently) in response. That’s true of most adversaries in addition to traditional allies like Japan. While Bush has been threatening to invade Iraq almost constantly for the last year, other measures (such as the multilateral United Nations oil embargo and other sanctions) are really more effective with less of an opportunity cost. It’s only for a truly dramatic event (like the terrorist tragedy on September 11, 2001) that will of necessity engender a military response. Nye is a believer in war as a last resort, considering it a “solution” that is often actually creates worse problems. Nye is not, as should be clear, a hawk per se. War is an impractical and problematic means of enforcing American interests and desires. That said, Nye is a realist who does seek to advance American interests through the policies he advocates. How, then, does one secure American interests, especially in the face of competing and potentially adversarial powers? The answer is a question of containment vs. engagement. Containment is a more hawkish strategy, where one uses foreign policy tools to isolate an adversarial power. Engagement is where a nation continues to interact with the adversarial power through trade, diplomacy and other channels in an attempt to exert influence over the other state. Nye is usually an advocate of engagement. Take, for example, the case of China. An emerging power with one billion citizens and a growing economy, China will be a force in the new century. Nye’s idea is that a strong China is better for the world community than a weak China, given that a weak China would be more given to lash out to shore up its power -- especially against American allies like Taiwan (an island nation that China considers a part of its country, though the Taiwanese don’t agree) or Japan. If that is true, Nye reasons, then the United States must not isolate china. An attempt to treat China as a threat, in fact, might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “If China can be brought into a network of rule-based relations, such an evolution may continue. Will this strategy work? No one can be certain, but it is clearly better than the containment strategy ... It would be one of history's tragic ironies if domestic politics leads to an unnecessary Cold War in Asia that will be costly for this and future generations of Americans,” he wrote. As an intellectual who lived through the darkest moments of the Cold War, Nye knows what kind of policies led to increased tensions during that period in history. He is keen on avoiding that kind of situation with other powers, such as China. It should be noted that this falls right in line with his idea of soft power: the “big stick” approach is a counterproductive one. Rather than isolating other nations, in his view, we should be using our influence in a positive manner. 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