Smart Power

John Krige, author of American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, offers his insights on the new administration’s use of “smart power” and what it means for foreign policy and our research agenda abroad:

The new Obama administration is committed to shifting its foreign policy approach from confrontation to dialog.  In fact just before she took office Hillary Clinton said that she would make the use of ‘smart’ power the hallmark of her tenure as Secretary of State.  ‘Smart’ power, as defined by Joseph Nye, a previous dean of the Kennedy School of Government, combines hard coercive power with soft, co-optive power.  Smart power mobilizes a cocktail of instruments adapted to securing U.S. interests abroad without the loss of legitimacy, influence and international prestige that is associated with the war in Iraq.  Nye had senior positions in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and is tipped to be invited by Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

Nye has stressed that the U.S.’s scientific and technological leadership, widely admired across the globe, can serve as an instrument of soft power.  Indeed it was used to just that effect by the United States in Western Europe in the first two decades after World War II.    High-ranking scientific statesmen, officers in the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as people in the State Department and NATO, in consultation with sympathetic members of local elites on the continent, set out to enroll European scientists in American research agendas and practices, and to export American institutional models and values abroad in fields as diverse as molecular biology, physics and operations research.  The overall aim was to build a strong Atlantic scientific community to better meet the Communist threat on the continent.

This strategy still offers useful lessons for today.  Firstly, the exercise of soft, co-optive power in the domain of science and technology was only successful to the extent that the indigenous European research community saw the interest and importance of adopting American models.    When they did not (as in an attempt to create an ‘MIT for Europe’ or to instill an American style of operations research in NATO) consensus collapsed and American overtures and plans were rejected, sometimes violently.  Secondly, in such cases, and generally, there was never really any question of the U.S. using hard power to coerce the support of its allies in the struggle against Communism in Europe; if the ‘soft’ approach failed the scheme was abandoned, at least temporarily.    Thirdly, in global initiatives like ‘Atoms for Peace,’ when the Eisenhower administration tried to lock developing countries into the American orbit, the attraction of the nuclear could only be embedded locally if it was coupled by educational programs for foreign elites in the U.S. and institutional innovation and political support abroad.  In short, while the instruments of soft power have played an important role in securing the legitimacy of the American project abroad, its successful implementation requires the conjuncture of multiple historical, social, and ideological factors. 

The history of the use soft power through cultural instruments, including science and technology, suggests that co-option alone, without the threat of force, will only be successful in very specific situations, as the critics of the concept today are quick to point out.    The logic of soft power demands that the U.S. be willing to back off from ventures that do not achieve the hoped-for support among its partners.   Hillary Clinton and the President are committed to ‘smart power’.  When will that be limited to ‘soft’ power, and when will they feel obliged to complement it with at least the threat of hard, coercive power to achieve their objectives?