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Hard Power, Soft Power, Smart Power

Ernest J. Wilson, III
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2008; 616; 110
DOI: 10.1177/0002716207312618

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 This article pushes beyond hard power and soft power
to insist on smart power, defined as the capacity of an
actor to combine elements of hard power and soft
power in ways that are mutually reinforcing such that
the actor’s purposes are advanced effectively and effi-
ciently. It argues that advancing smart power has
become a national security imperative, driven both by
long-term structural changes in international condi-
tions and by short-term failures of the current adminis-
tration. The current debates over public diplomacy and
Hard Power, soft power suffer from failures to address conceptual,
institutional, and political dimensions of the challenge,
three dimensions the author addresses in this article.
Soft Power,
Keywords: foreign policy; public diplomacy; soft power;
Smart Power smart power

By
T here is much sentiment in the United
States and abroad that the current design
and conduct of American foreign policy is flawed
ERNEST J. WILSON III and needs to be repaired. Unfortunately, the
debate itself is also flawed: neither the advo-
cates of soft power nor the proponents of hard
power have adequately integrated their posi-
tions into a single framework to advance the
national interest. Advocates of soft power and
public diplomacy tend to frame their argu-
ments poorly; their positions are often politi-
cally naïve and institutionally weak. Meanwhile,
hard power proponents, who are politically and
institutionally powerful, frequently frame their
arguments inadequately because they seem to
believe they can safely ignore or simply sub-
sume elements of national power that lie out-
side their traditional purview. The consequence

Ernest J. Wilson III, PhD, is Walter H. Annenberg

Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Southern
California. He served on the senior staff of the National
Security Council and at the U.S. Information Agency.
NOTE: The author wishes to thank Lauren Movius and
Geoffrey Cowan for their useful comments on this arti-
cle, as well as Ted Richane and Matt Armstrong.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716207312618

110 ANNALS, AAPSS, 616, March 2008

HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 111

is that the national interest is being badly served by an imperfect, dichotomous

debate.
As we enter the transition period leading up to a new administration, impor-
tant conversations will take place on the campaign trail, in party conclaves, and
in Washington think tanks about the incoming administration’s foreign policy pri-
orities. In the past, such conversations have been shaped mostly by traditional
hard power concerns. As we look toward the future, soft power calculations
should figure far more prominently in the design of American national security
and foreign policies.
This article aims to provide a smart power framework for debating these
competing claims and for improving foreign policy performance. It first explains
why new structural and conjunctural conditions require smart power and then
analyzes the conceptual, institutional, and political challenges that must be met
to accelerate America’s achievement of smart power. The article draws from
a yearlong project1 involving an international blog-based conversation (www
.smartpowerblog.org), an ongoing research seminar and a series of colloquia
where the term has been critically debated. It also coincides with the important
work conducted by the recently formed Commission on Smart Power, led by
Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS).

Why Attention to Smart Power Now?

The growing interest in smart power reflects two contemporary trends, one
structural and long-term, the other short-term and conjunctural, driven mainly
by the policies of the current administration. The most obvious reason to reflect
seriously on smart power is because of the widely perceived shortcomings of the
policies of the U.S. administration over the past seven years. There is widespread
belief in America and around the world that the Bush administration’s national
security and foreign policies have not been smart, even on their own terms, and,
as a result, that they have compromised the diplomatic and security interests of
the United States, provoked unprecedented resentment around the world, and
greatly diminished America’s position in the world (Kohut and Stokes 2006; Pew
Global Attitudes Project 2006; Halper and Clarke 2004).
In contrast, leaders in other countries have been more sophisticated in their
use of the instruments of power. Though not without significant flaws, the lead-
ership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), for example, has deployed power
resources strategically. The individual policy choices made by President Hu
Jiantao and his advisors have reflected a sophisticated analysis of the world as it
is; and they have deployed a balanced, integrated array of instruments to achieve
their narrow political goals as well as to advance their national purposes. Hu’s
decisions to develop and consistently pursue a doctrine of “China’s Peaceful Rise”
is a clear counterpoint to President George W. Bush’s approach, which has
112 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

focused largely on the need to maintain military superiority. Yet both approaches
constitute clear examples of policy calculations made by a powerful country’s
leadership that is relatively independent and not inevitably shaped by structural
factors. The leadership of the PRC made conscious decisions to pursue this
smarter course. It could have pursued a strategy of “China’s Militant Rise.” It
could have been diplomatically dysfunctional in its treatment of African nations
and clumsy in its pursuit of oil and mineral resources; instead, it created what
Josh Kurlantzick (2007) called a multifaceted “charm campaign” offering African
leaders foreign assistance and high-level attention. Likewise, it could have
ignored Europe and relied mostly on hard power across the straits of Taiwan.
While the charm offensive of the PRC has yielded mixed results, it was based on
a sophisticated appreciation for the full range of instruments of national power.

