Joseph Nye and the End of the American Century

0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Felan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. The U.S. had lots of soft power before Trump. China had little soft power. And the use of coercive power, which Trump emphasizes, disrupts U.S. friendship patterns and alliances, including the countries with which we have most in common. So Trump is throwing away American soft power. For decades, Joe Nye was one of the true giants of American foreign policy. His career in government and in the academy spanned epochs, and his body of work as a scholar of international relations remains unparalleled. Nye, who passed away at the age of 88 in May, served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and headed the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades.

0:47But he may be best known for his contributions to the study of international relations. Nye coined the term soft power and co-authored Power and Interdependence, a path-breaking analysis of geopolitics with Robert Cohane. Fifty years later, Nye and Cohen, longtime colleagues and friends, were united for a final time in Foreign Affairs pages to argue that President Donald Trump's single-minded fixation on hard power risks weakening the real sources of U.S. strength. It is a fitting, if not exactly valedictory, culmination of a life in the American century. Over the decades, Cohen got to know Nye the thinker and Nye the man better than almost anyone.

1:24I spoke with Kohane about Nye's legacy and about what a changing American foreign policy will mean for the future of international relations.

1:40Bob, a huge thank you for joining me. We're really happy to have you here, even though this conversation is prompted in part by a sad occasion, the death in May of Joe Nye. Joe was truly one of the giants of international relations and American foreign policy. And for you, most importantly, a longstanding and extremely close friend and collaborator, including on a recent foreign Affairs essay. Well, Joe was indeed a close friend. I knew him since 1967. So that was 58 years. So a very close friendship. He was my best friend. So this was quite a blow and it still is quite a blow. Our thoughts are with you and his family and everyone who was so close to him.

2:20You and Joe had just finished that new essay for Foreign Affairs and it's an enormous honor for us to have it in our new issue, really the best way I can imagine to honor his life and contributions over many decades. Most listeners will have at least some sense of those contributions. Joe was responsible, of course, for some of the most important work in international relations over the last half century, whether it's the idea of soft power or the seminal book you and he co-authored, Power and Interdependence. He was a longtime dean of the Kennedy School, a professor at Harvard, and also a senior government official, both an assistant secretary of defense and chair of the National Intelligence Council, and really played in both those roles a pretty important role in shaping post-Cold War American foreign policy.

3:02And I would just add on a personal note for me, I met him later in his life. First, I was a junior State Department official, then here at Foreign Affairs. And two things that really struck me about him, he was both extremely generous and supportive in sharing his perspective and wisdom and guidance. And also that he really, through his 80s, continued to quite avidly and openly update and develop his own thinking, which is of course not, it was not necessary given everything achieved before that, but it was really striking. We in fact had a long and lively conversation about the essay the two of you co wrote in our current issue over dinner just a few weeks before he got sick.

3:38So I want to start by talking about that essay. It's called the end of the long American century, Trump and the sources of U S power. And a really kind of central point that the two of you make is that Trump misunderstands power in pretty fundamental ways and that even his misguided conception of it is riven with internal contradictions. How do you, as you assess Trump, understand his understanding of power? And what do you and Joe argue that understanding gets wrong? Trump believes in hard power. That is the use of threats and promises of material sanctions and benefits to induce other countries to do what he wants them to do.

4:16And he has one thing right. The U.S. has lots of hard power deriving from its economic and military might. The key principle of hard power is the one that Joe and I articulated in power and interdependence, that is asymmetrical interdependence in one's favor confers power. That is, if one country is less dependent on a relationship, will suffer less from the breaking of that relationship or its distortion than the other, it thereby gains potential ability to affect the behavior of the other. That is, it gains power. So whether it's less costly for you to cut off trade or military relations with another country, then if it's less costly, you can gain power by threatening to cut off those relations.

