The sources of American soft power—culture, values, etc.,—remain attractive despite foreign policy decisions that are unpopular and increased anti-American sentiment. While the issues may be different, the views in this article from 2004 will seem all too familiar and provide some insight into how the United States has changed and how it has stayed the same.

Anti-Americanism has increased in the past few years. Thomas Pickering, a seasoned diplomat, considered 2003 “as high a zenith of anti-Americanism as we’ve seen for a long time.”Footnote 1 Polls show that our soft power losses can be traced largely to our foreign policy. “A widespread and fashionable view is that the United States is a classically imperialist power…That mood has been expressed in different ways by different people, from the hockey fans in Montreal who boo the American national anthem to the high school students in Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as exchange students.”Footnote 2 An Australian observer concluded that “the lesson of Iraq is that the US’s soft power is in decline. Bush went to war having failed to win a broader military coalition or UN authorization. This had two direct consequences: a rise in anti-American sentiment, lifting terrorist recruitment; and a higher cost to the US for the war and reconstruction effort.”Footnote 3 A Gallup International poll showed that pluralities in fifteen out of twenty-four countries around the world said that American foreign policies had a negative effect on their attitudes toward the United States.

A Eurobarometer poll found that a majority of Europeans believe that the United States tends to play a negative role in fighting global poverty, protecting the environment, and maintaining peace in the world.Footnote 4 When asked in a Pew poll to what extent they thought the United States “takes your interests into account,” a majority in twenty out of forty-two countries surveyed said “not too much” or “not at all.”Footnote 5 In many countries, unfavorable ratings were highest among younger people. American pop culture may be widely admired among young people, but the unpopularity of our foreign policies is causing the next generation to question American power.Footnote 6

American music and films are more popular in Britain, France, and Germany than they were twenty years ago, another period when American policies were unpopular in Europe, but the attraction of our policies is even lower than it was then.Footnote 7 There are also hints that unpopular foreign policies might be spilling over and undercutting the attractiveness of some aspects of American popular culture. A 2003 Roper study showed that “for the first time since 1998, consumers in 30 countries signaled their disenchantment with America by being less likely to buy Nike products or eat at McDonalds…At the same time, nine of the top 12 Asian and European firms, including Sony, BMW and Panasonic, saw their scores rise.”Footnote 8

The Costs of Ignoring Soft Power

Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. When you can get others to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Hard power, the ability to coerce, grows out of a country’s military and economic might. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced.

Skeptics about soft power say not to worry. Popularity is ephemeral and should not be a guide for foreign policy in any case. The United States can act without the world’s applause. We are so strong we can do as we wish. We are the world’s only superpower, and that fact is bound to engender envy and resentment. Fouad Ajami has stated recently, “The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands.”Footnote 9 Columnist Cal Thomas refers to “the fiction that our enemies can be made less threatening by what America says and does.”Footnote 10 Moreover, the United States has been unpopular in the past, yet managed to recover. We do not need permanent allies and institutions. We can always pick up a coalition of the willing when we need to. Donald Rumsfeld is wont to say that the issues should determine the coalitions, not vice-versa.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss the recent decline in our attractiveness so lightly. It is true that the United States has recovered from unpopular policies in the past, but that was against the backdrop of the Cold War, in which other countries still feared the Soviet Union as the greater evil. Moreover, while America’s size and association with disruptive modernity are real and unavoidable, wise policies can soften the sharp edges of that reality and reduce the resentments that they engender. That is what the United States did after World War II. We used our soft power resources and co-opted others into a set of alliances and institutions that lasted for sixty years. We won the Cold War against the Soviet Union with a strategy of containment that used our soft power as well as our hard power.

It is true that the new threat of transnational terrorism increased American vulnerability, and some of our unilateralism after September 11 was driven by fear. But the United States cannot meet the new threat identified in the national security strategy without the cooperation of other countries. They will cooperate, up to a point, out of mere self-interest, but their degree of cooperation is also affected by the attractiveness of the United States. Take Pakistan for example. President Pervez Musharraf faces a complex game of cooperating with the United States on terrorism while managing a large anti-American constituency at home. He winds up balancing concessions and retractions. If the United States were more attractive to the Pakistani populace, we would see more concessions in the mix.

