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Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power
Is America still Number 1? A leading scholar of international politics and former State Department official takes issue with Paul Kennedy and others and clearly demonstrates that the United States is still the dominant world power, with no challenger in sight. But analogies about decline only divert policy makers from creating effective strategies for the future, says Nye. The nature of power has changed. The real-and unprecedented-challenge is managing the transition to growing global interdependence.
336 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1990
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253 people want to read
About the author
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
77 books298 followersJoseph Samuel Nye Jr. was an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" ("the ability to combine hard and soft power into a successful strategy") became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration. These theories from Nye are very commonly seen in courses across the U.S., such as I.B. D.P. Global Politics.
Nye was the Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he later held the position of University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus. In October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was also a member of the Defense Policy Board. He was a Harvard faculty member since 1964. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a foreign fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
The 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of over 1,700 international relations scholars ranked Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past 20 years. He was also ranked as one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included him on its list of top global thinkers. In September 2014, Foreign Policy reported that international relations scholars and policymakers ranked Nye as one of the field's most influential scholars.
Nye was the Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he later held the position of University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus. In October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was also a member of the Defense Policy Board. He was a Harvard faculty member since 1964. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a foreign fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
The 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of over 1,700 international relations scholars ranked Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past 20 years. He was also ranked as one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included him on its list of top global thinkers. In September 2014, Foreign Policy reported that international relations scholars and policymakers ranked Nye as one of the field's most influential scholars.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 29, 2016
Joseph Nye makes a convincing case in this book that the US really wasn't in decline in the last quadrant of the 20th century. In fact, he says that decline really isn't even the issue. The issue with figuring out where the US stands and what it should do on the global stage is to understand how the nature of power has changed and whether or not the US possesses new forms of power. This is where Nye's brilliant concept of soft power comes into play. We all know what hard power is; realist scholars have been focusing on it forever: military size and competency, technology, GNP, population size, geographic location, financial strength, etc. In those terms, one could say that the US declined from 1945-1990, but this would be a narrow way to understand that period. The US wanted economic centers in Europe and East Asia to recover because that contained communism and made everyone stronger, even if it eroded relative US superiority. This was the brilliant enlightened self interest of the postwar liberal international system. Moreover, the US "hegemonic moment" after WWII was never as dominant as many declinists suggest. In fact, US share of things like global GNP or manufacturing production declined more from 45-70 than it did from 70-90, the supposed age of stagnation, decline, and de-industrialization. The US also maintained a major edge in hard power into the early 1990's.
Ok, so on to soft power. The idea here is that power is all about trying to get others to do what they otherwise would not do through some means. Soft power is a country's ability to influence others indirectly through the appeal of values, culture, institutions, cooperation, and trade. In a sense, countries have soft power, but it's hard to use. It works slowly over time as societies become more connected and interdependent, as they have throughout the second half of the 20th century. US soft power comes from a bunch of sources: the appeal of US lifestyle, pop culture, and values, the ubiquity of our goods, our advanced post secondary education system, the English language, the institutions we founded and continue to support, the rules around which we and our friends organized postwar international politics, etc. With soft power, the US has been able to shape the rules and institutions that govern international interactions, creating standards that most countries try to adhere to. This gives the US indirect but powerful interest over the rest of the world. Nye's central argument is that the US remains the world's leader in soft and hard power as of 1990. It's only when you measure the US share of power and resources against the rise of other centers of power and production that. US relative decline is not a problem as long as the US maintains sufficient hard power to provide stability to the international system of rules, institutions, and relationships it helped set up post WWII.
I found Nye's book and his critique of the declinists (and the focus on decline) refreshing and relevant to the present. Countries that believe they are in decline often do erratic things. You know, like vote for Brexit or Trump? Or Sanders for that matter (not a moral equivalence here, but he does play on the notion of decline heavily). Understanding that the nature of power is changing (for example, countries can't just use force as nakedly as they used to, making it a less important tool of power) should help people panic less about the rise of other centers of power in the world. In fact, trying to cut yourself off from the world (protectionism and withdrawal from international institutions, two political errors rife in 2016) or stop the rise of those alternative power centers (other than the crazy or aggressive ones) often makes decline into a self-fulfilling prophecy by wreaking economic damage at home, reducing our soft power resources, and turning those other power centers against us.