4:59And Trump understands that. What he doesn't understand is first that trade is mutually beneficial, that comparative advantage works, and with trade, states specialize in what they are best at. Trump thinks that trade is always competitive. It's a zero-sum game. And he also doesn't understand what Joe articulated so well in his subsequent work, not work with me, soft power. And his power, as Joe has often said, is the ability to get others to do what one wants. And coercion is expensive. You have to make threats. You have to use material resources. And it's not always effective. Attraction, Joe's soft power, is often costless.

5:44So soft power builds on the attractiveness of one society to others. And the U.S. had lots of soft power before Trump. China had little soft power. And the use of coercive power, which Trump emphasizes, ISIS, disrupts U.S. friendship patterns and alliances, including the countries with which we have most in common. So Trump is throwing away American soft power. You and Joe have, I just think, a great line that captures this in the essay, so I just want to read it. I'm quoting you here. As Machiavelli once wrote about power, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved, but it is better yet to be both feared and loved.

6:24Power has three dimensions, And by ignoring attraction, Trump is neglecting a key source of American strength. In the long run, it is a losing strategy, which is, I think, as good a summary of the case for soft power as I've read. But let me focus on, I think, one critique that you would get, one response, I suppose, from members of the Trump administration. And you also hear this from scholars have engaged with this for decades. That's the argument that soft power, attractive power is really just a byproduct of more kind of material forms of power. I heard a Trump official articulate a version of this when he said, you know, we don't need to be so sensitive about allies.

7:01You'll get the allies if you're the winner because that's where people want to be. They want the best economy, technology, and military. That's the administration version. But I think you heard similar counterarguments from Sam Huntington engaged with this. And he and Joe were, of course, colleagues at Harvard, but also I think had a different view of this. How do you think of those counterarguments and what do you think they miss? They miss that it's not an alternative. They miss that even if material power is certainly important, Joe and I never denied that, and military power and economic power are crucial, they miss that self-power is additive.

7:35It's a power of attraction, which therefore makes some people, not everybody, in other countries more conducive to following America's lead. And it doesn't have a high cost. So it's kind of foolish to say that just because there's also material power, both military and economic, that you can throw away another source of power, which is cheap and attractive. So the other piece of this that you mentioned that is at the heart of the essay and really builds on the work that you and Joe did together, starting with your book, Power and Interdependence, in 1977. Is that right? I think I have the date of that, right?

8:15Yes, 1977. And he said this was a really important work and continues to be an important work in international relations. And in some ways, the heart of the kind of difference in your view and the Trump worldview is really about whether interdependence enhances power and influence and security or undercuts it. And I think, you know, there's obviously a Trump version of this, but it runs much deeper in American debates, this sense that, you know, there's this strong appeal to to unilateralism. That's obviously helped by the fact that America has the kind of geography and resource base and size that makes it more imaginable than it is for other countries.

8:51But you have a different view of interdependence in the way that it kind of changes international politics from zero sum to potentially positive sum. What explained the right way of understanding interdependence and how you think we're missing it, not just, I think, in the Trump administration, but also in kind of American views of national security more broadly at this moment? Well, interdependence constrains all the actors involved. So interdependence constrains the United States also. But if interdependence is asymmetrical, if it's more serious to disrupt the relationship for other countries, then it constrains them more.

9:25And since power is largely relative, if the U.S. is constrained less by interdependence than its partners, it makes a power gain. So the issue is not just whether interdependence constrains the United States. Yes, it does constrain the United States. We make commitments. We involve ourselves in economic relationships, and those are hard to unlock. So there is a constraint. But the constraint is asymmetrical because others are constrained more. If you look at U.S. trade relationships, the U.S. has huge trade deficits with all of its partners, except Canada. And those trade deficits are a source of power for the United States, because if it cuts off relationships, as the United States has done under Trump with China, or raises tariffs to a very high level, it tends to hurt the other side more than the United States.

