Joseph Nye: Power In The United States

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For Joseph Nye, Power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes you want. There are several ways one can achieve this: you can coerce them with threats; you can induce them with payments; or you can attract and co-opt them to want what you want. There are two basic forms of power. There is “hard power” which use of military and economic means to influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies. According to Nye, the term is “the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will.” Here, “carrots” are inducements such as the reduction of trade barriers, the offer of an alliance or the promise of military protection. On the other hand, “sticks” are…show more content…
The truth is that about two-thirds of the governments of NATO and the European Union supported Bush in his fateful decision to go to war in Iraq,“ True, he could authorize the attack only because of all the preparatory work done for years by the U.S. intelligence and special operations communities — much during the Bush administration. recruiter and motivator who was involved with planning operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda. There is also an indirect way to exercise power, the "soft power". Soft power is about getting people to want what you want. Soft power is not simply the reflection of hard power. The United States has long had a great deal of soft power. After World War II, American aid in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II was an advertisement both of the prosperity and the generosity of the people of the United States And countries like the Canada, the Netherlands have political clout that is greater than their military and economic weight because of their support for international aid and…show more content…
‘HHMM’, Hollywood, Harvard, McDonald’s, and Microsoft, were selling not only their products but also America's culture and values, the secrets of its success, to the rest of the world.' However, employing only hard power or only soft power in a given situation will usually prove inadequate. Nye utilizes the example of terrorism, arguing simply utilizing soft power resources to change the hearts and minds of the Taliban government would be ineffective and requires a hard power component. Nevertheless, in the Middle East, in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists, the openness of Western culture is repulsive, which we have a term for it ‘anti-Americanism’. As a result, Joseph Nye, suggests that the most effective strategies in foreign policy today require a mix of hard and soft power resources, the ‘smart power’. Nye notes that smart power strategy denotes the ability to combine hard and soft power depending on whether hard or soft power would be more effective in a given situation. He states that many situations require soft power; however, in stopping North Korea's nuclear weapons program, for instance, hard power might be more effective than soft

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