It is not smart to discount soft power as just a question of image, public relations, and ephemeral popularity. As I argued earlier, it is a form of power—a means of obtaining desired outcomes. When we discount the importance of our attractiveness to other countries, we pay a price. Most importantly, if the United States is so unpopular in a country that being pro-American is a kiss of death in their domestic politics, political leaders are unlikely to make concessions to help us. Turkey, Mexico, and Chile were prime examples in the run-up to the Iraq war in March 2003. When American policies lose their legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of others, attitudes of distrust tend to fester and further reduce our leverage. For example, after September 11, there was an outpouring of sympathy from Germans for the United States, and Germany joined a military campaign against the al Qaeda network. But as the United States geared up for the unpopular Iraq war, Germans expressed widespread disbelief about the reasons the United States gave for going to war, such as the alleged connection of Iraq to al Qaeda and the imminence of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. German suspicions were reinforced by what they saw as biased American media coverage during the war and by the failure to find weapons or prove the connection to al Qaeda right after the war. The combination fostered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished. By July 2003, one-third of Germans under the age of thirty said that they thought the American government might even have staged the original September 11 attacks.Footnote 11

Absurd views feed upon each other, and paranoia can be contagious. American attitudes toward foreigners harden, and we begin to believe that the rest of the world really does hate us. Some Americans begin to hold grudges, to mistrust all Muslims, to boycott French wines and rename French fries, and to spread and believe false rumors.Footnote 12 In turn, foreigners see Americans as uninformed and insensitive to anyone’s interests but their own. They see our media wrapped in the American flag. Some Americans, in turn, succumb to residual strands of isolationism, saying that if others choose to see us that way, “to hell with’em.” If foreigners are going to be like that, who cares whether we are popular or not. But to the extent that we allow ourselves to become isolated, we embolden enemies such as al Qaeda. Such reactions undercut our soft power and are self-defeating in terms of the outcomes we want.

Some hard-line skeptics might say that whatever the merits of soft power, it has little role to play in the current war on terrorism. Osama bin Laden and his followers are repelled, not attracted by American culture, values, and policies. Military power was essential in defeating the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and soft power will never convert fanatics. Charles Krauthammer, for example, argued soon after the war in Afghanistan that our swift military victory proved that “the new unilateralism” worked. That is true up to a point, but the skeptics mistake half the answer for the whole solution.

Look again at Afghanistan. Precision bombing and Special Forces defeated the Taliban government, but U.S. forces in Afghanistan wrapped up less than a quarter of al Qaeda, a transnational network with cells in sixty countries. The United States cannot bomb al Qaeda cells in Hamburg, Kuala Lumpur, or Detroit. Success against them depends on close civilian cooperation, whether sharing intelligence, coordinating police work across borders, or tracing global financial flows. America’s partners cooperate partly out of self-interest, but the inherent attractiveness of U.S. policies can and does influence the degree of cooperation.

Equally important, the current struggle against Islamist terrorism is not a clash of civilizations but a contest whose outcome is closely tied to a civil war between moderates and extremists within Islamic civilization. The United States and other advanced democracies will win only if moderate Muslims win, and the ability to attract the moderates is critical to victory. We need to adopt policies that appeal to moderates and to use public diplomacy more effectively to explain our common interests. We need a better strategy for wielding our soft power. We will have to learn better how to combine hard and soft power if we wish to meet the new challenges.