[T]he G-8 nations are accelerating their

transformation from industrial to
postindustrial economies, where power
increasingly rests on a nation’s capacity to
create and manipulate knowledge and
information. A country’s capacity for creativity
and innovation can trump its possession of
armored divisions or aircraft carriers, and new
hi-tech tools can greatly enhance the reach of
military and nonmilitary influence.

But the current thirst for smart power is not driven only by the good or bad
choices of individual leaders. Even if the U.S. administration had not displayed
so many weaknesses of its own making, there are some longer-term secular
trends that would have provoked a demand for a new way to conceive of and
exercise state power. In a nutshell, the G-8 nations are accelerating their trans-
formation from industrial to postindustrial economies, where power increasingly
rests on a nation’s capacity to create and manipulate knowledge and information.
A country’s capacity for creativity and innovation can trump its possession of
armored divisions or aircraft carriers, and new hi-tech tools can greatly enhance
the reach of military and nonmilitary influence. Armies and militaries remain
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 113

important, but their relative role has changed radically, in terms both of how the
military conducts warfare and in the mix of military to nonmilitary assets. The
world of warfare has become more digital, networked, and flexible, and nonmil-
itary assets like communications have risen in the mix of instruments of state
power (Arguilla and Ronfeldt 1999).
Sophisticated nations have everything from smart bombs to smart phones to
smart blogs. And as states get smarter, so too do nonstate actors like Al Qaeda in
their use of the media across multiple platforms (Brachman 2006; Thomas 2003).
Any actor that aspires to enhance its position on the world stage has to build
strategies around these new fundamentals of “smartness.”
Smart strategies must also take into account the shifting influence among tradi-
tional states, with the rise of India, China, Brazil, and other actors on the world
stage, since the old cold war dichotomies have collapsed. Their new power imposes
new constraints on the unilateral actions of the more established G-8 nations,
including the United States. Designing foreign policies cognizant of new techno-
logical capacities and new actors requires greater sophistication than in the past.
A final reason for the hunt for smart power today is that target populations
themselves have become “smarter.” With the steady spread of secondary and
higher education and the availability of more media outlets, populations in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America have grown much more affluent, more sophisticated and
knowledgeable about their own and other societies, and less easily influenced by
the exercise of soft or hard power. These newly educated populations demand to
be treated differently than in the past; as their world becomes more urban and
more middle class, individuals are becoming more assertive. The spread of demo-
cratic practices has meant that foreign leaders also have less leeway than in the
past to act as American surrogates, as stand-ins for American power from over the
horizon. Democracy places distinct constraints on the design and conduct of U.S.
foreign policy just as it provides opportunities.
In brief, the world has become smarter, and America’s reigning foreign policy
elites have not kept up. Until very recently, the Bush administration officials have
demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to conceive of and deploy power cre-
atively, in ways appropriate to our times, and synthesizing the strengths of the dif-
ferent instruments of state power. Alas, this has proven a bipartisan problem,
as the previous Democratic administration was not a paragon of smart power
either, with serious missteps in its initial efforts to mix military power, trade, and
diplomatic influence.

The Search for Smart Power

Not surprisingly, the un-smart use of power has provoked a smart power coun-
termovement. In the United States and abroad, one hears constant calls for far-
reaching reforms coming from all points of the political compass, and across the
communities of hard and soft power advocates, from neoliberals to reformed
neoconservatives (Korb, Boorstin, and Center for American Progress 2005;
114 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Chomsky 2002; Haas 2005; Halper and Clarke 2004; Nossel 2004; Princeton
Project on National Security 2006). Not surprisingly, the harshest critiques have
come from the backers of diplomacy, both traditional and public, and other forms
of soft power. But their arguments suffer from a number of serious flaws, illus-
trating a need for

1. better definitions and conceptualizations of the meaning of hard and soft power;
2. greater attention to the institutional realities that underlie the ways these meanings are
articulated; and
3. a more systematic effort to incorporate real-world political dynamics that must be
involved in any shift toward smart power doctrines, as well as a more aggressive attempt
to engage politically with the issues in ways that are consistent and consequential.