10:18Now, it's not as one-sided as Trump thought, because if you look at the U.S.-China relationship, China has cards to play in return, rare earths in particular. So the interdependence is actually mutual, although I don't think it's totally balanced. I think the U.S. has an advantage because of the huge Chinese export surplus to the United States. The U.S.-China dynamic is a kind of really fascinating, you know, real-life manifestation of these dynamics. You know, there have been arguments, including one made by Adam Posen, The Economist, both in our pages and on this podcast recently, that in fact, China has the kind of upper hand in this relationship because its supply, the kind of critical supplies, critical inputs to the US economy aren't in fact a source of more leverage than just the fact of trade.

11:06Do you think that that misunderstands it? Or is this the kind of thing that we could only really see in real time as we watch how this plays out? I think the one thing that is very clear is that the Trump administration overestimated U.S. leverage in the relationship. And Trump's backing down with China in the face of supply chain problems is an indicator of that. I don't think it's clear that China has the upper hand. The U.S. has a huge market, and China does depend on the U.S. market. And if the U.S. cut off that market or severely restricted it, it would be very bad for the Chinese economy.

11:42I think it's more a mutual hostage situation than one-sided in favor of one side or the other. Some of the most impactful, some of the most important work in the field in recent years has come from Henry Farrell and Abe Newman, two political scientists who have done work on weaponized interdependence, which of course very much builds on the work that you and Joe did. And what they observe is how over the last really couple of decades, just how sophisticated and aggressive the U.S. use of the kind of tools of interdependence have become. And that's true across multiple administrations when you look at increasingly sophisticated sanctions and debates overseeing Russian assets held in European and American banks or export controls on chips.

12:27How do you understand the weaponized interdependence work in relation to your and Joe's original formulation? And do you share their concern about the United States really overusing the tools of interdependence and eroding those tools and causing others to kind of undermine interdependence on their own as a result? I think Farrell and Newman's work is very important. Some of the most important work done in the last decade. I think they're right about broadly about weaponizing interdependence. And it's not surprising because it's very tempting when the United States under, as they say, many administrations faced a problem that was difficult to solve, where the United States wanted to persuade or coerce some other country into actions that it desired that the other country didn't want to engage in.

13:15Grabbing a hold of SWIFT, for example, or other tools of weaponized independence was very handy and virtually impossible to resist. So the United States, I think, overused these tools. The problem is that in the short run, that made sense. And it probably made sense for those policymakers. Policymakers don't generally take into account the long-term effects of their behavior if it extends past their administration. So you had a long-term erosion of U.S. leverage, a greater incentive for others to try to develop. They haven't yet succeeded totally, but they're trying to develop alternatives to the swift penguin system or other sources of weaponized interdependence.

13:58In the essay, you and Joe have a pretty stark warning about the consequences of interdependence and U.S. soft power eroding over time. You write that wise American policy would maintain patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction. But the continuation of Trump's current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World War II has served so many countries well, most of all the United States. Could you sketch out what scenario worries you if we do see a continuation of some of these developments?

14:35The Europeans become much less inclined to follow the United States' lead. That's the first effect. They increasingly, if this continues, distrust the United States and won't make sacrifices of their own in the short run to achieve American purposes. The same could be true of other American allies, although the Asians are more dependent on the United States, more worried about China, and less likely to push back. But that's the first effect. Secondly, the U.S., insofar as it loses influence because of its misuse of interdependence, it gives opportunities to China in particular to gain influence in Africa, even in Latin America, by being at least in the short term more generous, less demanding than the United States.

15:26And that would then shift the willingness of those other countries to support the United States in the U.N. or elsewhere. as opposed to china so it has long-term effects that are actually potentially severe even if each day they may not seem very important to the policymaker who's making a decision to attain some short-term objective there's one other part of the piece that i i want to spend some time on you and joe write that the trump administration is also unwinding another key tool of american soft power the country's espousal of liberal democratic values that assertion stands as dark contrast to what we saw from Trump's speech when he was visiting Saudi Arabia in May, I believe, when he very bluntly said, look, it's not our business what you do.