Beneath the surface structure, the world changed in profound ways during the last decades of the twentieth century. September 11 was like a flash of lightening on a summer evening that displayed an altered landscape, and we are still left groping in the dark wondering how to find our way through it. George W. Bush entered office committed to a traditional realist foreign policy that would focus on great powers like China and Russia and eschew nation building in failed states of the less-developed world. But in September 2002, his administration proclaimed a new national security strategy that declared “we are men aced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies falling into the hands of the embittered few.” Instead of strategic rivalry, “today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” The United States increased its development assistance and its efforts to combat AIDS because “weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states.”Footnote 13 The historian John Lewis Gaddis compared the new strategy to the seminal days that redefined American foreign policy in the 1940s.Footnote 14

The new strategy attracted criticism at home and abroad for its excessive rhetoric about preemptive military strikes and the promotion of American primacy. Critics pointed out that the practice of preemption is not new, but that turning it into a doctrine weakens international norms and encourages other countries to engage in risky actions. Similarly, American primacy is a fact, but there was no need for rhetoric that rubbed other people’s noses in it. Notwithstanding such flaws, the new strategy responded to the deep trends in world politics that were illuminated by the events of September 11, 2001. The “privatization of war” is a major historical change in world politics that must be addressed. This is what the new Bush strategy gets right. What the United States has not yet sorted out is how to go about implementing the new approach. We have done far better on identifying the ends than the means. On that dimension, both the administration and Congress were deeply divided.

According to the National Security Strategy, the greatest threats the American people face are transnational terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and particularly their combination. Yet, meeting the challenge posed by transnational military organizations that could acquire weapons of mass destruction requires the cooperation of other countries—and cooperation is strengthened by soft power. Similarly, efforts to promote democracy in Iraq and elsewhere will require the help of others. Reconstruction in Iraq and peacekeeping in failed states are far more likely to succeed and to be less costly if shared with others rather than appearing as American imperial occupation. The fact that the United States squandered its soft power in the way that it went to war meant that the aftermath turned out to be much more costly than it need have been.

Even after the war, in the hubris and glow of victory in May 2003, the United States resisted a significant international role for the UN and others in Iraq. But as casualties and costs mounted over the summer, the United States found many other countries reluctant to share the burden without a UN blessing. As the top American commander for Iraq, General John Abizaid reported, “You can’t underestimate the public perception both within Iraq and within the Arab world about the percentage of the force being so heavily American.” But, Abizaid continued other countries “need to have their internal political constituents satisfied that they’re playing a role as an instrument of the international community and not as a pawn of the United States.”Footnote 15 Before the Madrid conference of potential donors to Iraq in October 2003, the New York Times reported that L. Paul Bremer, the chief occupation administrator in Baghdad, said, “I need the money so bad we have to move off our principled opposition to the international community being in charge.”Footnote 16 Neoconservatives like Max Boot were urging conservatives not to treat marginalizing the UN as a core principle, and Charles Krauthammer, proud author of “the new unilateralism,” called for a new UN resolution because Russia, India, and others “say they would contribute only under such a resolution.” In his words, “the U.S. is not overstretched. But psychologically we are up against our limits. The American people are simply not prepared to undertake worldwide nation building.”Footnote 17

In the global information age, the attractiveness of the United States will be crucial to our ability to achieve the outcomes we want. Rather than having to put together pick-up coalitions of the willing for each new game, we will benefit if we are able to attract others into institutional alliances and eschew weakening those we have already created. NATO, for example, not only aggregates the capabilities of advanced nations, but its interminable committees, procedures, and exercises also allow these nations to train together and quickly become interoperable when a crisis occurs. As for alliances, if the United States is an attractive source of security and reassurance, other countries will set their expectations in directions that are conducive to our interests. Initially, for example, the U.S.-Japan security treaty was not very popular in Japan, but polls show that over the decades, it became more attractive to the Japanese public. Once that happened, Japanese politicians began to build it into their approaches to foreign policy. The United States benefits when it is regarded as a constant and trusted source of attraction so that other countries are not obliged continually to re-examine their options in an atmosphere of uncertain coalitions. In the Japan case, broad acceptance of the United States by the Japanese public “contributed to the maintenance of US hegemony” and “served as political constraints compelling the ruling elites to continue cooperation with the United States.”Footnote 18 Popularity can contribute to stability.