To enhance the effectiveness of hard and soft power deployed individually, and
combined into smart power, we must redress these three issues: provide more pre-
cise and sophisticated definitions, carefully analyze the institutions of hard and
soft power, and be much more clear-eyed about the political dynamics required to
support the integration of hard and soft power in the creation of smart power.

Conceptual and Definitional Challenges

In international politics, having “power” is having the ability to influence
another to act in ways in which that entity would not have acted otherwise. Hard
power is the capacity to coerce them to do so. Hard power strategies focus on
military intervention, coercive diplomacy, and economic sanctions to enforce
national interests (Art 1996; Campbell and O’Hanlon 2006; Cooper 2004;
Wagner 2005). In academic writing, it is the neorealist approaches that tend to
emphasize hard power, especially the hard power of states, while liberal institu-
tionalist scholars emphasize soft power as an essential resource of statecraft
(along with the power to write the rules of the game, a curiously missing element
in contemporary conversations of hard and soft power).
In contrast to coercive power, soft power is the capacity to persuade others to
do what one wants. A powerful formulation first introduced by Joseph Nye in
1990, and expanded in his later works, soft power has become a central analytic
term in foreign policy discussions. Nye defined it as the ability to get what one
wants through persuasion or attraction rather than coercion (Nye 1990). It builds
attraction and encompasses nearly everything other than economic and military
power (Cooper 2004). Nye (2004) stated, “In terms of resources, soft-power
resources are the assets that produce such attraction.”2 The term is not without
its critics, dissatisfied either with the concept or its application. One Canadian
author, for example, claimed that conventional hard and soft power concepts
are inappropriate for Canada; confusion results as analysts “attempt to graft an
American-originated concept onto the Canadian political landscape” (Smith-
Windsor 2005). As seen in his work with the CSIS Commission, Nye is also
wrestling with the idea of smart power.
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 115

Reframing the Issue

This article defines smart power as the capacity of an actor to combine ele-
ments of hard power and soft power in ways that are mutually reinforcing such
that the actor’s purposes are advanced effectively and efficiently.
A conceptually robust and policy-relevant framework for smart power should
be built on a few additional core considerations:3

• The target over which one seeks to exercise power—its internal nature and its broader
global context. Power cannot be smart if those who wield it are ignorant of these attrib-
utes of the target populations and regions.
• Self-knowledge and understanding of one’s own goals and capacities. Smart power
requires the wielder to know what his or her country or community seeks, as well as its
will and capacity to achieve its goals.
• The broader regional and global context within which the action will be conducted.
• The tools to be employed, as well as how and when to deploy them individually and in
combination.

[A] genuinely sophisticated smart power

approach comes with the awareness that hard
and soft power constitute not simply neutral
“instruments” to be wielded neutrally by an
enlightened, all-knowing, and independent
philosopher king; they themselves constitute
separate and distinct institutions and
institutional cultures that exert their own
normative influences over their members, each
with its own attitudes, incentives, and
anticipated career paths.

Each of these factors deserves far more attention than is possible in a single article,
but it is important to elaborate briefly on the matter of “tools” since they are so
central to the current conversations about hard and soft power—what instruments
116 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

are most appropriate under what circumstances. One requires a firm familiarity of
the full repertoire or inventory of the instruments of statecraft. Smart power means
knowing the strengths and limitations of each instrument. What can armies be
expected to achieve? What can targeted broadcasts do? What can exchange pro-
grams achieve? Furthermore, one needs the capacity to recognize when to use one
kind of power rather than another to achieve national purposes, depending on the
context. This is related to the wisdom to know how to combine the elements of
coercive power with the power to persuade and to inspire emulation (i.e., to com-
bine soft and hard power). It helps to be familiar with past instances of effective
combinations of hard and soft power, as guides for the present and the future.
Finally, a genuinely sophisticated smart power approach comes with the awareness
that hard and soft power constitute not simply neutral “instruments” to be wielded
neutrally by an enlightened, all-knowing, and independent philosopher king; they
themselves constitute separate and distinct institutions and institutional cultures
that exert their own normative influences over their members, each with its own
attitudes, incentives, and anticipated career paths.

