of really tricky problem. um, and they played an interesting role and advocacy. and they've become in the some ways, it's been described by other reporters as kind of a farm team for the obama administration's foreign policy. >> what's your day job? >> my day job? i write for "the wall street journal". i cover national security. >> finally, nathan hodge, what is the impackage of -- image on the front of your book. the young boy here on the wrap around and soldier. where'd you get this image? >> i think the imimagine conveys a little bit of, um, sort of how i felt about this mission as i observed it unfold which was kind of like, at times, kind of -- it brought to mind sort of the ronald reagan saying, you know, i'm from the government, i'm here to help. yes, we are. our military is there. they are there to help, they are there to do, um, you know fundamentally humanitarian things. and that's a mission that they've embraced. it's a rewarding mission.

but it's one that also has unintended consequences. so i wanted to at least share that there's a little bit of an ironic juxtaposition there. >> "armed humanitarians" is the book, author is nathan hodge. .. it is about how do you understand power and america's position in the world and it goes back to the book, bound to lead which was published in 1990

which was a period when americans believe they were in decline and in trying to answer why i didn't think the americans were in decline, this is when i coined the term soft power. i looked at military power and economic power and i said you know that is not all there is. there's also the ability to get out there and do what you want because you attract and persuade them besides coercing and paying them. and, that, the term took off, but as we enter the 21st century, there was a bit of a reversion to more emphasis on hard power thinking we could do more with core version then we could. and there was also a new dimension of what was going on in power. this was stimulated by the globalization and information revolution that you are seeing. so trying to think about the work that i had done in the

past, i looked back 20 years and i try to look forward 20 years or so. what will power shifts look like in the 21st century? and basically argued that globalization information revolution are producing too big power ships. one is a shift if you want from west to east. sometimes it is called the rise of asia and should be more of the return of asia. i called up our transition the normal shift in power amongst states. it is also called by farid zakariab rice of the rest. we know a far amount about that. the other is power diffusion which is the shift of power from states whether east or west to nonstate actors. that is a lot newer and a lot harder for us to wrap our minds around this and the chapter on that is the chapter on

cyberpower. the idea that you can suddenly cross borders with electrons and to do damage in nobody knows where do you are a state or nonstate actor, that is really quite new and we haven't thought through what that means. power, but may talk about each of those rather quickly and then we will have time to discuss what they mean in practice. power diffusion is a product of this extraordinary reduction in the cost of computing and communications. if you look at what happened to computing power in the last quarter of the 20th century, declined 1000 fold. the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly as the price of computing you could buy a car today for $5. anytime you have that dramatic reduction in the price of something, the barriers to entry go down. so now anybody can get into the game.

in 1975, if you wanted to have instantaneous communications from washington to johannesburg to moscow and beijing you could do it. but it was expensive. you needed to be a government or a large corporation. today anybody has the capacity and the price of entry into an internet café. as examples that give to illustrate this but the important point is not the governments are finished or that they are not the most important actors in world politics. on the contrary, they are, but the stage is much more crowded. there are now many more participants on that stage than before. and information has essentially become so much more widespread that there are many people able to play. egypt was a great example of this. if you look at the way we used to think that you only had a choice between an autocrat and extremist is the spectrum of participants in politics. it turns out there was a middle.

information had filled in the middle. what is more evaded giving them tools like twitter and facebook and so forth to coordinate. this is new, and as i said when you talk about cyber, it is even more new in terms of our inability as yet to develop a full strategy in which we understand this. so power diffusion is one of the really big changes in the 21st century and we are only beginning to wrap our minds around it. what it means is we are going to have to have a much more subtle and sophisticated understanding of power and the strategies that involves. classically, the market for great power is the great british historian put it, the ability to prevail in war. the ability to prevail in the war is not just whose army wins but also who story once. inevitability to mix those two, to have the military capacity but also a powerful narrative is

something that is very difficult to do. if you think only in hard power terms, and don't think about soft power terms simultaneously, you are going to get your strategy wrong. you are going to have to think of how can you combine those two into smart power strategies. so in that instance i think we are going to need a much more sophisticated understanding of power and the resources to put it and promote, that create it in the 21st century than we have seen thus far. that is power diffusion and i think we should come back to it in our conversation. let me say couple of force about our transition, transition from states to other states. people talk about this as the rise of asia. it is really the return of asia. in 1800 if you took a snapshot of the world, asia was more than half of the worlds population of more than half of the world's product. by 1900 still is half the worlds population, only 20% of the world's product.

