Joseph Nye on Soft Power After Iraq

America has a “profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics,” says Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye. Power is distributed at three levels: unipolar military relations among states, multipolar economic relations, and transnational issues outside the control of governments. The most urgent challenges faced by the US today, such as the Iraq war, global climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation, are all transnational issues, requiring multilateral cooperation and hard, coercive power tempered by the “soft” power of attraction. The cooperation required in Iraq can therefore only by achieved by abandoning lofty ideals in favor of developing civil society and the rule of law.