Institutional Challenges
Rigorous concepts and definitions of smart power are essential, but the design
and conduct of smart power always takes place in a practical institutional context.
The institutional landscape for hard and soft power is simultaneously very simple
and quite complex. Simply put, the institutions of hard power are vastly, dispro-
portionately larger, better funded, and more influential than the institutions of
soft power. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has a budget of upwards of
$260 billion, with 3 million people under its authority. By contrast, the central
core of soft power (including public diplomacy, or PD) is located mainly in the
State Department, an agency with a budget only a fraction of the Pentagon’s—
about $10 billion requested for 2008 (U.S. Department of State Budget 2008)—
of which public diplomacy accounts for only a small proportion, approximately
$1.5 billion (U.S. International Information Programs 2008).4 Even if we add in
portions of the budgets for USAID, or the Trade Development Authority, we are
still at only a tiny fraction of what is spent across the river at DOD (Office of
Management and Budget 2005).
Within this one simple fact of institutional asymmetry lurk huge complexities.
Size, status, budget, and institutional culture shape the exercise of power. Smart
power perspectives need to come out of smarter institutions.
A rational foreign policy based on smart power means recognizing and reform-
ing a variety of institutional forms and relationships across a plethora of existing
agencies, offices, bureaus, and departments, all of which have their own norms,
values, and rigidities (Halperin and Kanter 1973). Any talk of achieving smart
power must begin by admitting that the current institutional arrangement con-
stitutes a major stumbling block. Institutional fixes are notoriously complicated.
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 117

There is neither one Ministry of Hard Power nor a single Department of Soft
Power Affairs. And certainly there is not a Department of Smart Power. In all
countries, in the real world of public policy, the powers to coerce and the powers
to persuade are spread across a variety of agencies. However, the spread is lumpy
and unequal. The institutional reality is that the soft power institutions are in a
subordinate position, lacking the resources and clout of their hard power coun-
terparts. As cited above, hard power institutions certainly dominate in
Washington, making it difficult to sustain a balanced strategy within government
and beyond because the soft power side of the equation lacks the clout to win the
interinstitutional policy debates. In addition, senior political leaders increasingly
lack confidence in the ability of the soft power institutions of USAID, or the State
Department, to do their job.
Traditionally, all the foreign policy and security agencies possess internal cul-
tures that make it difficult to cooperate and thereby decrease the chances of
achieving smart power. There are few long-lasting incentives for interagency coop-
eration, and institutional rigidities are visible in all the foreign policy and national
security agencies. The culture of the State Department is currently tangled up in
an antiquated slow-moving system of recruitment, promotion, and retention
demonstrably unsuited for the fast pace of the modern world. Far-reaching
reforms have been frozen for years by norms and expectations very difficult to
change. The intelligence community is another classic case of outmoded norms
and procedures inappropriate for radically changed circumstances, from recruit-
ment and training rules, to requirements for promotion, to the incentives in place
that retain vertical stovepipe structure at the expense of professional mobility
around the community that would foster information sharing and innovation.
An interesting and potentially instructive road to governmental reform has
been the experience of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), a twenty-year
campaign since the time of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 in which Congress
required more “jointness” across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
Goldwater-Nichols arguably has made the armed forces smarter about the con-
duct of modern warfare through greater interservice cooperation. One change
was to require that officers seeking promotion had to have some joint forces
experience (Ross et al. 2002). As Lahneman (2007) and Nolte (2004) have
observed, there have also been steps toward a “Revolution in Intelligence
Affairs,” but despite some policy and organizational changes, there remains much
to be done.
There has not yet been a revolution in diplomatic affairs, although U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did press the department to change through
her call for “transformational diplomacy.” She expressed her wish to make State
“smarter” by “transform[ing] old diplomatic institutions to serve new diplomatic
purposes.” Rice noted that “transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership;
not paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them, we seek to use
America’s diplomatic power to help foreign citizens better their own lives and to
build their own nations and to transform their own futures.” Rice conceded that
shifts in priorities will be “the work of a generation,” but she said it will start with
118 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

