Joseph Nye, Harvard foreign policy guru who coined the term ‘soft power'

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Joseph Nye, who has died aged 88, was the doyen of Harvard foreign-policy analysts and an occasional Washington public servant; he was famous for coining and popularising the term 'soft power', which he defined as 'the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment – magnets rather than carrots or sticks'.
The term first appeared in his 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, which Nye then distilled into an article for Foreign Policy magazine. The democratic revolutions in east and central Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War gave the concept salience on the international conference circuit and further afield, alongside Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history'.
According to the 'soft power' theory, in the end the Cold War had been won not by the missile silos and massed tanks of Nato, but by Elvis, blue jeans, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, youth culture and Disney – as well as the Voice of America and the BBC World Service. By the end of the century 'soft power' was not only a buzz phrase but seen by many as a way of exercising power in practice.
Nye argued that soft power enhanced America's relative position in the world. 'Soft power means that others want what the United States wants,' he told an audience at Chatham House in 2005. 'It's not just a question of whose army wins but of whose story wins.'
The basic idea is as old as diplomacy itself. Nye's good fortune was to encapsulate a complex web of ideas into a single phrase at a time when the political landscape was ready for it. In practice, however, 'soft power' has often proved the loser when up against the harsh military and economic realities of the modern world.
The idea appealed to Bill Clinton (under whom Nye served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, then assistant secretary for international security affairs at the Pentagon) when he was elected president in 1992, but he found himself perpetually thwarted in putting 'soft power' into practice. When the US lost troops to violence in Somalia and in Lebanon, and Yugoslavia descended into mayhem, he found himself criticised for his timidity.
In 2004 Nye, by now dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, gave a lecture extolling the idea of soft power to an audience that included George W Bush's hawkish defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. When another audience member asked Rumsfeld what he thought of the notion, he replied: 'I don't know what it means.'
Bush's presidency eventually boosted the 'soft power' cause, as his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became increasingly unpopular with American voters, although his 'War on Terror' still had enough public appeal to help him see off John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential vote. (Had Kerry won, Nye was seen as the natural choice to be National Security Adviser.)
Nye's star rose again with the election of Barack Obama, though by this time he had refined the 'soft power' concept, coming up with the term 'smart power' – the ability to deploy both soft and hard power to maximum advantage. In 2009, during her confirmation hearings as Obama's nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton used the term 'smart power' 13 times in explaining how she would combat international Islamic terrorism.
The wheel turned again when Donald Trump rode a populist wave to the White House in 2016. If Nye was dismayed by the new president's disdain for national security professionals, he was even more dismayed, following Trump's return to power earlier this year, when he withdrew funding from food and medical aid to foreign countries and the Voice of America.
'I'm afraid President Trump doesn't understand soft power,' Nye told CNN a few days before his death. 'Think back on the Cold War – American nuclear deterrence and American troops in Europe were crucial. But when the Berlin Wall went down, it didn't go down under a barrage of artillery. It went down under hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been changed by the Voice of America and the BBC...
'So when you cancel something like USAID humanitarian assistance, or you silence the Voice of America, you deprive yourself of one of the major instruments of power.'
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr was born on January 19 1937 in South Orange, New Jersey; his father was a Wall Street bond trader. From Princeton University, where he graduated in 1958, he won a Rhodes scholarship to do graduate work at Oxford University, then took a PhD in political science at Harvard with a dissertation about East Africa's emergence from colonialism.
Nye joined the Harvard faculty in 1964, and in 1977 published Power and Interdependence (with Robert Keohane) in which he argued that military power was a declining force and that nations should work towards a peaceful world through global institutions such as the UN and World Trade Organisation.
He first worked in government in the Carter administration as a deputy under-secretary of state from 1977 to 1979, when he was in charge of nuclear non-proliferation policy.
Returning to Harvard during the Reagan years, he served as director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F Kennedy School of Government from 1985 to 1990; associate dean for International Affairs at the university from 1989 to 1992; and dean of the John F Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004.
His other books included Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), and A Life in the American Century (2024), in which he observed that trying to launch policy ideas from outside government was like 'dropping pennies into a deep well... When you're trying to influence things as a public intellectual, sometimes you hear a splash, but sometimes you're just kidding yourself.' The most significant way to affect policy was to 'have your hands on the levers'.
In 1961, Nye married Mary 'Molly' Harding, with whom he lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, and also owned a farm in New Hampshire, where he grew vegetables, hunted deer and made maple syrup. His wife died in December last year and Nye is survived by their three sons.
Joseph Nye, born January 19 1937, died May 6 2025
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