Joseph Nye is dead, and the illusion of ethical power politics should die too

The Hill

26-05-2025

Joseph Nye died earlier this month at the age of 88, and with him passes one of the most influential voices of post-Cold War American internationalism.
The tributes have been swift and respectful, as they should be. The renowned Harvard professor was not only a gifted scholar but a consummate Washington insider, serving as assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs in the Clinton administration. He bridged the worlds of academia and power like few others of his generation.
Nye's concept of 'soft power' became gospel in the foreign policy establishment. His calls for an ethical foreign policy won plaudits from policymakers who wanted to believe that American primacy could be both virtuous and enduring.
But now that the official remembrances have piled up, it is time to say something different. Nye was a man of ideas. His passing should invite not just mourning, but reevaluation. And the hard truth is that the world Nye helped interpret, shape and justify no longer exists.
Nye's signature ideas — soft power, the liberal order, ethical realism — are artifacts of an age that is over. What remains is a harsher and more tragic world, one that calls not for the ethics of Harvard seminars but clarity, hard-nosed realism and morally unsettling truths.
Let's begin with the concept Nye made famous: soft power. In his telling, the ability to attract and co-opt, rather than coerce, was the future of global leadership. Cultural appeal, democratic norms and economic openness would draw others toward America's orbit, making the world safer, more liberal and more cooperative. Nye did not reject hard power; he sought a synthesis, famously urging policymakers to wield 'smart power' — the judicious blend of persuasion and coercion.
But soft power was never a strategy. It was a theory of influence in a world where U.S. cultural and economic hegemony was taken for granted. At its core, soft power depended on a set of illusions: that America's values were universally attractive, that its economic system was the endpoint of development, that its leadership was benevolent rather than self-interested. These illusions worked, for a while, because there was no real alternative. In the unipolar moment of the 1990s, even critics of the U.S. had to live within the order it dominated. Soft power was, in truth, a polite name for power with no challengers.
That world is gone. The appeal of American liberalism is weaker than it has been in decades. China offers a model of techno-authoritarian capitalism that has growing appeal across the Global South. Russia, for all its brutality, has demonstrated that hard power can still shape borders and revise status quos. Even U.S. allies no longer assume that America's cultural gravity is irresistible. And at home, the U.S. is mired in political division, moral confusion and social decay. The foundations of soft power have cracked, and no amount of elite consensus can put them back together.
To his credit, Nye tried to grapple with these changes. He remained a realist (at least in the academic sense), and his later writings explored how presidents might pursue ethical foreign policies in a world of limits. But this effort, too, ultimately fails. Nye's vision of 'ethical realism' relied on the idea that America's power could be used for moral ends — that statesmen could balance national interest with cosmopolitan responsibility, and that the exercise of power could be squared with the principles of justice. His final works urge policymakers to consider the intentions behind policy, the means by which it is pursued and the consequences it unleashes.
But what if the world doesn't allow that kind of neat calculus? What if, as Thucydides wrote in the Melian Dialogue, 'the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must'? What if tragedy — not ethics — is the defining logic of international relations? That power always outruns virtue? That necessity, not morality, determines action in an anarchic world?
Nye was too much a liberal, and too much a moralist, to follow this thought to its end. And so his ethical realism amounts to little more than a comforting fiction for elites desperate to believe that U.S. leadership still carries moral weight.
The most damning critique of Nye, however, is not that he was wrong. It is that his ideas provided the intellectual scaffolding for an era of American overreach.
Soft power lulled Washington into complacency about its real sources of strength. Ethical realism gave moral cover to disastrous interventions in Iraq, Libya and beyond. And the concept of 'smart power' became a euphemism for a bipartisan consensus that dressed up brute force in the language of benevolence. The wreckage of these policies can be seen around the world — from Kabul to Kyiv, from the South China Sea to the Sahel. Nye's legacy, however well-intentioned, cannot be separated from the failures that it helped legitimize.
We are left with a need for a new realism — one not rooted in morality tales or campus abstractions, but in the grim realities of power, fear and ambition. Carl von Clausewitz reminds us that war is a continuation of politics by other means, not a failure of diplomacy. Machiavelli teaches that the appearance of virtue is often more important than its substance. And Thucydides shows that human nature and the structure of international politics make conflict all but inevitable. These are not comforting truths, but they are truths nonetheless.
Nye's death marks the passing of an era — the final twilight of the American imperium imagined in the 1990s. It is fitting that we honor his contributions. He was a serious thinker, a patriot and a decent man.
But let us not honor him with empty praise or uncritical nostalgia. Instead, let's bury the illusions that his ideas inspired. The post-Cold War liberal order is gone and the dream of ethical hegemony has faded. In its place stands a world of multipolar competition, civilizational rivalry and structural disorder. This world will not be managed by soft power, nor redeemed by ethical realism.
It will be shaped — if we are lucky — by hard choices, clear thinking and a new generation of statesmen unafraid to look tragedy in the face. That is the true task of our time. And that is the epitaph that Nye's legacy deserves.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.