Finally, as the RAND Corporation’s John Arquila and David Ronfeldt argue, power in an information age will come not only from strong defenses but also from strong sharing. A traditional realpolitik mindset makes it difficult to share with others. But in an information age, such sharing not only enhances the ability of others to cooperate with us but also increases their inclination to do so.Footnote 19 As we share intelligence and capabilities with others, we develop common outlooks and approaches that improve our ability to deal with the new challenges. Power flows from that attraction. Dismissing the importance of attraction as merely ephemeral popularity ignores key insights from new theories of leadership as well as the new realities of the information age. We cannot afford that.

American Empire?

Not everyone agrees with this picture of the changing nature of world politics, and thus, they recommend a different approach to American foreign policy. Many argue that our new vulnerability requires a much higher degree of forceful control. Moreover, our unprecedented power now makes it possible. As Robert Kaplan has argued, “it is a cliché these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire; the question now is how the American empire should operate on a tactical level to manage an unruly world.”Footnote 20 William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, says, “We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperialist power, fine.”Footnote 21 Writing in the same journal in 2001, Max Boot agreed, in the explicitly titled article “The Case for an American Empire.”Footnote 22

Three decades ago, the radical left used the term “American empire” as an epithet. Now, the phrase has come out of the closet and is used by a number of analysts, on the left and the right alike, to explain and guide American foreign policy. Andrew Bacevich, for example, argues that the notion of an American empire is approaching mainstream respectability, and we should not worry about the semantic details.Footnote 23 But words matter. In Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice that she can make words mean whatever she wants. But when we want to communicate clearly with others, we have to take care in what we use our words to do. If America is like no other empire in history, as Bacevich claims, then in what sense is it an empire? And while the use of the term may point up some useful analogies, it may also mislead us by obscuring important differences.

In many ways, the metaphor of empire is seductive. The American military has a global reach, with bases around the world, and its regional commanders sometimes act like proconsuls. English is a lingua franca, like Latin. The American economy is the largest in the world, and American culture serves as a magnet. But it is a mistake to confuse the politics of primacy with the politics of empire. Although unequal relationships certainly exist between the United States and weaker powers and can be conducive to exploitation, absent formal political control, the term “imperial” can be misleading. Its acceptance would be a disastrous guide for American foreign policy because it fails to take into account how the world has changed. The United States is certainly not an empire in the way we think of the European overseas empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because the core feature of such imperialism was direct political control.Footnote 24 The United States has more power resources, compared to other countries, than Britain had at its imperial peak. On the other hand, the United States has less power, in the sense of control over the behavior that occurs inside other countries, than Britain did when it ruled a quarter of the globe. For example, Kenya’s schools, taxes, laws, and elections—not to mention external relations—were controlled by British officials. Even where Britain used indirect rule through local potentates, as in Uganda, it exercised far more control than the United States does today. Others try to rescue the metaphor by referring to “informal empire” or the “imperialism of free trade,” but this simply obscures important differences in degrees of control suggested by comparisons with real historical empires. Yes, the Americans have widespread influence, but in 2003, the United States could not even get Mexico and Chile to vote for a second resolution on Iraq in the UN Security Council. The British empire did not have that kind of problem with Kenya or India.

Devotees of the new imperialism say not to be so literal. “Empire” is merely a metaphor. But the problem with the metaphor is that it implies a control from Washington that is unrealistic and reinforces the prevailing strong temptations toward unilateralism that are present in Congress and parts of the administration. The costs of occupation of other countries have become prohibitive in a world of multiple nationalisms, and the legitimacy of empire is broadly challenged.

Power depends on context, and the distribution of power differs greatly in different domains. In the global information age, power is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard of political-military issues, military power is largely unipolar, but on the economic board, the United States is not a hegemon or an empire, and it must bargain as an equal when Europe acts in a unified way. And on the bottom chessboard of transnational relations, power is chaotically dispersed, and it makes no sense to use traditional terms such as unipolarity, hegemony, or American empire. Those who recommend an imperial American foreign policy based on traditional military descriptions of American power are relying on woefully inadequate analysis. If you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on one board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them—witness the connections in the war on terrorism between military actions on the top board, where we removed a dangerous tyrant in Iraq, but simultaneously increased the ability of the al Qaeda network to gain new recruits on the bottom, transnational board.Footnote 25

