American Soft Power

Intel corporation is a better apparatus to fight the war on terror than the U.S. Army.

After making that assertion using the preferred language of the Republican leadership, I don’t want to call it a ‘war’ anymore. I want to message it a different way and The Intel World Ahead Program is precisely one message that gets the job done. The idea is that American Soft Power will do better fulfilling American foreign policy goals in the long run than blunt military force.

I got the idea for the above statement while working on some Case Studies for Pakistan, India, Jordan, and Turkey which are included in the The Intel World Ahead Program. The Intel World Ahead Program is a 1 billion dollar initiative by a ‘corporate citizen’ whose objective is to provide technological advancements for developing countries. The Program has three initiatives:

Accessibility - Providing the foundation for technology usage and ownership
Connectivity - Extending broadband Internet access to developing countries
Education - Preparing students for success in the global economy through programs, resources, and technology

The program can be accessed publicly here.

This is only one of many ways in which America uses its Soft Power. So what is Soft Power anyway? It is very much in line with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s recommendation “Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”

The actual phrase Soft Power was coined by Joseph Nye and it was introduced to me by my friend and colleague Darren Newton (aka D>Run). D>Run comments:

“Joseph Nye was Asst. Secretary of Defense under Clinton. He states the case, correctly, that American soft-power (cultural & economic capital as used in the Marshall Plan post WW2) is far more powerful than short term military force. It is a well reasoned refutation of everything the current administration is doing.

“Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria are both proponents of this view. Zakaria makes wonderfully contrarian statements in his weekly Newsweek column along these lines; such as positing that the real solution to Iran would be to open an embassy in Tehran and hand out a bunch of student visas.”

Many thanks to D>Run. His lead has led to copious rewards on the research front. For instance, one of my favorite resources is wikipedia:

Soft power is a term used in international relations theory to describe the ability of a political body, such as a state, to indirectly influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies through cultural or ideological means. The term was first coined by Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, who remains its most prominent proponent, in a 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. He further developed the concept in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. While its usefulness as a descriptive theory has not gone unchallenged, soft power has since entered popular political discourse as a way of distinguishing the subtle effects of culture, values and ideas on others’ behavior from more direct coercive measures, such as military action or economic incentives. In Nye’s words,

"The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks.’

Soft power, then, represents the third way of getting the outcomes you want. Soft power is contrasted with hard power, which has historically been the predominant realist measure of national power, through quantitative metrics such as population size, concrete military assets, or a nation’s Gross Domestic Product. But having such resources does not always produce the desired outcomes as the United States discovered in the Vietnam War. The resources from which soft power behavior is derived are culture (when it is attractive to others), values (when there is no hypocrisy in their application) and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others). Unless these conditions are present, culture and ideas do not necessarily produce the attraction that is essential for soft power behavior. The extent of attraction can be measured by public opinion polls, by elite interviews, and case studies. Nye argues that soft power is more than influence, since influence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. And soft power is more than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It is also the ability to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence. ...

If I am persuaded to go along with your purposes without any explicit threat or exchange taking place—in short, if my behavior is determined by an observable but intangible attraction—soft power is at work. Soft power uses a different type of currency—not force, not money—to engender cooperation. It uses an attraction to shared values, and the justness and duty of contributing to the achievement of those values.”

The United States Army has discovered that if they are going to meet their objectives in the Middle East and other critical terrorist threat zones, they will need to employ something other than force to influence others. To see Soft Power at work within the context of our military, let’s look at an article:

The Wall Street Journal
“A General’s New Plan to Battle Radical Islam”
Saturday/Sunday, September 2-3, 2006 page A1.

“Top commander Gen. Abizaid uses soldiers to build health clinics and dig wells. But is it enough?”

“In the Fall of 2002, the U.S. military set up a task force here on the Horn of Africa to kill any al Qaeda fighters seeking refuge in the region. The base was crawling with elite special-operations teams, and an unmanned Predator plane armed with hellfire missiles sat ready on the runway.

“Today, the base houses 1,800 troops whose mission is to build health clinics, wells and schools in areas where Islamic extremists are active. The idea is to ease some of the suffering that leaves the locals susceptible to the radicals’ message, thus bolstering local governments, which will run the new facilities and get credit for the improvements.

“Behind the shift is Gen. John Abizaid—a 55-year-old of Lebanese descent and a fluent Arabic speaker—who leads U.S. forces in the Middle East. In May, the four-star Army general visited 17 Navy Seabees, or engineers, at work designing a school. ‘Those 17 Seabees doing their mission out there achieve as much for us as a battalion of infantry on the ground looking for bad guys,’ the general said.