a “down payment” by shifting one hundred positions to “countries like China and
India and Nigeria and Lebanon” (Rice 2005). Still, this is very much a work in
progress.
In the United States, arrangements for integration and balance are worked out
through what is called the “interagency process,” often but not always led by the
National Security Council (NSC) on behalf of the White House (Rothkopf 2006).
This is the locus where programs and policy instruments are supposed to be inte-
grated. Traditionally, the role of the NSC is to recommend policy options to
the president, including combinations of instruments to be used, and then to
oversee their effective implementation. In some cases, particular line depart-
ments are given the lead role, whether State, Defense, or Commerce. The coor-
dinating role of the NSC will be a very important component of any smart power
reforms, but as anyone who has served as a senior staff member at the NSC can
attest, guaranteeing a seat for a soft power or smart power coordinator on the
NSC staff is not itself an adequate fix in the absence of the strategic and political
reforms called for in this article.
Every institution, of course, carries its own culture and way of looking at the
world. Institutional incentives of promotion and pay, organizational procedures,
and internal norms and expectations shape the worldview of the key players.
There is a “State Department perspective” on the world, and a “Defense
Department perspective,” and the two differ substantially. Pursuing smart power
cooperation means recognizing those cultural differences and incorporating some
and dampening others where appropriate in any reformed interagency processes.
In the past, institutional matters have probably been given too much attention
as well as too little. There is a tendency among some public diplomacy advocates
to pay too much attention to the institutional arrangements of smart power.
Moving around boxes on organizational charts has been a preoccupation of many
of the various blue ribbon panels and high-level task forces over the past several
decades (U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy 2003; Council on
Foreign Relations 2003). Such calls for institutional reform can sometimes feel
like moving around the deckchairs on the Titanic rather than simultaneously
addressing the tougher conceptual and political contexts. Ultimately, the ability
to create sensible institutional arrangements hinges on the willingness of a
nation’s leader to recognize the institutional rigidities that thwart smart power,
and root them out, while mobilizing a political constituency in support of long-
term institutional reform.

Political Challenges
At the end of the day, the effectiveness of any foreign policy is a matter of
power and politics. In democracies, priorities are set by elected political leaders.
Smart power in foreign policy rests on politics and power as much as it draws on
robust concepts and nimble institutional arrangements. By itself, a good idea for
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 119

reform will not carry the day. A good reform proposal introduced into a welcom-
ing institution has a better chance of success. Add leadership and an influential
constituency and the reform idea can gain real traction. This is as true for foreign
policy reform as it is for domestic campaigns.
Not surprisingly, the political asymmetries of hard and soft power are just as
skewed as the institutional imbalances. The allies of hard power are much more
numerous, visible, and powerful than their soft power counterparts. Each con-
gressional district has some substantial expression of the institutional power of
the Department of Defense, military bases, veterans’ hospitals, and the like, on
which thousands of workers depend for their livelihood. Thousands of private
sector workers are employed by defense contractors, and their executives hire
lobbyists and support advocates of continued defense-related expenditures. Lots
of workers and companies translate into lots of votes in favor of hard power
resources.

The allies of hard power are much more

numerous, visible, and powerful than their soft
power counterparts.

Soft power has few such natural political connections. A handful of profes-
sional organizations regularly call for greater attention to diplomacy, often led by
former diplomats. But there is simply no counterpart to the huge political base
of the hard power community. Instead, the firm advocates of soft power and its
wider introduction into foreign policy making exist as scattered public intellectu-
als in various think tanks and universities, or the occasional consulting group.
However, we are at a structural and conjectural moment when the failures of the
recent past may be pushing the average citizen and voter to demand a new kind of
foreign policy. Polling data suggest that Americans want a better balance between
unilateral and multilateral actions, between the imperatives of power and the pos-
sibilities for ethical policies, between hard power and soft. This turning of the tide
is occurring, of course, in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. In this pres-
idential election, these issues are already central to the public agenda. Matters of
soft and hard power balances that normally remain far in the background are more
likely to be addressed front and center because of the widespread citizen responses
to the structural and conjectural changes described earlier.
There are several concrete political steps that smart power reformers can pur-
sue during this critical political season. One is to seek opportunities to affect
party platforms, both Republican and Democratic. Another complementary step
120 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