The real question around the issue of soft power as an American strength is whether people around the world really see us as we wish to be seen. Fukuyama would say that they largely do, or at least they are drifting in that direction. Huntington would say they really don't, that they are actually entrenching in a form of civilizational defense against Western universalism. Barber would say that US soft power is really just McWorld, the soulless, insidious neoliberal corporate agenda to homogenize the world that is sparking "jihad," or third world resistance and atavism. I land on the more optimistic side of this question, but I think a lot of it depends on how the US exercises its hard power around the world. As Nye suggests, the US should focus on bolstering international institutions and trade relations with other nations because these are the only good ways of dealing with the problems of interdependence (terrorism, refugees, climate problems, protectionism) that cannot be tackled unilaterally. The US should also be willing to play its hard power role as the guarantor of the openness and stability of the international system, as it did in the Gulf War, but it cannot let the exercise of hard power spoil the long term effects of soft power.
I think George Kennan would have really liked this book. Kennan saw that the US way of life would most likely out-compete the communist way if communism could be contained and its most open aggression stymied. US attempts to stop peripheral communist aggression with hard power usually backfired (Korea was an exception), leading to the reduction of the appeal of our soft power. The US still lives in this dilemma today. Trust in our values, institutions, and cooperation with the world should give the US a long-term edge over the appeal of other systems around the world from Islamism to Chinese nationalism to various forms of "Third Wordism." Of course, as Nye warns, we have to first make sure that we are living up to those values and rules at home before they can have any effect abroad.
I'm a classic liberal, and I think this is a crucial book for liberals to either read or get the main idea from. Foreign policy historians should check it out too. For everyone else, it's a bit dated, but Nye is still publishing and updating his discussions of soft power.
Ok, so on to soft power. The idea here is that power is all about trying to get others to do what they otherwise would not do through some means. Soft power is a country's ability to influence others indirectly through the appeal of values, culture, institutions, cooperation, and trade. In a sense, countries have soft power, but it's hard to use. It works slowly over time as societies become more connected and interdependent, as they have throughout the second half of the 20th century. US soft power comes from a bunch of sources: the appeal of US lifestyle, pop culture, and values, the ubiquity of our goods, our advanced post secondary education system, the English language, the institutions we founded and continue to support, the rules around which we and our friends organized postwar international politics, etc. With soft power, the US has been able to shape the rules and institutions that govern international interactions, creating standards that most countries try to adhere to. This gives the US indirect but powerful interest over the rest of the world. Nye's central argument is that the US remains the world's leader in soft and hard power as of 1990. It's only when you measure the US share of power and resources against the rise of other centers of power and production that. US relative decline is not a problem as long as the US maintains sufficient hard power to provide stability to the international system of rules, institutions, and relationships it helped set up post WWII.
I found Nye's book and his critique of the declinists (and the focus on decline) refreshing and relevant to the present. Countries that believe they are in decline often do erratic things. You know, like vote for Brexit or Trump? Or Sanders for that matter (not a moral equivalence here, but he does play on the notion of decline heavily). Understanding that the nature of power is changing (for example, countries can't just use force as nakedly as they used to, making it a less important tool of power) should help people panic less about the rise of other centers of power in the world. In fact, trying to cut yourself off from the world (protectionism and withdrawal from international institutions, two political errors rife in 2016) or stop the rise of those alternative power centers (other than the crazy or aggressive ones) often makes decline into a self-fulfilling prophecy by wreaking economic damage at home, reducing our soft power resources, and turning those other power centers against us.
The real question around the issue of soft power as an American strength is whether people around the world really see us as we wish to be seen. Fukuyama would say that they largely do, or at least they are drifting in that direction. Huntington would say they really don't, that they are actually entrenching in a form of civilizational defense against Western universalism. Barber would say that US soft power is really just McWorld, the soulless, insidious neoliberal corporate agenda to homogenize the world that is sparking "jihad," or third world resistance and atavism. I land on the more optimistic side of this question, but I think a lot of it depends on how the US exercises its hard power around the world. As Nye suggests, the US should focus on bolstering international institutions and trade relations with other nations because these are the only good ways of dealing with the problems of interdependence (terrorism, refugees, climate problems, protectionism) that cannot be tackled unilaterally. The US should also be willing to play its hard power role as the guarantor of the openness and stability of the international system, as it did in the Gulf War, but it cannot let the exercise of hard power spoil the long term effects of soft power.
I think George Kennan would have really liked this book. Kennan saw that the US way of life would most likely out-compete the communist way if communism could be contained and its most open aggression stymied. US attempts to stop peripheral communist aggression with hard power usually backfired (Korea was an exception), leading to the reduction of the appeal of our soft power. The US still lives in this dilemma today. Trust in our values, institutions, and cooperation with the world should give the US a long-term edge over the appeal of other systems around the world from Islamism to Chinese nationalism to various forms of "Third Wordism." Of course, as Nye warns, we have to first make sure that we are living up to those values and rules at home before they can have any effect abroad.