“In an interview in Iraq later, he was even blunter about the limits of U.S. firepower. ‘Military power can gain us time…but that is about it,’ he said.

“It’s a striking comment from one of the country’s most influential generals, whose views are increasingly being echoed by President Bush. As head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Abizaid oversees the U.S. military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and the Mideast. He wields great military power, commanding more than 200,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, along with hundreds of warplanes and dozens of ships.

“But his view of the region is increasingly shaped by the inability of all that firepower to prevail against a violent strain of Islam seeking to expand its foothold. ‘The best way to contain al Qaeda is to increase the capacity of the regional powers to deal with it themselves.’

“Gen. Abizaid’s approach is part of a broader rethinking within the Bush administration of how to fight terrorism, driven in part by the failures of the past five years. One of its tenets is that change must take place gradually and be led by locals. The U.S. can provide help training and equipping indigenous counterterrorism forces to break up al Qaeda cells, Gen. Abizaid says. But bigger changes that address the root causes of terrorism in the region must take place over years, if not decades.

“‘We tend to be very impatient and want democracy to form tomorrow,’ he says. But ‘reform paced too quickly can have unintended consequences.’

“Gen. Abizaid says his approach calls for a ‘long war, because it will take a long time for reform to take place.’”

Why are we calling it a war? Because the military is doing the Peace Corps’ job? If we would spend $100 billion annually on the Peace Corps and call it a “Peace on Terrorism” wouldn’t that communicate the ideals of U.S. culture better than hellfire missiles?

The United States calls it a “War on Terror” because of the Republican leadership has a myopic, unilaterist, Cold War approach to the world which is sapping up our Soft Power—our ability to compel the rest of the world to follow our guidance.

In this trumped up “War on Terror”, our core leaders are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice and looking at their background will tell us why our foreign policy is “War on Terror”:
• President Bush who is a failed Texas oil business man who got his political reputation because he is the son of the former director of the CIA who graduated to President on the coat tails of Ronald Reagan
• Vice-President Cheney who was the former Secretary of Defense, who then became CEO of Halliburton in his time off between the Pentagon and the White House
• A two time Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld has been publicly called incompetent by a top General in Iraq and a member of his own staff has publicly admitted that they deliberately manipulated data to create false talking points on WMD’s which supported a preemptive strike against Iraq
• The first Secretary of State, Powell was a former General who was the top Chief for George H. Bush. Powell had big ideas of turning the U.S. into the biggest bully of global street fights.
• Powell was replaced by the second Secretary of State, Rice served on the board of directors for the Chevron Corporation, was promoted from her post as National Security Advisor after she was unable to act upon the brief “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.”, the daily intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush a month before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The declassified intelligence report said the FBI had detected “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” You would think that a brief with that title would send up some red flags with any administration, especially since the previous administration under President Clinton fired 75 cruise missiles worth 1 million dollars apiece at Osama bin Laden. She did nothing to protect us and got promoted. Bush did nothing to protect us and the American public re-elected him.

We call it a “War on Terror” so the United States can keep dolling out billions of dollars on contracts to company’s like Halliburton, a company assisting the U.S. build 14 permanent bases in Iraq, instead of giving the State Department billions of dollars, as General Abizaid suggests, who might “teach locals ways to open their societies that don’t threaten them.”

We call it a “War on Terror” so the government can justify half of our open tax expenditure to be spent on the military.

Joseph Nye comments, “in Jordan and Pakistan, a 2004 poll shows that more people are attracted to Osama bin Laden than to George Bush.

“Democratic values can be attractive and thus help to produce soft power, but not when they are imposed at gunpoint.”

One of the heaviest costs of the Iraq War has been the loss of America’s reputation worldwide, writes Nye. The image of America as an arrogant, global bully is increasingly commonplace around the world. The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison have exacerbated this negative perception of the US, and contributed to the decline of America’s ‘soft power’. For decades after WWII, Nye argues, America’s soft power proved instrumental in influencing human rights policies and attracting people around the world to democracy. Yet the US now spends a minimal amount of its budget on soft power programs, allotting a mere $150 million a year to public diplomacy in the Islamic world. “There is something wrong with our priorities,” Nye writes, “when the world’s leading country in the information age is doing such a poor job of getting its message out.” Nevertheless, Nye continues, the US’s reputation will ultimately survive the negative press of horrors such as Abu Ghraib, as its democratic system demands that the individuals who committed and permitted these wrongs be brought to justice. “Even when mistaken policies reduce our attractiveness, our ability to openly criticize and correct our mistakes makes us attractive to others at a deeper level,” Nye concludes.