Transcription
Well, power is the ability to get what you want from others, and you can do it three ways. You can do it with coercion, you can do it with payment, or you can do it with attraction and persuasion. Coercion and payment I call hard power. The ability to get what you want through attraction and persuasion is soft power.
Well, probably the greatest example would be the Cold War. Uh, when the Berlin Wall went down, it did not go down under an artillery barrage of hard power. It went down under people wielding hammers and bulldozers. In other words, their minds had been changed. They've been attracted and persuaded, and that's an example of soft power. And that was created by culture, values, ideas. People on the Eastern side had lost their faith in communism, and they basically were, uh, changed, or those views were changed through attraction and persuasion. And that's a good example of soft power, as you could want.
Well, if a country has a culture which is attractive to others, it may make other countries more willing to hear its views or to sympathize with its views. And, um, countries spend a fair amount on that. For the United States State Department, there's an undersecretary for public diplomacy with a budget that supports people in different national capitals and other parts of countries to get American culture and ideas across. But probably the biggest source of soft power is not what the government does. It's, uh, everything from Hollywood to Harvard. It's American entertainment, American universities. Probably do more to convey American culture than anything else.
Other countries like China are making major efforts to increase their soft power. Hu Jintao told the 17th Party Congress in 2007 that China had to invest more in its soft power, and they spent billions and billions of dollars on it. The problem the Chinese have is they think the government creates soft power, and they're not willing to let their civil society free to basically act internationally in the way that, uh, Western European or American civil society is able to do. And that sets limits on their soft power.
Well, there, I mean, totalitarian societies do wield soft power. Adolf Hitler was a master of the propaganda cinema, uh, and so it's not as though democracies alone wield soft power. But it's true that in a world in which you have a modern communications revolution and more openness, uh, if you have societies that are open, that may help in terms of increasing the numbers of channels of soft power. That's why when we talk about public diplomacy, we're not talking about diplomacy between states to states. We're talking about diplomacy in which you communicate with the public in another country. And it may not be the communication from government one to the public in state number two. It may be communication between public in state number one to the public in state number two. This is sometimes called nowadays, uh, Twitter diplomacy, and it, it's a factor to consider.
It might well. Remember, the Soviets had a good deal of soft power in 1945, uh, in Europe, for example. Uh, the Soviet Union was regarded as, uh, very attractive because it, it stood up to the fascism of Hitler and the fascism of Mussolini. And, uh, you know, when you had elections in Italy and in France, Communists won very, very large numbers, coming close to majorities. And, uh, I think in that sense, the Soviets had a good deal of soft power. They lost that soft power with time as people began to realize how repressive Soviet society was internally, and as they saw the invasion of Hungary to repress a popular revolt in Hungary, uh, Soviet soft power began to erode. And so by the time you got to the late '60s and early '70s, uh, ironically, Soviet hard power had increased, the number of missiles and the size of the armies and so forth, but Soviet soft power was in severe decline.
Not necessarily. Uh, it's soft power is the ability to attract, and, uh, you can make efforts to make yourself attractive. But, uh, basically, if it rests on a country's culture, values, and policies, culture and values are long-term propositions. Policies can change with an administration or with a leader, but culture and values tend to be, uh, longer in duration.
Well, remember, soft power, uh, doesn't just inhere in large countries. Small countries can and use soft power as well. Norway, uh, is a country of only about 5 million people, and, uh, it's not part of the European Union, but it has followed policies, uh, such as being seen as a peacemaker, such as giving 1% of its gross domestic product to overseas development assistance, which are attractive to others. So Norway has indeed used policies to enhance its soft power. In addition to that, Norway is regarded as a well-ordered society, an attractive society, the way they implement their values at home, and that adds to Norway's soft power.
Well, you can see it in the invasion of Iraq. Um, the United States, uh, went into Iraq without the legitimacy of a second United Nations resolution, and when you look at public opinion polls, you see that the US lost about 20 to 30 points of attractiveness on public opinion poll scales in Western Europe. But an even more dramatic example is Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world. In the year 2000, the United States was attractive to 75% of Indonesians. After the invasion of Iraq, that dropped to 15%. 15%. That's a huge loss of soft power. Now, it can be regained. For example, when the United States, uh, helped or used Navy ships to help provide tsunami relief after the 2004-5, uh, tsunami, uh, then you got an appreciation of the attractive aspects of the United States, and the polls show the United States going back up into about the 40% range in Indonesia.
Yes, in fact, uh, soft power is not a zero-sum game. For example, if China sets up a Confucius Institute to make Chinese culture more attractive in the United States, presumably that can enhance China's soft power in the US. And if the US uses an exchange program to make the United States more attractive inside China, uh, that increases American soft power inside China. If we're both interested in avoiding a conflict between the United States and China, which I think we are, that increase in soft power attractiveness of each country to each other, uh, is a, a win-win.
