Richard L Armitage was US Deputy Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005 under President George W Bush. He is a Republican. Joseph S Nye Jr is a Professor of Government at Harvard. He also served as an Assistant Secretary of Defence for international security affairs in the Clinton administration. He is a Democrat.
The two men co-chair the bipartisan Commission on Smart Power, under the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington think-tank.
The Commission released its report on November 6, exactly one year before the presidential election. The main objective of the CSIS Smart Power project is to provide US policymakers, particularly the next president of the United States, with a strategic vision for integrating soft and hard power tools into “Smart Power”, in order to address current and future challenges and opportunities in the international arena and to chart a new approach to foreign policy.
Smart Power, as explained by Mr Armitage and Dr Nye in a recent Washington Post article, is essentially “a smarter strategy that blends [US] ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power”, that is, American economic and military might with the “ability to attract and persuade”, in exercising world leadership.
The Smart Power report recognizes that there is general, global dissatisfaction with America’s attitude to the world. Notably, most foreigners do not believe that America can be trusted to act responsibly and President Bush is seen as a threat to world peace. America has dissipated the considerable sympathy aroused by the 9/11 atrocities and its standing, reputation and influence are at an all-time low. The report argues that this matters a great deal for the security and prosperity of the United States.
The report is brutally frank, identifying five significant causes for America’s declining influence: the backlash against America’s status as the sole superpower; a perception that globalization only benefits America and is simply a cloak for American economic and cultural imperialism; America’s increased unilateralism and rejection of the United Nations and international, multilateral agreements; America’s fearful and isolationist reaction to 9/11, its often simplistic and arrogant conduct of the so-called “War on Terror” and its double standards on human rights and international law; and perceptions of American fallibility and incompetence, based on poor managerial performances in Iraq and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and flawed domestic policies on health care and immigration.
The report argues that it is not too late to turn things around and makes the case for a broader, more balanced, “smarter approach”.
The Smart Power project is based on the premise that effectively addressing the main foreign policy challenges facing America today requires deploying the full spectrum of tools available to the US Government, ranging from public diplomacy and educational exchanges to counterterrorism, economic development, health and energy security. The report therefore presents five specific recommendations, whereby the United States should:
“invest in a new multilateralism” by reinvigorating the alliances, partnerships and institutions that allow it to address numerous hazards at once without having to build a consensus from scratch to respond to every new challenge; create a Cabinet position for global development and aid for a more unified and integrated aid programme that aligns US interests with the aspirations of people worldwide, starting with global health; reinvest in public diplomacy within the government and establish a non-profit institution outside of it to build people-to-people ties, including doubling the annual appropriation to the Fulbright programme;
sustain its engagement with the global economy by negotiating a “free trade core” of countries in the World Trade Organisation, willing to move directly to free trade on a global basis, and expand the benefits of free trade to include those left behind at home and abroad; and take the lead in addressing climate change and energy insecurity by investing more in technology and innovation.
Over the next year and a half, Mr Armitage and Dr Nye, along with the other eighteen Smart Power Commissioners, representing a cross-section of eminent Americans, in addition to CSIS scholars and staff, will travel around the United States conducting a broad-based, national discussion about America’s role in the world, which should provide feedback that would further inform the findings of the report and, hopefully, the future development of US foreign policy.
If the United States is once more to be, as Mr Armitage and Dr Nye put it, “a force for good in the world”, then much will depend on their own ability to persuade people that America has more to gain from being perceived as a friend than as a bully, a willing partner in multilateral consensus-building rather than a swaggering, threatening leader of the “Coalition of the Willing”, a leader in investing in the global good rather than an uncaring, inward-looking behemoth.
By using Smart Power, the two co-chairmen argue that America can become a “smarter power”. The world needs a smarter America. Let us hope that the CSIS Commission can convince their fellow citizens of this imperative.