is to immediately and aggressively engage with the foreign policy and national
security teams of the 2008 presidential candidates on the value of smart power
and resist waiting for the conventions. I underscore “smart power” and not “soft
power.” From my experience as an advisor on the national security team in sev-
eral presidential campaigns, I observe that candidates typically select foreign pol-
icy intellectuals with a comprehensive view of international affairs as their very
top advisors, and more often than not, whether Democrats or Republicans, they
select individuals with solid realpolitik perspectives. These top aids are charged
with integrating specific issues into a national security and foreign policy
approach with which the candidate feels comfortable, and which over time the
candidate makes his (or her) own. Soft power principles and programs find their
way into primary and general election speeches only with great difficulty, driven
out by the national security exigencies of the moment, the political pressures to
appear hard and strong in public pronouncements, and the views of the closest
advisors. In this environment, an appeal to soft power too often sounds limp and
carries less weight than a more sophisticated appeal to smart power. Moving for-
ward, smart power must begin with the assumption that hard power is essential,
and the national interest is best advanced by effectively combining hard power
and soft. Smart power advocates must learn to articulate the advantages of soft
power combined with hard power in a language that is politically compelling. In
the 2008 campaign, one can only hope that competence in combining hard and
soft power in pursuit of a compelling national vision will be a key criterion for the
man or woman we elect as the next president of the United States.

Conclusion
Achieving smart power requires artfully combining conceptual, institutional,
and political elements into a reform movement capable of sustaining foreign pol-
icy innovations into the future (including into the 2012 presidential campaign and
beyond). In other words, smart power needs a smart campaign. The power of
communications and rhetoric must be brought to bear on selling smart power just
as it is mobilized so effectively on behalf of hard power. The irony, of course, is
that the advocates of soft power and public diplomacy have been routed by the
proponents of hard power, in part because the latter are such effective users of
soft power techniques.
America’s political leadership has to step up to meet these conceptual, institu-
tional, and political challenges. Conceptually, policy intellectuals have to reframe
hard and soft power to demonstrate the benefits of each and indicate how they
can be more intelligently integrated and balanced in the design and conduct of
American foreign policy. They must argue that achieving and sustaining smart
power is not just a nice thing to do. It has become an urgent matter of national
security, and it needs to be done well and done now.
Making this case convincingly will require both scholarly and technical writing
as well as communicating through popular media to sway informed opinion in
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 121

foreign affairs. Over the long haul, it requires enhancing the education of the
American public about the need for smart power. This means new curricula in
our secondary schools and universities, and especially in the institutions that pre-
pare the foreign policy elite, including the National Defense University, the
Foreign Policy Institute, the service academies, and leading private schools like
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton
University and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In other words, the institutional landscape of hard and soft power needs to be
reformed. The gross asymmetries between hard and soft power agencies in bud-
get, clout, and organizational effectiveness must be redressed as a serious matter
of high national interest.
Finally, linking ideas and institutional outcomes is politics. Unless a small but
expanding group of leaders with substantial national political standing are willing
to jump into the fray and powerfully frame a national debate on these reforms,
then achieving smart power will be unlikely. To do so requires a constant and con-
sistent drumbeat on the need for “smartness” and a concerted effort to create and
sustain a political coalition that crosses political parties and links respected
experts from the “two cultures”—military/national security and public/traditional
diplomacy and global affairs. The recent “Smart Power” initiative by the CSIS is
therefore a step in the right direction.
The good news for such an appeal to smart power is that the picture is not
quite as bleak nor as black-and-white as it might appear. For their part, the brass
at the Pentagon are much more engaged in thinking seriously about a wide vari-
ety of soft power activities. One flavor of Pentagon thinking is puzzling through
how soft power can advance traditional war-fighting responsibilities. For
example, increasing attention is paid to using the precepts of public diplomacy to
gain the respect and support of potentially hostile populations where the Army
or Marines are conducting traditional battle operations or to retraining soldiers
in the public affairs function to use and respond to blogging to publicize the bru-
tal tactics of hostile terrorists. The other flavor in soft power is what the Pentagon
calls OOTW—Operations Other than War. The rules, tactics, and competencies
for humanitarian intervention, for example, rest more on precepts of public
diplomacy and soft power than does conventional warfare. And across the board,
military leaders (like those in the intelligence services) are trying to enhance the
cultural competencies of soldiers through better language training and better
knowledge of local people. Interestingly, the internal tensions involved with these
changes inside the military, and the external tensions between the hard power
and the soft power agencies (Defense vs. State) are emerging fully blown in the
recent sharp debates over the purposes and competencies required to stand up
the new U.S. Africa Command (USAfricom).
On the soft power side of the street, in addition to Secretary Rice’s “transfor-
mational diplomacy,” Karen Hughes, the former under secretary of state respon-
sible for public diplomacy, made some significant changes in how her unit thinks
about its soft power activities, although they have yet to make big impacts in over-
all policy. Nor is it clear how much the U.S. State Department is doing to work
more effectively with the hard power organizations.
122 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Given the complexity of these problems—conceptual, institutional, political,