I'm a classic liberal, and I think this is a crucial book for liberals to either read or get the main idea from. Foreign policy historians should check it out too. For everyone else, it's a bit dated, but Nye is still publishing and updating his discussions of soft power.
June 27, 2024
Useful concept of soft power. A lot of examples so not as focused towards the end of the book.
August 20, 2025
If you think that soft power is an overused word, this is the book to blame. The late Joseph Nye Jr. launched an impressive critique of the American declinist theory, popular in the 1980s. His ideas were very influential after the fall of Communism, as the liberal policies of that era attest. Bound to Lead is useful for any reader interested in understanding the background of today's international relations.
Practiced in the study of interdependence, integration and nuclear issues, Joseph Nye Jr. extended the neoliberal institutionalism perspective on great power politics. He argued against the ideas of Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, his colleague, Robert Keohane, who thought that US power was vaning, in comparison with other international actors. According to Bound to Lead, published in 1990, this idea is based on misunderstandings about power and the way the world works.
First, in Bound to Lead, Joseph Nye thought that, if one uses traditional power analysis, the United States was still the strongest unit in the international system, at the end of the 1980s. The Soviet economy stagnated, then it started to fall, and it didn't adapt well to technological change. China started reforms but it still had a long way ahead, the European Community lacked the political cohesion needed for world politics and Japan's capabilities were mostly economic.
The second part of Bound to Lead is about the diffusion of power away from the state, brought by interdependence and globalization. Joseph Nye Jr. always argued that, alongside traditional power politics and economic competities, new new forms of transnational relations. Soft power is decisive, a form of influence derived from values, and societal appeal, almost as ethereal as beauty. Here lay serious troubles for the United States: the goals of foreign policies should have been more modest, more attention was required for global communication or international organizations and the decision-makers' showed complacency about some new social facts (loss of competitivity, decline in productivity and savings, a shrinking of R&D position, problems in educational abilities, and parochial politics).
The difference between hegemony and leadership was important, for Joseph Nye Jr. The first was slipping because of globalization, the other was still possible, and it required vision, convincing and domestic reforms. The author was a moderate and thought that traditional power politics still matters, a feature criticized by scholars like John Mearsheimer. For me Bound to Lead is about the mixture of change and continuity which defines international relations and about optimism in face of uncertainty.
Other sources
John J. Mearsheimer, The False Promise of International Institutions, International Security, 19:3, 1994-1995.
Practiced in the study of interdependence, integration and nuclear issues, Joseph Nye Jr. extended the neoliberal institutionalism perspective on great power politics. He argued against the ideas of Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, his colleague, Robert Keohane, who thought that US power was vaning, in comparison with other international actors. According to Bound to Lead, published in 1990, this idea is based on misunderstandings about power and the way the world works.
First, in Bound to Lead, Joseph Nye thought that, if one uses traditional power analysis, the United States was still the strongest unit in the international system, at the end of the 1980s. The Soviet economy stagnated, then it started to fall, and it didn't adapt well to technological change. China started reforms but it still had a long way ahead, the European Community lacked the political cohesion needed for world politics and Japan's capabilities were mostly economic.
The second part of Bound to Lead is about the diffusion of power away from the state, brought by interdependence and globalization. Joseph Nye Jr. always argued that, alongside traditional power politics and economic competities, new new forms of transnational relations. Soft power is decisive, a form of influence derived from values, and societal appeal, almost as ethereal as beauty. Here lay serious troubles for the United States: the goals of foreign policies should have been more modest, more attention was required for global communication or international organizations and the decision-makers' showed complacency about some new social facts (loss of competitivity, decline in productivity and savings, a shrinking of R&D position, problems in educational abilities, and parochial politics).
The difference between hegemony and leadership was important, for Joseph Nye Jr. The first was slipping because of globalization, the other was still possible, and it required vision, convincing and domestic reforms. The author was a moderate and thought that traditional power politics still matters, a feature criticized by scholars like John Mearsheimer. For me Bound to Lead is about the mixture of change and continuity which defines international relations and about optimism in face of uncertainty.
Other sources
John J. Mearsheimer, The False Promise of International Institutions, International Security, 19:3, 1994-1995.
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January 18, 2010Bound to Lead : The Changing Nature of American Power by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (1990)
September 6, 2013
Once again, Professor Nye leads us to the conclusion that nations and individuals are responsible for leadership.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews