Is Soft Power Better Than Hard Power

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Is soft power better than hard power? At the end of the 20th century, in his book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature Of American Power, Joseph Nye a political scientist from USA elaborated upon a theory in the field of International Relations (IR) concerning the notion of power he invented: “soft power”. This concept provoked a massive debate amongst academics of the necessity to move on from America’s long-established usage of ‘hard power’ toward a little more nonthreatening power that he called ‘soft power’. Contemplated to be, during the 2005 United States presidential election, the National Security Advisor, Nye is one of the most distinguished liberal academics in the discipline of foreign policy and International Relations. This paper will examine the nature of ‘soft power’ and its association with ‘hard power’, and it will show that neither soft nor hard power can be used on its own. While soft power might seem the better choice for states or political organisations to practise, it cannot be used without hard power to back it up. Soft power does not create a substitute to hard power, as a number of people appear to consider, being more precise Nye’s soft power evaluation balances that of hard power. Joseph Nye points out that every nation is able to exercise two forms of power, soft and hard power. Before we inspect the two divisions of power, we need to define power. Power like many basic ideas is a disputed concept. In the Oxford dictionary power is defined as; “The capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” (N/A). Not all definitions of power are accepted by all, some define power as the ability to resist or make changes, and others describe it as the ability to get what we want (Nye, 1990). As stated by Nye, the nature of power is a lot simpler to ‘encounter’ than to theorise, and this is apparent
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