16:16This was, of course, in the country which was responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi, as well as plenty of other policies that go against liberal democratic values as you see them. The Trump view is that this, in fact, backfires more than it benefits the United States. And, you know, frankly, there were lots of parts of the world, not just, you know, autocratic governments who said, thanks, finally, no more preaching. What do you think that view gets wrong? Make the case that these values and the kind of espousal of them and support of them are, in fact, beneficial to American soft power, not a detriment?

16:49I'm not a great fan of preaching in other countries either. I think for the United States to exemplify the values has a big effect. I think for the United States to preach at others when they can see, as the Bible says, the moat in our eye or the beam in our eye as well as we can is sometimes counterproductive. It makes us look hypocritical. So I'm not as critical of Trump as some people might be. I don't know what Joe would have said, for not particularly caring for that kind of preaching style. The United States needs to exemplify its values, needs to carry through its values at home, and then announce them abroad, support them abroad, but not necessarily harass governments that are not meeting our standards, which they may or may not be able to meet, given their underlying conditions.

17:41One of the warnings in the piece, and this is one that you read often in the pages of Foreign Affairs and in conversations among people who write for Foreign Affairs, is that the liberal order will come apart. And this is something that Joe has certainly been warning about and you've been writing about for decades at this point. Joe, in fact, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs just after Trump's election in 2017, where he writes that the demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of US foreign policy.

18:20And he, of course, worried that Trump would not extend that. Americans tend to think that when they hear about many of the pieces of the order, obviously, this is not the way it's talked about in political conversation, but there's a sense that the system has worked badly for the United States, that it has not, in fact, had the benefits to security or prosperity or anything else. Why do you think there's such a disconnect between the kind of popular conception of elements of the order and the way it's seen in your writing and Joe's writing? And I think in the kind of consensus view of much of the foreign policy establishment.

18:52I think that one feature of the United States political culture is a celebration of American democracy. And along with that goes the view that democracy actually brings all kinds of benefits and very few costs. And therefore, the success of the United States, for example, economically in the last 50 years is attributed to American democratic institutions and American economic institutions. If you actually look at the contribution of immigrants to the American economy in the last 50 years, it's enormous. And that is open borders to immigration by people who are qualified has been enormously successful for the United States.

19:39I think one other source of skepticism of the kind of liberal institutionalist or liberal internationalist view has to do with China. There was, think if you, you know, talk to most people in our world in the 90s or at least in first half of the aughts, there would be a sense that China would be changed more by the order than it would manage to change the order. And, you know, part of this was about U.S. engagement with China. Part of this was about the benefits that China had clearly gotten from the international system and the ways in which it could play a greater role in it. And, you know, China has not exactly evolved in the way that I think most people expected when you go back to the hopes of the immediate post-Cold War.

20:22Did liberal internationalists, liberal IR kind of get China wrong? How do you see this part of the debate? We all got China wrong. The capitalists got China wrong, too. They wanted to build factories in China, and they wanted to trade with China. They wanted to invest in China. So there was a general lack of pushback, I think. The liberals got China wrong for one reason, was being too hopeful, wishful thinking, a certain view of history that was too deterministic. And the capitalists got it wrong for another reason. They wanted to make money. And as a result, there wasn't really any pushback. If you remember, there wasn't pushback from Republicans either about China.

21:03There was a general view that this was okay. So there were multiple reasons to get China wrong. We certainly got China wrong. Has that caused you to revise in any features in your view of international relations? It doesn't cause me to revise what we wrote in Power and Interdependence, because there we clearly and explicitly circumscribed the argument. We didn't say it applied to U.S.-Soviet relations. In fact, we said the reverse. We were talking about relations among capitalist democratic states. So it doesn't change my view that the relations among capitalist democratic states can be managed through interdependence and to the benefit of all parties, even though it was some conflict.

