Joseph S. Nye Jr. > Quotes

“What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“The world is neither unipolar, multipolar, nor chaotic—it is all three at the same time.”
― Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Future of Power

“When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“A moral vision must be balanced by the realist dimension of prudence to have a reasonable prospect of success.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

“Smart power is neither hard nor soft. It is both.     Joseph”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“إن القوتين الصلبة والناعمة تعزز كل منهما الأخرى أحيانا، وتتدخل فيها أحيانا أخرى”
― جوزيف س. ناي, القوة الناعمة: وسيلة النجاح في السياسة الدولية

“power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“Power is also like love, easier to experience than to define or measure, but no less real for that.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“Terrorism, like theater, is a competition for audience. Shocking events are designed to capture attention, polarize, and provoke overreactions from their targets.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“Globalization has made national boundaries more porous but not irrelevant. Nor does globalization mean the creation of a universal community.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr.

“What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It 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. America has long had a great deal of soft power. Think of the impact of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square by creating a replica of the Statue of Liberty; of newly liberated Afghans in 2001 asking for a copy of the Bill of Rights; of young Iranians today surreptitiously watching banned American videos and satellite television broadcasts in the privacy of their homes. These are all examples of America’s soft power. When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like
democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive. As General Wesley Clark put it, soft power “gave us an influence far beyond the hard edge of traditional balance-of-power politics.” But attraction can turn to repulsion if we act in an arrogant manner and destroy the real message of our deeper values.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

“يرى بعض المشككين أن التقليد أو الجاذبية هما تقليد أو جاذبية فقط، وليس قوة كتاب”
― جوزيف س. ناي

“In 2009, polls showed an impressive “revival of America’s global image in many parts of the world reflecting confidence in the new president.”53 One poll-based assessment of brand values even suggested the Obama effect was worth $2 trillion in brand equity.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“Information is power, and modern information technology is spreading information more widely than ever before in history.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“Hard military power will remain crucial, but if its use is perceived as unjust, such as at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, then hard power undercuts the soft power needed to win the minds of mainstream Muslims and creates more new terrorists than are destroyed. For example, a leading terrorism expert concludes that anti-Americanism was exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the U.S. failure to tailor strategies for key countries. International jihadist groups increased their membership and carried out twice as many attacks in the three years after 2001 as before it.38 Similarly, the former head of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service told the commission investigating the origins of the Iraq War that the war had increased, rather than decreased, terrorists’ success at recruitment.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“Weber warns that “he who seeks the salvation of the soul, his own soul and others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics.”
― Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

“I want you to carry this question home with you: gain such a victory, and what do you do with it?”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

“The short answer to our question is that we are not entering a post-American world. It is not possible for this (or any) book to see “the future,” because there are so many possible futures dependent on unpredictable events and they play a larger role the further out one tries to look. Thus it is important to specify a time horizon. For example, if the “American century” began in 1941, will the United States still have primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041? My guess is “yes.” In that sense, the American century is not over, but because of transnational and non-state forces, it is definitely changing in important ways that are described below. But first, we must look at the charge that the United States is in decline.”
― Joseph S. Nye, Is the American Century Over?

“When Russia had disputes with neighbors such as Ukraine over gas prices, it did not hesitate to cut off gas supplies as a form of economic power. Later, when a more sympathetic government came to power in Ukraine, Russia used the lure of heavily discounted gas prices to obtain the extension of its lease of a naval base in Ukraine, thus complicating the prospect that Ukraine might one day join NATO.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“More important to be feared than to be loved. But in today's world, it is best to be both.........Information is power...............Power is like the weather. Everyone depends on it and talks about it, but few understand it.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

“Shortly after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in the seventeenth century, some Puritans lamented a decline from earlier virtue.”
― Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Is the American Century Over?

