Joseph Nye Jr. ’58 Strengthened America Through Soft Power

The man who coined the term “soft power” was a Princetonian. When he came up with the idea, he had long since left Princeton — but he also hadn’t left, in the sense that he stayed all his life near the seminar room and used those experiences to inform his guidance to the war room. Often called “the dean of American political science,” Joseph Nye Jr. ’58 advised governments, steered U.S. intelligence, and worked for the White House and the Pentagon, but he was also an academic leader who thought long and hard about what it is, exactly, that universities export to the world — and argued that universities, in their quiet way, can project power just as forcefully as armies.

Nye grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Wall Street trader and a Smith College graduate. At Princeton, he was a big man on campus, serving as vice president of Colonial Club and writing columns for The Daily Princetonian. (In his columns, he practiced the Princeton style of overwriting, as we all do: “Princeton in the fall. Fitzgerald-like leaves of crimson and vermillion take the final plunge of their subastral existence. Bold figures in orange and black march upon fields of green — fighting fiercely for every precious yard.”)

After his graduation — his classmates elected him Class Day speaker — Nye went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, choosing to study politics, philosophy, and economics. Next, he went to Harvard for a Ph.D. in political science. His dissertation adviser was Henry Kissinger, which must have been interesting.

Nye stayed at Harvard to join the faculty and rose through a series of powerful directorships and deanships, ultimately becoming dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. The U.S. government also tapped him for senior roles in intelligence and national security.

He coined the idea that became a global phenomenon at the end of the Cold War. In a 1990 book titled Bound to Lead, he pointed out that policy wonks usually defined power as control over resources. This definition made power measurable, but it also made that measurement misleading because time and again countries with fewer resources managed to win over countries with more: “Some countries are better than others at converting their resources into effective influence, just as some skilled card players win despite being dealt weak hands.”

Nye argued that, thanks to mutually assured destruction, the power countries derived from the threat of force often proved to be blunted in the age of nuclear weapons — but opposing sides still won or lost contests of power, often for reasons that had nothing to do with weapons. Ordinary East Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, not because the democratic West had control over resources in East Germany, but because the East Germans found its vision for the future attractive.

This is what Nye called soft power: The ability to achieve your goals, not with carrots or sticks, but because people in other countries find your ideas attractive, identify with your culture, and follow your example. The United States had, during the second half of the 20th century, the immense advantage of a popular culture that dominated the globe, as well as a reputation for audacious tolerance and generosity, immigration policies that made other countries lament their “brain drain” to the U.S., and universities that attracted bright students from around the world.

The concept of soft power changed how states all over the world approached diplomacy. Nye often talked about how universities, in particular, supply a formidable form of soft power: “For example,” he wrote in The New York Times in 2000, “at a time when Chinese government propaganda was lambasting us, a former student in this country who was the son of a high Chinese official published a book widely read in Beijing that described the United States positively.”

Nye worried at the end of his life that America’s standing was diminishing, and he warned that soft power, once lost, is difficult to restore.

But he also believed in America’s resilience, and in the “American idea” — which is, at bottom, the power of America as an idea. For him, America’s reputation for optimism, generosity, and plain old decency wasn’t propaganda; it was a gift and a duty, and the nation’s best hope for survival. In his memoir, he recalled a message he shared as Class Day speaker: “I can remember standing in Alexander Hall and telling my classmates that, while we could not alone save the world, we could each do our small bit to improve it.”

Elyse Graham ’07 is an English professor at Stony Brook University.