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“soft power”? From Joseph Nye. “Soft Power.” Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2004. This article, originally published in 1990, is featured in the same collection from which the AC640 reading by Nye is taken. This earlier article is concerned to define and explain the concept of “soft power,” one that features centrally in the article on soft power and the new information technologies we read. a. defining soft power Joseph Nye is a former assistant secretary of defense in the U.S. government, former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and now a professor at the Kennedy School. In recent years, he has been identified with his famous “soft power” thesis, an argument most comprehensively explored in his 2004 book, Softpower: The Means to Success in World Politics. Nye is an American liberal: that means he is critical of the excessive or unjust use of American power, while believing that this same power is a force for good in the world. A former senior defense bureaucrat, Nye’s voice is that of a wise counsel to, rather a harsh critic of, the world’s only superpower. Nye defines power as “an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they would otherwise not.” While the definition of the word “power” has not changed much since Aristotle wrote his treatise on politics in 350 BCE, the nature of power has changed significantly. Where power has historically involved a hard emphasis on military force, and th the direct control of land and people, such as was evident in the colonial era, the late 20 century has been the stage for a new form of power that partly eclipses the hard form: soft power. Nye defines soft power as follows: “… when one country gets other countries to want what it wants… in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” (75). He elaborates on this definition later, asserting that soft power is “the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own” (77). In a more specific sense, soft power is power as exercised through technology, value- added skills, diplomacy, economic growth, communication, and culture. The liberation—or invasion, depending on how you see it—of Iraq in 2003 was a “hard power” exercise. It involved massive numbers of soldiers and huge quantities of armaments. The popularity of Hollywood films worldwide, and their role in encouraging interest in American goods and identification with American themes and ideologies, is a form of soft power. No one is directly harmed; many are entertained and enlightened; but there is a discernible value to the U.S. government in films that celebrate the American way of life among audiences in global markets. b. soft power and the realist doctrine Nye defines his position against that of a dominant school of thought in political science known as “realism.” In international relations, realism is a doctrine that views the state as the primary phenomenon in politics. Realism views global politics as a competition between states for power in a conflict-ridden and unstable world: the accumulation of power is the goal of realist foreign policy. Henry Kissinger, a chief policy architect for th century, is a supreme example of a realist various U.S. adminis