Because of its leading edge in the information revolution and its past investment in military power, the United States will likely remain the world’s single most powerful country well into the twenty-first century. French dreams of a multipolar military world are unlikely to be realized anytime soon, and the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has explicitly eschewed such a goal.Footnote 26 But not all the important types of power come out of the barrel of a gun. Hard power is relevant to getting the outcomes we want on all three chessboards, but many of the transnational issues, such as climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, international crime, and terrorism, cannot be resolved by military force alone. Representing the dark side of globalization, these issues are inherently multilateral and require cooperation for their solution. Soft power is particularly important in dealing with the issues that arise from the bottom chessboard of transnational relations. To describe such a world as an American empire fails to capture the real nature of the foreign policy tasks that we face.

Another problem for those who urge that we accept the idea of an American empire is that they misunderstand the underlying nature of American public opinion and institutions. Even if it were true that unilateral occupation and transformation of undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere would reduce some of the sources of transnational terrorism, the question is whether the American public would tolerate an imperial role for its government. Neoconservative writers like Max Boot argue that the United States should provide troubled countries with the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets, but as the British historian Niall Ferguson points out, modern America differs from nineteenth-century Britain in our “chronically short time frame.”Footnote 27 Although an advocate of empire, Ferguson worries that the American political system is not up to the task, and for better or worse, he is right.

The United States has intervened in and governed countries in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, and America was briefly tempted into real imperialism when it emerged as a world power a century ago, but the interlude of formal empire did not last.Footnote 28 Imperialism has never been a comfortable experience for Americans, and only a small portion of the cases of military occupation in our history have led directly to the establishment of democracies. The establishment of democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II remains the exception rather than the rule, and in these countries, it took nearly a decade. American empire is not limited by “imperial overstretch,” in the sense of costing an impossible portion of our gross domestic product. We devoted a much higher percentage of the gross domestic product to the military budget during the Cold War than we do today. The overstretch will come from having to police more peripheral countries with nationally resistant publics than foreign or American public opinion will accept. Polls show little taste for empire among Americans. Instead, the American public continues to say that it favors multilateralism and using the UN. Perhaps that is why Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian advocate of accepting the empire metaphor qualifies it by referring to the American role in the world as “Empire Lite.”Footnote 29

In fact, the problem of creating an American empire might better be termed “imperial understretch.” Neither the public nor Congress has proven willing to invest seriously in the instruments of nation building and governance as opposed to military force. The entire budget for international affairs (including the Agency for International Development) is only 1% of the federal budget. The United States spends nearly nineteen times that amount on its military, and there is little indication that this is about to change in an era of tax cuts and budget deficits. Moreover, our military is designed for fighting, rather than for police work, and the Rumsfeld Pentagon has cut back on training for peacekeeping operations. The United States has designed a military that is better suited to kick down the door, beat up a dictator, and then go home rather than stay for the harder imperial work of building a democratic polity. For a variety of reasons, in regard to both the world and the United States, Americans should avoid the misleading metaphor of empire as a guide for our foreign policy. Empire is not the narrative we need to help us understand and cope with the global information age of the twenty-first century.

American Foreign Policy Traditions

The United States has a variety of foreign policy traditions to draw upon that overlap, reinforce, and sometimes conflict with each other. The writer Walter Mead has used the device of identifying these traditions with the names of past leaders as a helpful way to distinguish them.Footnote 30 The realists who prudently pursue national interest and commerce are named after Alexander Hamilton. Populists, who emphasize self-reliance and frequent use of coercion, he names for Andrew Jackson. He calls “Jeffersonians” those who pursue democracy by being a shining beacon to others rather than (in John Quincy Adams’s words) “going forth in search of monsters to destroy.” Finally, “Wilsonians” are the idealists who follow Woodrow Wilson in seeking to make the world safe for democracy.