what we are seeing now is what you might call return to the normality. at some point in this century asia will be half of the worlds population and have the world's product. it starts with japan in the late 20th century and goes on to korea, the so-called asian tigers and now it is gone to china but in the future it is going to move to india. this is a process which is important, and it is affecting power but it sometimes is summarized as the rise of china and the decline of the u.s.. i think that is the wrong way to understand what is happening. first of all, i don't see the decline of the u.s.. i had a piece in "the wall street journal" yesterday arguing this, but there is a whole chapter in a book which gives you facts and figures as to why this is true. decline is a very misleading metaphor. it assumes that you know what the lifespan of the country is.

we don't. lifespans of countries are not like lifespans of individuals. if you take something like rome you will see that rome lasted in power three centuries after it reached a peak of its power and when it finally collapsed, it didn't collapse before another state but under internal decay and the onset of barbarians. so we have no idea what the trajectory of american power is and i think it has quite a long way to go still. the other problem with the term decline is it infuses two things. relative power and absolute internal dk. in relative power, other countries will come closer to the united states. this is the rise of the rest. i don't see absolute dk from this. people say how can you not see this? it is going on all around us. take a little look at history. we have looked a lot worse at

other times in our history. what's more as americans go through cycles of believing we are in decline. after sputnik in the 50s we thought we are finished. the russians were 10 feet tall. after nixon closed the gold window on the oil embargo we thought that was the end. in the 1980s when ronald reagan had a huge budget deficit, there was a widespread belief in the decline. that is when i wrote bound to lead. my friend paul kennedy at yale, great british historian wrote a book called the rise of all the great powers. he said we were going to go the way of philip the second in spain. paul got all the royalties because people believed in decline. and now we are going through another bout of decline, which is set off by the 2008 recession. i suspect as the economy recovers we will outgrow this one as well. but the point is that i don't see this proof of absolute

decay. problem is in the country, yes. lots of problems. there are a couple that particularly bother me, the deficits and secondary education but if you look at the innovativeness of the american economy we are the world economic forum ranks us as number four and the first three are small states and china is number 27, or if you look at new technologies like nanotechnology, biotechnology or if you look at demographic factors like the fact that we will keep our position demographically because we are a nation of immigration whereas the rest of the advanced world in fact is in decline and even china is going to a demographic trouble and in another decade or so, i think all of these things are reasons why the american society is not an absolute decline. i particularly like the comment that lee kwan yew told me as we

were having lunch about this last year. he said you know the chinese have the greatest advantage. they can draw on a talent pool of 1.3000000000 people but the u.s. can draw a talent pool of seven alien people and what's more we can take those 7 billion and three combined them in a way that the chinese can't, because they are limited by chinese nationalist. he said as long as you keep open that way he will place his bets on the americans. so i don't see absolute decline. now, what about relative power? china is doing well, and i think you can see that will continue likely to do well. goldman sachs is projected in china will pass the americans in overall economic size by 20207 and might even be earlier than that. it stands to reason if one country has a population of 1.3000000000 at growing 10% a

year sooner or later the smaller population of 300 some billion will be a full-size economy. but a big mistake to go from the quality and size of gdp to economic equality. is essentially they will be equal in size but not in composition. and if you look at gdp per capita to better measure the composition of an economy, and the u.s. is going to stay way ahead. china probably won't equal the u.s. in gdp per capita in till well into the century. the other thing is that these projections about china being equal to the u.s. infant in the 2020's are one-dimensional. they look at economic power. they ignore military power. it is hard to see china equaling the u.s. and military power for another 20 years or so. they also ignore soft power.