“In 1900, Europe accounted for a quarter of the world’s population. By 2060, it may account for just 6%—and almost a third of these will be more than 65 years old.” Europe does face severe demographic problems, but the size of a population is not highly correlated with power, and “predictions of Europe’s downfall have a long history of failing to materialize.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“A more serious concern would be if the United States turned inward and seriously curtailed immigration. With its current levels of immigration, America is one of the few developed countries that may avoid demographic decline and keep its share of world population, but this might change if reactions to terrorist events or public xenophobia closed the borders. Fears over the effect of immigration on national values and on a coherent sense of American identity have existed since the early years of the nation.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power

“In conclusion, the American century is not over, if by that we mean the extraordinary period of American pre-eminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods. Contrary to those who proclaim this the Chinese century, we have not entered a post-American world. But the continuation of the American century will not look like it did in the twentieth century. The American share of the world economy will be less than it was in the middle of the last century, and the complexity represented by the rise of other countries as well as the increased role of non-state actors will make it more difficult for anyone to wield influence and organize action. Analysts should stop using clichés about unipolarity and multipolarity. They will have to live with both in different issues at the same time. And they should stop talking and worrying about poorly specified concepts of decline that mix many different types of behavior and lead to mistaken policy conclusions. Leadership is not the same as domination. America will have to listen in order to get others to enlist in what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a multipartner world. It is important to remember that there have always been degrees of leadership and degrees of influence during the American century. The United States never had complete control. As we saw in Chapter 1, even when the United States had preponderant resources, it often failed to get what it wanted. And those who argue that the complexity and turmoil of today’s entropic world is much worse than the past should remember a year like 1956 when the United States was unable to prevent Soviet repression of a revolt in Hungary, French loss of Vietnam, or the Suez invasion by our allies Britain, France, and Israel. One should be wary of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. To borrow a comedian’s line, “hegemony ain’t what it used to be, but then it never was.” Now, with slightly less preponderance and a much more complex world, the United States will need to make smart strategic choices both at home and abroad if it wishes to maintain its position. The American century is likely to continue for a number of decades at the very least, but it will look very different from how it did when Henry Luce first articulated it.”
― Joseph S. Nye, Is the American Century Over?

“The rise of radical Islamism received a good deal of state help from Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family agreed to propagate Wahhabism as a means of propitiating the clerics, thus buying “their own political legitimacy at the cost of stability elsewhere.”65 Because funding of Wahhabist institutions comes from both Saudi government ministries and private charities, it is virtually impossible to estimate the total spending. One expert testified to Congress that the Saudis had spent roughly $70 billion on aid projects since the 1970s, and others report that they sponsored 1,500 mosques and 2,000 schools worldwide from Indonesia to France.66 These institutions often displace more moderate and worse-funded institutions promulgating moderate interpretations of Islam.67 Even if these numbers are incorrect, a fraction of the dollar figures still dwarfs what the United States has spent on public diplomacy in the Muslim world.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“Moreover, Europeans provide 70 percent of overseas development assistance to poor countries—four times more than the United States. Europe also has ten times as many troops as the United States involved in peacekeeping operations under multilateral organizations such as the UN and NATO.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

“The real key is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

“Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

“During the twentieth century, America recorded its highest percentage of foreign-born residents in 1910: 14.7 percent of the population. A century later, about 40 million people or nearly 13 percent of Americans today are foreign-born citizens.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Is the American Century Over?

“Ironically, the soft power of Wahhabism has not proved to be a resource that the Saudi government could control or use to obtain favorable outcomes. Instead, it has been like a sorcerer’s apprentice that has come back to bedevil its original creator. The radicals regard the royal family as corrupt and in league with Western infidels. They aim to overthrow or disrupt the government, and launched terrorist attacks in Riyadh in 2003. The royal family’s bargain with the Wahhabist clerics has backfired because the soft power of Islamic radicalism has flowed in the direction of Osama bin Laden and his goal of overthrowing the Saudi government, not in the direction of making the Saudi government more secure.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics