The Future of Power

Citation

Richardson, J. (2012), "The Future of Power", Foresight, Vol. 14 No. 5, pp. 432-433. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636681211269905

This is the twelfth book that Professor Joseph Nye has signed alone or with a co‐author on the growingly defiant topic of power: whether national or supranational, corporate or small business, academic, within civil society, or among NGOs and even individuals. As a political scientist, “Joe” Nye has established himself as the explicator and evaluator of power in its various forms and the innovator who introduced the notion of “smart power”. Military power, the most forceful hard power as he reminds us, has been called “the ultimate form of power” in world politics, yet a thriving economy is necessary to produce such power. “Even then […] force may not work on many crucial issues, such as financial stability or climate change. Relative importance depends on context”.

Power, in other words, is no longer what it used to be. The United States, despite its superiority in the hardware for killing others, lost major conflicts in northern Korea and Vietnam. Another, ongoing variant of hard power is the battle of petroleum and gas pipelines between provider Russia and clients Germany, Poland and Ukraine. The problem is obviously not one of only militarily threatening solutions, although these would have been the method at hand one or two generations ago. “To be credible in a century where power is diffusing from states to institutions depend[s] on evolving information and communication technologies”. Nye depicts (for example) emerging cyberpower's three main visages in a table appearing on p. 105.

The United States (to which Nye directs much of his attention) construes that the current highest costs of cyber “hacktivism” lie in economic espionage, crime, cyberwar and cyberterrorism, “but over the next decade [this] order may be reversed”.

Towards the end of his remarkable analysis, in a chapter titled “Power transition“, Nye devotes 51 pages to “the question of American decline” within a context of power diffusion. He examines the question from the points of view of hegemonic status and how soft‐power sources are distributed today among the emerging BRICS. He also looks penetratingly at the issue of domestic decay, although he anticipates that the US, “could decline in terms of relative power not because of imperial overstretch, but because of domestic underreach […] Rome rotted from within. People lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, and the economy failed to grow adequately”. America's great risk is, in effect, that the country “could lack the capacity to transform [its impressive] resources into effective influence”.

To safeguard against such lack, author Nye foresees that “American capacity to maintain alliances and create networks will be an important dimension of the nation's hard and soft power” – requiring power together with others as much as power over others (his emphasis).

And now, on to smart power

The last section, Part III of the volume, concentrates on the making and application of smart power. Exercising smart power in the new century, maintains the author, “is not about maximizing power or preserving hegemony. It means finding ways to combine resources into successful strategies in the new context of power diffusion […] [T]he old twentieth century narrative about an American century and primacy or, alternatively, narratives of American decline are both misleading about the type of strategy that will be necessary”. A strategy relating means to ends and requiring clear goals, smart strategy, Nye stresses, must be equipped to respond to five key questions.

1. 1.

   What goals or outcomes are preferred?

2. 2.

   What resources are available, and in what contexts?

3. 3.

   In the attempts to influence, what are the positions and preferences of the targets?

4. 4.

   Which forms of power behavior are most likely to succeed?

5. 5.

   What is the probability of success?

The author then devotes 20 pages to a five‐step elaboration of how this analysis might be applied to the specific case of the USA.

Although the procedure happens to be germane to one state (and its complex geopolitics), his scheme seems equally applicable to non‐states, NGOs, corporations large and small, and other bodies launching into the evolving e‐world of smart power. Globalist Nye concludes on the theme that the advent of smart‐power strategy “requires that the old distinction between realists and liberals needs to give way to a new synthesis that we might call liberal realism”. Norway did this when it joined NATO, yet at the same time the Nordic country expanded a far‐reaching program of foreign assistance as well as honest brokerage in regard to the Israeli‐Arab conflict. In order to exploit a liberal‐realist method of smart power, the willing participation of the United States will be prerequisite and possibly preponderant.

Although Nye's procedure is specific to the state, he applies it equally to non‐state organizations of almost any type: NGOs, businesses of whatever size, universities and foundations, hospitals and benevolent associations. They share common obstacles, including the need for foresight combined with the challenge of intelligent management.