and while china has paid major investments on power, hu jintao did basically tell the 17th party congress that china should soft power is mentioned they're not going to be a will to project soft power as effectively as the u.s. so long as they keep the authoritarian political position they have. if you take the example of the beijing olympics or you take the shanghai expo, great confucius institutes, you go when you buck up you shall bow and cut the nobel prize ceremony and you suddenly shoot yourself in the foot. you undercut all that soft power that you invested in. so until china changes, i don't see it being able to come close to the americans in soft power are there. that you might say why worry about all of this? wife us? is this just another way of saying we are number one and pretending we are the green bay

packers is something? the answer to that is no. power is not good or bad per se. power is a say in the book is like calories in a diet. too little and you die, too much of it and you get obese. and basically, we have to think about power in terms of what are smart strategies, how do we use our power effectively? one of the reasons that matters is you misjudged the relationships of power in the world. you can make a policy mistakes. you know there is the famous cities quote that the war was caused by the rise of the power of athens and the fear of sparta which people have transposed to world war i. world war i was created by the rise in power of germany and the fear created in britain and then many others transporting it into the future and saying the 21st century will be the rise in power of china and the fear it creates in the u.s..

that history. that history because if you look at britain and germany, germany had passed britain by 1900 terms of power. if you believe what i said earlier and this is supported by facts that are in chapter 6 of the book, china's not going to pass the u.s. for another couple of decades, if then. which means we have time. we don't have to get alarmed and overly fearful. we have time to manage this relationship. it will not be easy. the danger is that china, because it thinks the americans are in decline, suffers from hubris. the americans thinking we are in decline suffer from fear which means we overreact or react the wrong way. so, getting this wrong will be be -- or getting it right i should say will be one of the big questions of the first decades of the 21st century. i happen to think we can still get it right though it is going

to take careful management and a pretty good estimation of the realities of power. let me conclude this and summarize it by saying that as a i think about power, i have used a metaphor, a three-dimensional chess pool. on the first top board you have military power. there, the united states is the only power, the only country that will reject power and i think it is going to stay that way for another couple of decades. if you look at the middle board, the economic relations among states, the world is multipolar and it has been for a couple of decades. this is the area where your can act as a unit and when it does act as a unit it has an economy bigger than the united states. in addition you have china and japan and others that can help balance american power sows unipolarity on a top board and

multipolarity on a second port go to the bottom of transnational nations things across borders outside the control of government where the need agents like the terrorists and al qaeda or transnational crime syndicates or whether it be in personal forces like pandemics or global climate change. power in this domain is chaotically distributed. it makes no sense to use all your categories of you know know -- unipolarity or multipolarity to understand this. the only way you can deal with these issues that are actually creating a new and important challenge from this bottom chessboard of the three-dimensional game is like getting cooperation from other governments and that is going to require much more use of soft power as well as mixtures with hardened power. in that area what we see is a need for a new and far more sophisticated strategy which we realize we need to think of

power sometimes as a zero-sum game and sometimes as a positive-sum game. we need to think of power over others for example in preserving deterrence or enabling balances. we also need to think of power owners. for example dealing with climate change were pandemics or terrorism. we have to learn to do both of those at the same time. that is just going to require much more sophisticated understanding of power and how you combine hard and soft power into effect if smart power strategies. just to summarize when hillary clinton said in her not grow hearings before the senate foreign relations committee that smart power meant using all the tools in our toolbox. we are going to have to get much better at using all the tools in our toolbox than we have been so far and in the process of encouraging that is why i try tried to write this book. so that is enough for me. i would much rather hear from you. over to you.

>> thanks very much joe. appreciated and i want to start with a question before throwing the floor open. 20 years after the end of the cold war, 20 years after the publication, it seems to me that in many ways the united states is still trying to define the role of american power in the world. what are we trying to do with american power, and given you what you have written here could you outline for us just a few of the tenets that you think should underline that narrative of america's role in the world in decades to come? >> well it is a good point, nate because i don't think you are going to find a nice easy slogan. in another word sometimes you will say what can replace it. i think looking for the bumper sticker may not be very helpful. if i had to choose a bumper sticker, i talk, use a smart power strategy that combines hard and soft power or as in the book i talk about the need to

overcome the difference between liberalism and realism. i say somewhat facetiously i consider myself a liberal realist that i don't buy this dichotomy very useful, that you need those. but what that means in particular is thinking through how do you maintain your position as a strong military power and not squander your resources? how do you maintain your economic strength at home. how do you project your soft power and learn how to do that in the right proportions? the combination of hard and soft power is not easy. if you take something like counterinsurgency strategy, which i know people here have worked a lot on, that is a good example in which you combine hard and soft power. polling is interesting because instead of saying i will maximize my heart powered by how many i can kill, you say no i want to maximize how many