Oh, absolutely. If, uh, if our culture is unattractive to others, then a given cultural artifact doesn't, doesn't produce soft power. It may produce the opposite, may produce revulsion. So if you take, uh, uh, an American TV program or American film in which women are shown running around in bikinis and divorcing their husbands and working, and you show that in Saudi Arabia or Iran, uh, that's not attractive to the religious conservatives who rule those countries. But there is an interesting dimension to that. If you ask, is Baywatch attractive to the mullahs who run Iran? Clearly not. Doesn't create any soft power. But if you ask, what do young Iranian teenagers want? They want to see an American video in the privacy of their homes. So you can attract some people and repulse or repel others at the same time.
Well, I, I think a lot of, of, uh, the reputation of a country or its attractiveness goes to deeper cultural and value issues, uh, that governments, uh, don't control. But, uh, certainly if governments do things that are unattractive, it can, uh, can countervail those, those attractive aspects. Take the 1950s when Africa was becoming independent. Uh, the United States culture was quite racist. I mean, we had formal segregation in many states in the United States, and at the same time, we were trying to attract leaders of newly independent African countries. And yet, if they were going to travel to the US and wanted to take a bus ride from Washington D.C. to Richmond, Virginia, or Bacon, Georgia, they couldn't go into the same restaurants or the same, uh, rest stations that whites could. Well, that did not increase American attractiveness in the newly independent states of Africa. And so there's an example in which culture and policies, uh, undercut our soft power.
I think American diplomats who accurately project American culture in general, uh, are able to, uh, have a, a beneficial effect. I mean, some of the successful diplomats are one on who, who, uh, uh, you know, have exhibitions of American films, who, uh, bring modern American art and culture, who arrange, who travel, who get outside the embassy, don't just talk to other government officials, but meet people in different settings, who express something about the, the openness of American culture.
Well, Brazil is, is, uh, very attractive, not just in South America, but in Luso, uh, culture of the Portuguese language zone. I mean, there are parts of South America which are Spanish-speaking which are not necessarily attracted by Brazil. But if you look at Angola or Mozambique or Portugal, and so forth, you find that there are strong ties there. And even within the Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America, though there's some rivalry between some Spanish-speaking countries like Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, uh, there are many in South America who admire Brazil. And Brazil's culture of, uh, football and, and, uh, Carnival and so forth, are universal. They attract a lot of people in North America as well.
Well, in the Cold War, we not only had broadcasts like Voice of America, uh, and exchange programs that the government sponsored, but in general, you found American popular groups, rock musicians, for example, going to Russia, and in both the music and the lyrics, uh, you were able to express values of freedom, which, and openness, which I think, uh, further eroded the belief in communism and made America look attractive. Uh, so in the, you know, exchange programs, uh, uh, culture programs, so forth, these all help in terms of promoting soft power. And a, a, uh, an active diplomacy has to have this, uh, cultural diplomacy as part of its public diplomacy.
Well, if the Americans are, uh, wise in the way we pursue our power, we realize that a smart power strategy combines hard and soft power. And you can't accomplish everything with soft power alone, but you can't accomplish everything with hard power alone. The most effective policies are those which successfully have hard and soft power reinforce each other. Uh, the example of a failure there was, I think, as we mentioned earlier, the invasion of Iraq, where we relied on hard power, and it undercut our soft power. But, uh, I think you, you can argue that a smart power strategy for the United States in the future, before it, uh, takes a step, will say, how do I make sure that my hard and soft power are reinforcing each other?
Well, a smart diplomat is able to do both. I mean, a diplomat is going to have to convey messages, uh, from government to government. Sometimes it's very high levels, very private, not at all public. But that same diplomat, uh, who may have gone to call on the prime minister or president at 11:00 a.m., may that afternoon at 4:00 p.m. have a, uh, showing of an American film, or may go to what's called an American Corner where you have American books and culture being displayed in a local library. So a good diplomat learns to do both.
A successful diplomat, uh, is somebody who can represent his or her country. And that means that, uh, they not only can be an accurate and faithful messenger and reporter, an interpreter of what's conveyed in these messages, but also an, an, uh, accurate representative or faithful representative of the culture of their country. So they want to be both a, a good messenger at the highest levels, but also a good representative at the broad and popular levels.
Well, I think the Foreign Service, uh, which is an admirable group of people, when I worked in the State Department, I was impressed at how good they were and how hard they worked for the amount of credit they got. Uh, I think the hard thing will be adjusting to a, uh, modern communications revolution, to realize that, uh, some of the traditional skills of being a good, accurate messenger and reporter and analyst, uh, um, have to be supplemented by a greater capacity to, uh, represent and communicate to broad audiences.