Each approach has its virtues and faults. The Hamiltonians are prudent, but their realism lacks a moral appeal to many at home and abroad. The Jacksonians are robust and tough, but lack staying power and allies. Both the Hamiltonians and Jacksonians are deficient in soft power. The Jeffersonians, on the other hand, have plenty of soft power, but not enough hard power. Being a shining city on a hill is attractive but often not sufficient to achieve all foreign policy goals. The Wilsonians are also long on soft power, but sometimes their idealism leads them into unrealistic ambitions. Their danger is that their foreign policy vehicles often have strong accelerators but weak brakes and are thus prone to go off the road.

Whereas Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians tend toward prudent and conservative foreign policies that do not rock the boat, Wilsonians seek to transform the international situation. In the case of the Middle East, for years, the United States followed a Hamiltonian policy that sought stability through the support of autocrats but that, in the end, did not prevent the rise of radical Islamist ideology and terrorism. The Wilsonians urge a transformational rather than a conservative or status quo foreign policy. In their view, without democratization, the Middle East (and other regions) will continue to be a breeding ground for rogue states and terrorist threats. Much of the debate inside the Bush administration over the Iraq war was between traditional Hamiltonian realists (such as Secretary of State Colin Powell) and a coalition of Jacksonians (such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) plus neoconservative Wilsonians (such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz). Part of the confusion over American objectives in going to war was that the administration used different arguments to appeal to different camps. The suggestion of a connection to al Qaeda and September 11 was important to Jacksonians, who sought revenge and deterrence; the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction in violation of UN resolutions appealed to Hamiltonians and traditional Wilsonians in Congress; and the need to remove a bloody dictator and transform Middle Eastern politics was important to the new Wilsonians.

In recent years, the Wilsonians have divided into two camps. President Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, and traditional Wilsonians continue to stress both the promotion of democracy and the role of international institutions. The neoconservatives, many of whom split off from the Democratic party, stress the importance of democracy, but have dropped Wilson’s emphasis on international institutions. They do not want to be held back by institutional constraints, and they see our legitimacy coming from our focus on democracy. In that sense, the neoconservatives are advocates of soft power, but they focus too simply on substance and not enough on process. By downgrading the legitimacy that comes from institutional processes in which others are consulted, they squander soft power.

Ironically, however, the only way to achieve the type of transformation that the neoconservatives seek is by working with others and avoiding the backlash that arises when the United States appears on the world stage as an imperial power acting unilaterally. What is more, because democracy cannot be imposed by force and requires a considerable time to take root, the most likely way to obtain staying power from the American public is through developing international legitimacy and burden sharing with allies and institutions. For Jacksonians like Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, this may not matter. They would prefer to punish the dictator and come home rather than engage in tedious nation building. For example, in September 2003, Rumsfeld said of Iraq, “I don’t believe it’s our job to reconstruct the country.”Footnote 31 But for serious neoconservatives, like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, their impatience with institutions and allies may undercut their own objectives. They understand the importance of soft power but fail to appreciate all its dimensions and dynamics.

Soft Power and Policy

Soft power grows out of our culture, out of our domestic values and policies, and out of our foreign policy. Many of the effects of our culture, for better or worse, are outside the control of government. But there is still a great deal that the government can do. Much more can be done to improve our public diplomacy in all dimensions. We can greatly improve our broadcast capabilities as well as our narrowcasting on the Internet. But both should be based on better listening as well. Newt Gingrich has written that “the impact and success of a new U.S. communication strategy should be measured continually on a country-by-country basis. An independent public affairs firm should report weekly on how U.S. messages are received in at least the world’s 50 largest countries.”Footnote 32 Such an approach would help us to select relevant themes as well as to fine-tune our short-term responses. And we should greatly increase our investment in soft power. We could easily afford to double the budget for public diplomacy as well as raise its profile and direction from the White House.

Equally important will be increasing the exchanges across societies that allow our rich and diverse non-governmental sectors to interact with other countries. It was a great mistake for the Clinton administration and Congress to cut the budget and staff for cultural diplomacy and exchanges by nearly 30% after 1993.Footnote 33 And it is a mistake now to let visa policies curtail such contacts. The most effective communication often occurs not by distant broadcasts but in face-to-face contacts—what Edward R. Murrow called “the last three feet.” Such programs were critical to winning the Cold War. The best communicators are often not governments but civilian surrogates, both from the United States and from other countries.