and cultural—smart power will not be easy to achieve, especially in the short
term. Frankly, this is a generational adjustment driven by structural imperatives.
To launch this long march, smart power advocates need to become more sophis-
ticated at soft power and communicate their message more convincingly. Public
diplomacy services are superb at telling everyone’s story but their own, a liability
I observed at close hand in the dying days of the late lamented United States
Information Agency (USIA).
Soft power advocates need to be more convincing that their particular
strengths can advance the national well-being, and be much more Machiavellian
about how to do so. The hard power advocates need to be willing to admit pub-
licly what they readily admit in private at conferences and side conversations:
good diplomacy can prevent bad military conflicts. Distinguished diplomacy can
make it unnecessary for the Pentagon to commit troops and risk soldiers’ death
and injury. Even with the weakness of current U.S. diplomatic structures, the
military needs to resist the temptation to do everything on its own. Instead, mil-
itary leaders should do something that may seem irrational from a bureaucratic
perspective—they should advocate for additional budgetary resources for other
agencies. Unless we give the country the institutions, the ideas, and the policies
America deserves, then our children and grandchildren will pay the cost of this
generation’s inability to wield power intelligently and strategically—in other
words, to wield smart power.

Notes
1. The project on “Hard Power, Soft Power, Smart Power” is an initiative based at the Center for Public
Diplomacy in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles. Its purpose is to develop an innovative approach to national power that allows senior policy mak-
ers to better integrate the assets and tools of coercive power (hard power) such as military action with
the resources of traditional and public diplomacy (soft power). The project maintains a blog (www
.smartpowerblog.org) and an ongoing research program that is developing a glossary of terms, bibliogra-
phies, and a public seminar. The director of the Smart Power Project is the author of this article, which
also draws on the plenary address the author gave to the international conference on Public Diplomacy,
hosted by the U.K. Foreign Office at its Wilton Park site in 2006.
2. In his more recent work, Nye has also introduced the term “smart power,” but his formulation dif-
fers from the one offered here. In policy analysis, I believe smart power should be the central framing
concept under which hard and soft power are subsumed. But readers are urged to revisit Nye’s use of
the term, including the “smart power” group assembled by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
3. Taken together, these assumptions insist on the importance of the context of power. What is “smart”
in one context may not be smart in the next. A smart strategy in Afghanistan may not be a smart strategy
in Iraq. A strategy that is smart in April may turn out to be not so smart in May. Each of the instruments
of power has its own timetables—soft power often takes many years to work, while a hard power air strike
can take place in a moment’s notice. The imperatives of time and geography largely determine if a strat-
egy will be smart. Combining soft and hard power effectively means recognizing their interrelationships as
well as their distinctiveness. These influences can flow in both directions. For example, hard power can
and typically does amplify soft power. One is more likely to listen very carefully to nations with nuclear
weapons. Pakistan is likely to listen carefully to India, a contiguous neighbor with both a large conventional
standing army and ample nuclear assets. At the same time, the effective use of soft power can amplify hard
resources. France’s long-term ties to francophone Africa rested for decades on the daily uses of soft power
HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER 123

including language, combined with the judicious uses of military intervention when necessary to back up
its economic and cultural influences.
4. The budget provides $460 million for programs that foster independent media sources, pluralist
political parties, voter education, election monitoring, and human rights in nondemocratic countries as
well as $988 million to promote governance and rule of law in countries committed to reform. The bud-
get also provides $80 million for the National Endowment for Democracy.

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