civilian minds i can win and that is not measured by how many feet in enemy soldiers i kill. smart power also requires figuring out how to organize a government so that you can use both the resources of the state department and the defense department and combined them in effective ways. in our political coal church, we have this bizarre thing that we can't think clearly about this. we have a government of one giant in a lot of pygmies so there was an account, any account that was in the pentagon which secretary gates said should be transferred to the state department. and when it was transferred from pentagon to state, congress cut it in half. that is ridiculous. until we learn how to think more clearly about sweat -- what smart power is, they need to combine hard and soft to reinforce each other we are not going to be good at effective strategies. right now as a congressperson,

congresswoman i should say who is a good friend of mine said, you know you are absolutely right about needing to use more soft power. she said i just can't get up on a political platform and say that. there something is something wrong about our ability to mt. ace mark powered strategy when we can't talk about a half or a third of the components of what goes into using all the tools in the toolbox. so that is what i tried to get at and what i use smart power is my bumper sticker. doesn't solve all the problems but at least he tries to get people to think in more sophisticated way that what is involved in combining the use of power. >> thank you for coming. i was just wondering how do you tell this to the american people? i think you said how it seems like the american people don't

always -- they want to know who is the enemy and who it is not and you think about the problem selling that to the american people and how do you do that? >> well it is a problem. it is a problem, because it is much easier if you have clear white hats in clear black hats and that is all there is to it. when somebody is a whitehead at one minute and it lacks hat at one minute and sometimes it is gray then you have a more difficult way to think your way through it. take china. there are some areas were we in china are rifles. if china tries to push us out from the coast to the second i was chang that is pretty much zero-sum. i think we are going to stay much closer and that is a debate in another context but that could be zero-sum. if on the other hand they want to do something about climate change, the better china gets the climate change the better

off we are. they are better off, we are better off. so in some situations where it is zero-sum and other situations it is positive-sum, and there will be some better mix of elements of both, so it is hard to get the public to think in those terms. i mean it is much easier to have back in the cold war, the iron curtain and a clear line and good guys on the side of bad guys on that side. and the world in which you have the rise of the rest and the diffusion of power from state to nonstate actors is going to have a much more complex world which is going to require much more subtle strategies and that is hard in our political culture for politicians to explain that. is much easier to do the simple white hats, black hat. >> joe, you said that the u.s. will probably be the dominant

military power for decades to come. the only one able to project power globally, but what about asymmetry? we were humbled by asymmetry in the form of roadside suicide bombs in iraq and lately in afghanistan. might for instance a power like the chinese use a much more high-tech subtle version of asymmetry to come as you just said, try to lock us out of the first island chain or there. might we be in danger of having the world's greatest navy and air force but it meaningless in terms of what we can actually do with it? >> i think that is a great question and that is why i have a whole chapter in the book on cyberpower, because if you think of that enabled the main, american superiority in the oceans i think -- you can say we have naval superiority and it is likely to stay.

people say oh my goodness china is developing a carrier. it is a long distance between that and that carrier task forces as you know better than anyone. so the question then gets to asymmetries and interesting legend, the chinese military talk about asymmetries and if i had one -- if i had minus one carrier and americans had let them i would talk about asymmetries too. the question is can they really do it? i think if you look carefully at the cyberdomain the americans are still way ahead on cyberoffense. but at the same time we are more vulnerable than others because we depend on that cyber, so the question we have to figure it is how do we improve the resilience and robustness of our system? just taking this issue of pushing the americans passed the first i'll change. the ballistic missile which can hit a carrier, guess what? we can use cyberin the other

direction on that as well as they thinking they can use a ballistic missile so cybercuts in multiple directions. there is also the point that people say there is no deterrence and cyber, but if there there is deterrence but a different type of deterrence. it is not the deterrence in which you bombed their city after they beat -- you bombed their city. why is it that china had so many dollars and doesn't dump their dollars to bring the u.s. to its knees? because they would bring themselves to their ankles. the same thing, why doesn't china use cyberto bring americans to their knees because you could bring them to their ankles. that i think, if we have to begin to think through what these asymmetries maine, there will be some military domains or we will remain well ahead. there will be other military domains where i don't think you can count on superiority. i think we can't count on