We will need to be more inventive in this area, whether it be through finding ways to improve the visa process for educational exchanges, encouraging more American students to study abroad, rethinking the role of the Peace Corps, inventing a major program for foreigners to teach their languages in American schools, starting a corporation for public diplomacy that will help tap into the resources of the private and non-profit sectors, or a myriad of other ways. As Michael Holtzman has observed about the Middle East, our public diplomacy must acknowledge a world that is far more skeptical of government messages than we have assumed. “To be credible to the so-called Arab street, public diplomacy should be directed mainly at spheres of everyday life. Washington should put its money into helping American doctors, teachers, businesses, religious leaders, athletic teams, and entertainers to go abroad and provide the sorts of services the people of the Middle East are eager for.”Footnote 34

While the United States has a number of social and political problems at home, many of these are shared with other postmodern societies, and thus, invidious comparisons do not seriously undercut our soft power. Moreover, we maintain strengths of openness, civil liberties, and democracy that appeal to others. Problems arise for our soft power when we do not live up to our own standards. As we try to find the right balance between freedom and security in the struggle against terrorism, it is important to remember that others are watching as well. The Bush administration deserves credit for responding to human rights groups’ accusations that it was torturing suspects by unequivocally rejecting the use of any techniques to interrogate suspects that would constitute “cruel” treatment prohibited by the Constitution.Footnote 35

Some domestic policies, such as capital punishment and the absence of gun controls, reduce the attractiveness of the United States to other countries but are the results of differences in values that may persist for some time. Other policies, such as the refusal to limit gas-guzzling vehicles, damage the American reputation because they appear self-indulgent and demonstrate an unwillingness to consider the effects, we are having on global climate change and other countries. Similarly, domestic agricultural subsidies that are structured in a way that protects wealthy farmers while we preach the virtue of free markets to poor countries appear hypocritical in the eyes of others. In a democracy, the “dog” of domestic politics is often too large to be wagged by the tail of foreign policy, but when we ignore the connections, our apparent hypocrisy is costly to our soft power.

The government can do most to recover the recent American loss of soft power in the near term by adjusting the style and substance of its foreign policy. Obviously, there are times when foreign policies serve fundamental American interests and cannot and should not be changed. But tactics can often be adjusted without giving up basic interests. Style may be the easiest part. For one thing, the administration could go back to the wisdom about humility and warnings about arrogance that George W. Bush expressed in his 2000 campaign. There is no need to take pleasure in embarrassing allies or to have a secretary of defense insulting them while a secretary of state is trying to woo them. As a British columnist wrote in the Financial Times, “I have a soft spot for Donald Rumsfeld. But as an ambassador for the American values so admired around the world, I can think of no one worse.”Footnote 36 Prime Minister Tony Blair put it well in his 2003 address to the American Congress, when he said that the real challenge for the United States now “is to show that this is a partnership built on persuasion, not command.”Footnote 37

On the substance of policy, the Bush administration deserves credit for its efforts to align the United States with the long-term aspirations of poor people in Africa and elsewhere through its Millennium Challenge initiative, which promises to increase aid to countries willing to make reforms, as well as for its efforts to increase resources to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases. Success in implementing those programs will represent a significant investment in American soft power. So also will be the serious promotion of the peace process in the Middle East. As National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, “America is a country that really does have to be committed to values and to making life better for people around the world…It’s not just the sword, it’s the olive branch that speaks to those intentions.”Footnote 38

As for the sword, the United States will continue to need it from time to time in the struggle against terrorism and in our efforts to create stability. Maintaining our hard power is essential to security. But we will not succeed by the sword alone. Our doctrine of containment led to success in the Cold War not just because of military deterrence but because, as George Kennan designed the policy, our soft power would help to transform the Soviet Bloc from within. Containment was not a static military doctrine but a transformational strategy, albeit one that took decades to accomplish. Indeed, Kennan frequently warned against what he regarded as the overmilitarization of containment and was a strong supporter of contacts and exchanges. Those lessons about patience and the mixture of hard and soft power still stand us in good stead today.

