When, after all, had soft power ever really stopped a war?
Europe’s history is filled with tragic examples of countries that shared resonant values tearing vengefully into one another
with a loathing that no opera or philosophy or ballet could mitigate. “A conquering army on the border will not be stopped
by eloquence,” Bismarck — a Paris-lover who besieged the city — once observed. And armies weren’t stopped by even the deepest
cultural affinity. It was hard to see much soft power at work, for instance, as Japanese generals used Chinese characters
to ink page after page of orders to incinerate Chinese cities in World War II — before sitting down to a rice-heavy dinner
consumed with chopsticks in a spirit of Bushido that owed not a little to Chinese Ch’an Buddhism.
Listening to Nye’s stories of soft power at work, you could find yourself in some uncomfortable intellectual backbends. “Nicaraguan
television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas,” he wrote at one point, eager
to show soft power at work. “Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students
used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.” If you wanted to, you
could
read the irrepressibility of American culture into these observations: “Even as they waged war against us, those crazy Central
Americans still watched our TV shows!” you might chuckle as you sat in Boston or Washington. “They couldn’t fight their real
love for our way of life, hard as they tried.” But you could also read this more simply and pick up a message that was impossible
to miss if you had actually spent any time in Managua or Moscow or Beijing with the people Nye had in mind. It was possible
to watch
C.O.P.S. and
kill American proxy-army soldiers. You could spend your morning applying to Harvard and your afternoon — as happened in Beijing
in 1999 after U.S. missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade — stoning the U.S. embassy. The North Korean leader Kim Jong
Il grew up watching Clint Eastwood movies. Shiites may like Madonna. Bosnian soldiers murdering civilians while wearing Nikes
are not some weird historical anomaly —
How can they like the Houston Rockets and also murdering children?
Rather, they are highly personal expressions of the way in which collisions of power and modernity produce unpredictable
results. Soft power sounds good, it reassures us that there must be
something
great about our own way of living, but it doesn’t really make much sense if you think about it. Those murderous Bosnians
in their Air Jordans are an expression of the diversity that awaits us and that we have to plan for — not some weird exception.
The illusion of soft power has led to some disastrous miscalculations. Through several U.S. presidencies, for instance, American
foreign-policy leaders were seduced by the idea of a “moderate Iran” that needed only time and the gentle application of soft
power in order to emerge, like a butterfly sleeping inside a cocoon of fundamentalist hate. For most of the 1990s, Iran’s
support for terrorism and its relentless quest for an atom bomb were written off as soon-to-be-forgotten peculiarities of
a still-evolving nation.
Let soft power do its work,
the thinking ran. The United States pursued a policy of light pressure and incessant flirting, entranced by the idea that
Tehran’s hard-line mullahs would be pillowed into submission as mobile phones, Wi-Fi, and teenaged Iranian girls wearing lipstick
under their hijabs worked their magic.
Iran, meanwhile, did evolve — just not in the way it was supposed to: it started refining more uranium using better technology,
and it expanded its ties to Hizb’allah, deepened its connection with Syria, encouraged all sorts of mischief in Gaza and Iraq.
Opinion polls showed that even moderate Iranians thought the
Europe’s history is filled with tragic examples of countries that shared resonant values tearing vengefully into one another
with a loathing that no opera or philosophy or ballet could mitigate. “A conquering army on the border will not be stopped
by eloquence,” Bismarck — a Paris-lover who besieged the city — once observed. And armies weren’t stopped by even the deepest
cultural affinity. It was hard to see much soft power at work, for instance, as Japanese generals used Chinese characters
to ink page after page of orders to incinerate Chinese cities in World War II — before sitting down to a rice-heavy dinner
consumed with chopsticks in a spirit of Bushido that owed not a little to Chinese Ch’an Buddhism.
Listening to Nye’s stories of soft power at work, you could find yourself in some uncomfortable intellectual backbends. “Nicaraguan
television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas,” he wrote at one point, eager
to show soft power at work. “Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students
used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.” If you wanted to, you
could
read the irrepressibility of American culture into these observations: “Even as they waged war against us, those crazy Central
Americans still watched our TV shows!” you might chuckle as you sat in Boston or Washington. “They couldn’t fight their real
love for our way of life, hard as they tried.” But you could also read this more simply and pick up a message that was impossible
to miss if you had actually spent any time in Managua or Moscow or Beijing with the people Nye had in mind. It was possible
to watch
C.O.P.S. and
kill American proxy-army soldiers. You could spend your morning applying to Harvard and your afternoon — as happened in Beijing
in 1999 after U.S. missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade — stoning the U.S. embassy. The North Korean leader Kim Jong
Il grew up watching Clint Eastwood movies. Shiites may like Madonna. Bosnian soldiers murdering civilians while wearing Nikes
are not some weird historical anomaly —
How can they like the Houston Rockets and also murdering children?
Rather, they are highly personal expressions of the way in which collisions of power and modernity produce unpredictable
results. Soft power sounds good, it reassures us that there must be
something
great about our own way of living, but it doesn’t really make much sense if you think about it. Those murderous Bosnians
in their Air Jordans are an expression of the diversity that awaits us and that we have to plan for — not some weird exception.
The illusion of soft power has led to some disastrous miscalculations. Through several U.S. presidencies, for instance, American
foreign-policy leaders were seduced by the idea of a “moderate Iran” that needed only time and the gentle application of soft
power in order to emerge, like a butterfly sleeping inside a cocoon of fundamentalist hate. For most of the 1990s, Iran’s
support for terrorism and its relentless quest for an atom bomb were written off as soon-to-be-forgotten peculiarities of
a still-evolving nation.
Let soft power do its work,
the thinking ran. The United States pursued a policy of light pressure and incessant flirting, entranced by the idea that
Tehran’s hard-line mullahs would be pillowed into submission as mobile phones, Wi-Fi, and teenaged Iranian girls wearing lipstick
under their hijabs worked their magic.
Iran, meanwhile, did evolve — just not in the way it was supposed to: it started refining more uranium using better technology,
and it expanded its ties to Hizb’allah, deepened its connection with Syria, encouraged all sorts of mischief in Gaza and Iraq.
Opinion polls showed that even moderate Iranians thought the
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