21:48It certainly makes me emphasize that this is a conditional statement. And it's not that interdependence as such with any kind of regime will generate positive results. It's that interdependence, which is what we argued in 1977, with democratic regimes, liberal regimes, will generate these positive results. We'll be back after a short break. This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu Building at 945 Madison Avenue. The show will fill four floors of the modernist landmark on Museum Mile. See why Art News Magazine calls Independent 20th Century a staple of the season and experience historic modern art from around the world and one of New York's most iconic spaces, September 24th to 27th.

22:42To learn more, visit independenthq.com. Did you know that Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtzvallin sends a free newsletter every Saturday? Visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to get the editor's spotlight, a weekly email from Dan featuring more of the helpful context and clear analysis that you get here on the podcast. That's foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight. Sign up today.

23:11And now back to my conversation with Robert Cohane. I'm going to focus on a piece that you wrote, not with Joe in this case, but with the political scientist Jeff Colgan. This was in Foreign Affairs in 2017. It's called The Liberal Order is Rigged. Again, this was in the wake of Trump's election first time around. So it was this moment when people are trying to grapple with the rise of populism, what it would mean. And you argue that supporters of liberal order bear at least some of the responsibility for the rise of populism. And I'll quote you here. Those of us who have not only analyzed globalization and liberal order, but also celebrated them, share some responsibility for the rise of populism.

23:48We do not pay enough attention as capitalism hijacked globalization. Economic elites designed international institutions to serve their own interests and create firmer links between themselves and governments and ordinary people were left out. To what extent is this part of the story that we should be focused on? And to what extent do you see the right sorts of corrections to some of the excesses and mistakes of that earlier post-Cold War framework? First, I fully subscribe to all of those words still. I don't take any of that back. I think we as a field overlook these backlashes. They became evident with the Tea Party, but we should have seen it coming earlier.

24:27I think that in terms of policy, people who want to maintain a liberal international order need to pay a lot more attention to the consequences of that liberal order on ordinary people whom they don't talk to themselves. We are such a polarized society that I, for example, tend to talk to people like you and other people I know who are liberal internationalists and who are upper middle class, prosperous people who benefit from this economy. I'm not in the coalfields of Kentucky with Arlie Hochschild talking to those people on a daily basis. And so, therefore, people like me are less attuned than we should be to the effects on people like them.

25:16And we need to pay more attention to it. Now, it's hard because we are so polarized. We read different things. We listen to different programs. And we don't talk to each other. If I still lived in a little town where I was raised, a town called Mount Carroll, Illinois, which votes Republican reliably and heavily, I would meet these people every day. And I would have to at least take into account their views and try to counter them and try to discuss things with them and understand that these are views taken by intelligent people of a different view. As it is, living in Lexington, Massachusetts, I'm much more likely to downgrade or even demonize them.

25:55And that's a general problem in this society. It struck me that key figures in the Biden administration clearly shared this view. And I would note that Jake Sullivan, who, of course, went on to become Biden's national security advisor, wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2018 in which he approvingly quoted your liberal order as a rigged essay. So there was the alignment of thinking here. Did you see meaningful steps in the Biden years to address it? Did you see kind of a course correction that you think pointed in the right direction? I mean, it didn't seem to do a lot to allay populism given where we are now, but it also didn't have a ton of time.

26:31They tried with the IRA because they focused the IRA's investments in renewable energy on red areas. I think 75 % of the investments under the IRA Act were made in red counties. So they did understand the problem. They didn't get far enough to succeed with it. Maybe that was partly because it only had two years and takes a long time to get these projects going. Maybe there are other reasons. People are reluctant to give credit to their opponents, especially in this society. I think there wasn't enough of that pressure. There were still the interest groups that were dominant in the Democratic Party and the primary, especially our groups that don't have a lot of interest in or support for ordinary people in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who are struggling to keep a manufacturing job going.