When we do use our hard power, we will need to be more attentive to ways to make it less costly to our soft power by creating broad coalitions. Here, the model should be the patient and painstaking work of George H. W. Bush in building the coalition for the first Gulf war. Those who write off “old Europe” as so enthralled by Venus that it is hopelessly opposed to the use of force should remember that 75% of the French and 63% of the German publics supported the use of military force to free Kuwait before the Gulf war.Footnote 39 Similarly, both countries were active participants in NATO’s use of military force against Serbia in the 1999 Kosovo war, despite the absence of a formal UN security council resolution. The difference was that American policy appeared legitimate in the eyes of their publics in those two cases. We had soft power and were able to attract allies.

The UN is not the only source of legitimacy, but many people concluded that the Kosovo campaign was legitimate (although not formally legal) because it had the de facto support of a large majority of Security Council members. The UN is often an unwieldy institution. The veto power in the Security Council has meant that it has been able to authorize the use of force for a true collective security operation only twice in half a century: in Korea and Kuwait. But it was designed to be a concert of large powers that would not work when they disagree. The veto is like a fuse box in the electrical system of a house. Better that the fuse blows and the lights go out than that the house burns down. Moreover, as Kofi Annan pointed out after the Kosovo war, the UN is torn between the traditional strict interpretation of state sovereignty and the rise of international humanitarian and human rights law that sets limits on what leaders can do to their citizens. Moreover, the politics of consensus has made the United Nations Charter virtually impossible to amend. Nonetheless, for all its flaws, the UN has proven useful in its humanitarian and peacekeeping roles where states agree, and it remains an important source of legitimization in world politics.

The latter point is particularly galling to the new unilateralists, who correctly point to the undemocratic nature of many of the regimes that vote and chair committees. But their proposed solution of replacing the UN with a new organization of democracies ignores the fact that the major divisions over Iraq were among the democracies. Rather than engage in futile efforts at ignoring the UN or changing its architecture, we should improve our underlying bilateral diplomacy with the other major powers and use the UN in the practical ways in which it can help with the new strategy. In addition to the UN’s development and humanitarian agenda, the Security Council may wind up playing a background role related to North Korea ; the Committee on Terrorism can help to prod states to improve their procedures; and UN peacekeepers can save us from having to be the world’s lone policeman. Not only can the UN be useful to us in a variety of practical ways if we work at it, but unilateralist attacks on it will backfire in a way that undercuts our soft power.

* * *

Americans are still working their way through the aftermath of September 11. We are groping for a path through the strange new landscape recreated by technology and globalization whose dark aspects were vividly illuminated on that traumatic occasion. The Bush administration has correctly identified the nature of the new challenges that the nation faces and has reoriented American strategy accordingly. But the administration, like Congress and the public, has been torn between different approaches to the implementation of the new strategy. The result has been a mixture of both successes and failures. We have been more successful in the domain of hard power, where we have invested more, trained more, and have a clearer idea of what we are doing. We have been less successful in the areas of soft power, where our public diplomacy has been woefully inadequate and our neglect of allies and institutions has created a sense of illegitimacy that has squandered our attractiveness.

Yet this is ironic because the United States is the country that is at the forefront of the information revolution as well as the country that built some of the longest-lasting alliances and institution that the modern world has seen. We should know how to adapt and work with central to our power for more than half country with a vibrant social and culture that provides an almost infinite number of points of contact with other societies. What is more, during the Cold War, we demonstrated that we know how to use the soft power resources that our society produces.

It is time now for us to draw upon and combine our traditions in a different way. We need more Jefferson and less Jackson. Our Wilsonians are correct about the importance of democratic transformation of world politics over the long term, but they need to remember the role of institutions and allies. They also need to temper their impatience with a good mixture of Hamiltonian realism. In short, America’s success will depend upon our developing a deeper understanding of the role of soft power and developing a better balance of hard and soft power in our foreign policy. That will be smart power. We have done it before; we can do it again.