superior but in which we can involve smart shadow just to make sure that they can't remove our capabilities in let's say that the naval domain. and that is where we should be trying to develop strategies. >> said he'd consider yourself a liberal -- [inaudible] neal ferguson at harvard just published an article in "newsweek" sedating the obama administration's response to egypt was a disaster. as a liberal realist i would you create the frustrations responsive looking forward and how they should respond to iran and the other countries that may be vulnerable? how would you look at that? >> i think actually obama's response in egypt was not a disaster. and this is a good example of what i mean by a strategy. if you think about, should i

abandon the government? should i forget the government? no, sorry government are still are most important actors. i still have made your objectives and the hard power world like balancing iranian strategies like maintaining the peace between israel and egypt. if you just say oh the sooner we overthrow mubarak the better and suppose you wind up with chaos after that, that is not a foreign-policy. a human rights policy as part of a foreign-policy. it is not a foreign-policy. it is a human rights policy. on it and if you think of stability only working with the government and with our civil society, particularly in this civil society empowered by the diffusion of information, that is an inadequate foreign policy also. the trick or obama or for any government now is how do you deal with governments and also do with the people in tahrir square. your military aid for example uses influence over the government as a form of hard power. your narrative gives you

influence with the people in tahrir square. and i think the obama administration was trying to walk this tightrope and obviously it wobbled several times, but i think it got down that to tightrope relatively well. so i think neal was wrong. neal looks to simplify things. i don't think he got this one quite right are there. but i think it is a good illustration -- he is a friend of mine so i would tell him this if he were sitting where you are. we have had debates and lots of fun with it, but i think the key here is to learn how we going to combine your hard power, dealing with the government, and her soft power dealing with civil society and do them without one canceling out the other? and i would argue that yeah it was not easy but i don't think the obama administration did that badly on it. >> when you give a second or

third look for another intern around the table. >> i was wondering if you could talk a little more about how the u.s. should possibly -- given that the middle east is largely made up of people of a certain age group that often may be anti-american and how you think we should balance this? >> well it is hard and their policy positions we take which are unpopular. our support in israel is not popular in much of the arab world and those are difficult things to overcome. but if you realize the american soft power doesn't just grow out of government policy, it grows largely out of our civil society, and that is important because sometimes when we have a policy that the government is following which makes us very unpopular, we can also have a soft power narrative that helps save us if you want.

go back to vietnam and think back about the vietnam war. america was enormously unpopular around the world. before marching through the streets all over. the anti-american protests. but what were they singing? they weren't singing the communist international. they were singing art and with the kings's we shall overcome. that is the level of our societal soft power. similarly, after the iraq war, very unpopular in policy terms but in terms of you look at the polls, even in the arab world not to mention the muslim world more broadly, on issues like culture and technology and science and technology and so forth the american still had a certain amount of appeal to soft power. so we are going to have to realize that a large part of our ability to project their narrative is not just government. it is society and we have to be

be -- chris is a real expert on this and we should have her answer it but we should be supporting the governments role in developing soft power is partly public diplomacy, the doa in the various radio stations and so forth. but the most important you can do is increase the contact between americans and another part of society. the wonderful statement of walter cronkite who is a famous broadcaster, and which he said the most important part of human communication is not the 6000 kilometers of distance that you cover. it is the last 3 feet, the face-to-face communication and the reason is because there is credibility. when you are talking face-to-face in an interaction with another human being, you judge that person. you have a sense of where it is credible enough. when you listen to it rodkin is coming from the government you think government has its own reason to tell what is said on the broadcast. you often lose credibility.

policy matters. i'm not saying policy doesn't matter but the point is if we think a projection of soft power is simply what the government does or public diplomacy, more broadcasts or so forth and it is a simple government narrative we are missing in major.. the fact that there are 50,000 foreign students in the united d states, the fact that the bill and melinda gates foundation is working on eradicating malaria in africa, these are the things that are true. hollywood in its own way. i mean these are things that are generating a lot of american soft power and the more the government stays out of the way of that, the more it is able to support it but they cut off so it is not government controlled, that is i think the right way to generate american narrative. >> hi dr. nye.

