Conducted by Christopher Gombeski

Joseph S. Nye Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor and former dean at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, is also the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. In 2004, he published Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics; Understanding International Conflict (5th edition); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.

Just recently Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes resigned. Now, at the end of her tenure, the Pew Research Center reports that favorable views of the United States are still far from encouraging: 21 percent in Egypt, 15 percent in Pakistan, and 9 percent in Turkey. Is this a sign that public diplomacy cannot do all that much?

Well, I think that public relations and public diplomacy can only do a limited amount of good. The old saying in advertising is that even the best advertising can’t sell a defective product, and when you look at public opinion polls, the reason for the loss of soft power of the United States is the unattractiveness of our policies. I think that Karen Hughes had a difficult job in selling a flawed product.

If American domestic policies are central to maintaining and acquiring soft power, that begs the question, to what extent should the U.S. allow its desire for international approval to determine its own policies and law?

American desire for international approval should never be the only factor in determining our policies. If there’s something we think is absolutely right, we can’t change our policy just because it’s unpopular internationally. On the other hand, there are times we are doing something that is not right, where international approval might give us a clue about the need for change. This, for example, was the case in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower realized that American policies of segregation were basically hurting our standing in the independent countries of Africa, and therefore it was important to begin processes of change.

The United States has long remained one of Israel’s principal backers. For many Muslims, American support for Israel, more than any other policy, has proved the most damaging to the United States’ image. What can the United States do to salvage its standing in the Muslim world?

I think the United States needs to do two things to improve its standing in the Muslim world. One is to find some form of political solution in Iraq, and to be seen as trying to make progress on the Israel-Palestine issue. Those seem to be the two dominant issues in the Muslim world.

The Iraq War was first a hard power military victory for the United States and since then has become a source of tremendous soft power losses. In 2004, you wrote that it was unclear if those hard-power gains had been exceeded by the war’s costs to America’s soft power. What’s your assessment of the situation today? And what should then be America’s approach in Iraq for the near future?

 I think it is now clear that the costs greatly exceeded the benefits. According to the president, the War in Iraq was part of the larger War on Terror. According to British and American intelligence estimates, the War in Iraq has actually increased the number of terrorists. So I think you can make the argument that we were set back in larger objectives by the tactics we took. Now, we’re faced with a situation that has no good answers, and we should be trying to set a goal of getting out in terms of which would leave the least damage done to the region and to our interests in the region as a whole.

You wrote in the Taipei Times in October 2007 that even the United Nations’ “closest friends admit that its large size, rigid regional blocs, formal diplomatic procedures, and cumbersome bureaucracy often impede consensus.” How do you overcome such problems?

The UN remains the only universal organization and that is important for legitimacy, but in terms of getting things done it’s often useful to turn to other instruments to supplement the UN. For example, the idea that I find attractive is one that has been suggested by former Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada, which is to establish a Group of 15—the current Group of Eight augmented by countries like China, India, Russia, South Africa, and others—to represent close to 70-75 percent of world product and could begin to initiate action like dealing with global climate change and other issues.

There has been a lot of worry over the possibility that the relationship between the United States and Europe will become more and more strained because of differences over the conduct of the War on Terror. But you’ve written that you “do not believe that a lasting rift looms” between the United States and Europe. What makes their cooperation likely?

We have already seen in the form of the new Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy in France and the Chancellorship of Angela Merkel in Germany that countries which are highly critical of the United States and of our actions in Iraq, realize that in the longer and larger picture, the close transatlantic relations remain crucial to dealing with major problems. So the evidence is beginning to come in that while Iraq was damaging to the soft power of the United States in Europe, we will be able to recover just as we did in the period after the Vietnam War, when we were also unpopular.

You’ve written that America needs to become “a smarter superpower.” What would that require?

On Nov. 6, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington issued a report called Smart Power that was the work of a bipartisan commission which former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and I co-chaired. It argued that we needed to find ways to define our hard and soft power instruments more successfully if we are to become a smart power. In that report, we have a number of specific recommendations of how we can go about that, including using international institutions more effectively, putting development—particularly public health issues—as a higher priority on our agenda, increasing exchanges as a way of improving
the quality of our public diplomacy, and reorganizing a number of government agencies to make us better able to integrate the different dimensions of our toolkit of power instruments.

President Bush has said of Iran, “We’ve sanctioned ourselves out of influence.” You note in your book Soft Power that “Europe has significant trade ties with Iran and considerably more applicable soft power influence than the U.S.” Yet a third round of sanctions against Iran seems imminent. Was soft power here simply inadequate? Or did Europe fail to wield it successfully to rein in Iran and avoid the use of coercive measures?

In dealing with Iran, soft power is not likely to be sufficient. It’s going to require a combination of hard power, particularly sanctions, and the soft power of diplomacy, which offers the prospect of a more interesting future to the Iranians. So in some ways the answer to our current problems with Iran is that we need both bigger carrots and bigger sticks.

In Latin America, the rise of left-leaning politicians in various countries—the so-called “pink tide”—and Hugo Chavez’s growing power have raised some alarm among policymakers who fear that the U.S. might be losing influence in the region. Are their fears justified?

The United States still has a degree of attractiveness in parts of Latin America. The danger would be to exaggerate the importance of people like Chavez or Evo Morales of Bolivia. If we dramatize them, we actually help them. There are countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Chile where we still have chances to show that we can be a force that improves development, improves the prospects of those countries, where we can basically demonstrate the positive role the United States can play.

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