International Relations Blog

Sorting the mistakes from the fiascos on Syria.

There is so much wrong with the current “red-line” mess with Syria that a little sorting out is in order. It has gotten to the point that you can’t tell which fiasco you are talking about without a scorecard.

In the first instance, of course, there is the self-inflicted wound element of the problem, as reported in Sunday’s New York Times. Apparently, according to the paper, the president’s initial use of the term “red line” was an ill-considered bit of rhetorical muscle-flexing on his part. Since the president is the font from which all policy flows, it can hardly be called freelancing, but it was something close, making policy with a slip of the lip and less reflection on consequences than is truly desirable.

Of course, the word “consequences” cuts to another dimension of the problem that goes beyond the process misstep involved. Declaring a red line without figuring out the consequences you are willing to impose in advance is asking for trouble. It is the equivalent of a parent threatening an unruly child by counting to three: It works fine if the child doesn’t have the courage, curiosity, or recklessness to find out what happens after you get to three. Typically, however, the approach doesn’t work if the one you are seeking to talk back into line is a proven mass-murderer.

Another problem associated with the red line that Sen. John McCain quipped was written in “disappearing” ink has to do with the various ways United States has hemmed and hawed about the issue in the days since evidence appeared that suggested the red line might have been crossed. Admittedly, some of this was soundly cautious, a “let’s be sure” reaction that was a hard-learned lesson from Iraq. But some of it — notably the mixed signals that included Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s suggesting that the line might have been passed (a little, somehow, but not too much, but still worrisomely) while also saying the United States was considering tougher measures while also not actually taking any — was a classic illustration of a rudderless reaction. Read more…

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor at large of Foreign Policy. 

As publilshed in www.foreignpolicy.com on May 6, 2013.

Beijing and Moscow are trying their hands at attraction, and failing — miserably.

By Joseph S. Nye

When Foreign Policy first published my essay “Soft Power” in 1990, who would have expected that someday the term would be used by the likes of Hu Jintao or Vladimir Putin? Yet Hu told the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 that China needed to increase its soft power, and Putin recently urged Russian diplomats to apply soft power more extensively. Neither leader, however, seems to have understood how to accomplish his goals.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, and that can be accomplished in three main ways — by coercion, payment, or attraction. If you can add the soft power of attraction to your toolkit, you can economize on carrots and sticks. For a rising power like China whose growing economic and military might frightens its neighbors into counter-balancing coalitions, a smart strategy includes soft power to make China look less frightening and the balancing coalitions less effective. For a declining power like Russia (or Britain before it), a residual soft power helps to cushion the fall.

The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority). But combining these resources is not always easy.

Establishing, say, a Confucius Institute in Manila to teach Chinese culture might help produce soft power, but it is less likely to do so in a context where China has just bullied the Philippines over possession of Scarborough Reef. Similarly, Putin has told his diplomats that “the priority has been shifting to the literate use of soft power, strengthening positions of the Russian language,” but as Russian scholar Sergei Karaganov noted in the aftermath of the dispute with Georgia, Russia has to use “hard power, including military force, because it lives in a much more dangerous world … and because it has little soft power — that is, social, cultural, political and economic attractiveness.”

Much of America’s soft power is produced by civil society — everything from universities and foundations to Hollywood and pop culture — not from the government. Sometimes the United States is able to preserve a degree of soft power because of its critical and uncensored civil society even when government actions — like the invasion of Iraq — are otherwise undermining it. But in a smart power strategy, hard and soft reinforce each other. Read more…

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is professor at Harvard and author of the new book Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era.

As published in www.foreignpolicy.com on April 29, 2013.