was just wondering what keeps you up at night his first threats to the u.s.. you seem very optimistic and i'm just curious what makes you worry? >> >> there are things that make me worried. and in fact i deal with it in the book. when i is to chair the national intelligence council, i would say to the various analysts after they have done their alignment of the scenarios and assign probabilities to them, now take me -- tell me what can make all this wrong which make shoe sensitive to the assumption she met put in and for which i write the six chapter in the book in which i say i think on balance the americans are going to still be the most powerful country in the next couple of decades in the century. i asked myself that question, what could make it all wrong? there are a variety of things. we fail to do with the deficit and we failed to handle our secondary education problems. but the one that adds to your

question of what would make me the most worried is a nuclear terrorist attack on american cities. perhaps not one but a series in which we decide the right response is to close down, to curtail our civil liberties, our freedoms, turkey tail axis to the outside, to hunker down. that would have been neatly undercut that power that we get that i quoted from lee kwan yew. it would be away for us to shoot ourselves in the foot. and i think there is a last higher probability that we can react that way. in other words the series of large-scale, much larger than 9/11 terrorist attacks that played into a pole in, hunker down isolation, curtail civil liberties which is another way of undercutting our soft power, that world i think we could do

ourselves considerable damage, and so that is the one probably more than others keeps me up at night. >> you talked about being able to use power in concert with others and i am wondering what you think about a multilateral institution like nato, where yes it is multilateral but kind of built in the cold war era for a higher power purposes. do you think there is a role for an institution like that? do you think it should change with the future of that going forward? kind of hard and soft power? >> do you mac has an extraordinary capacity to work with allies. i mean there is no conventional wisdom of the 19th century that alliances are temporary. your ally today is your enemy tomorrow and these are merrick inconveniences.

look at nato. here is something that starts in 1949 and is still going today. i was at the munich security conference as were others and it was interesting to see that these countries still have a lot in common. they work closely together. indeed when i was responsible for nato affairs in the pentagot struck me was how excruciatingly warring nato meetings were, but that was all to the good. there were a lot of committees, a lot of high-level people coordinating and seeing each other not only agreeing on certain policy things which is developing networks so when he wanted to pick up the phone and say we have a fuss over something there was somebody on the other into new you in a face-to-face way that you to could get this thing solve. and so i think nato still has a role. it is not the same role that it had in the heart of the cold war but it still is an extraordinarily important part of reassurance and the reason that our military power remains

important is a variety of reasons but one of them is reassurance. look at the situation with china. china doesn't reassure its allies. it scares them so those allies want the americans. the america reassures its allies. in fact the soft power part of our alliances that really makes them so effective. i think ann marie stoddard, she is the outgoing director of policy planning who is now gone back to the woodrow wilson school, said the real secret of americans success is their ability to create and maintain networks. some of those are full of alliances and some of them are not but if the world is going to need more network power to supplement hierarchical power in this more complex situation that i have described, the americans are probably better at trading that network power than anybody else. nato is just one good example. so i remain a believer that it

is important. is not going to play the same role that played in the height of the cold war but it is still very important in this reassurance of networking roles. >> joa had a policy question and then a process question. the policy question you have spoken very well if the integration of smart power, soft power and hard power. i would ask you if i could what do you think american power should be directed to achieve and what i think may be more useful to the young people in the room, you have had a great career of fixing academic studies in practice. what are the lessons that have carried over well from the academic community to service in the government and what you wish you had known when you got to the government that the academy didn't teach you.

>> the first question is easier but on the question of what ends to american power, you think if you look at the united states role as the largest country, if we now produce public goods that help ourselves and help others nobody else will. there is a theory of collective action that goes back which says it is easy to free ride. on the biggest is the free ride because when the biggest free ride they notice the difference if you are a small actor and you are not going to notice much difference whether you free rider don't rewrite you might as well have every right. americans are free riders in the 20s and 30s. china is a free rider to some extent today and can't afford to be much longer but the americans do, and makes a huge difference whether we take a lead on something or don't. whether it be military stability, whether it be financial stability, whether it be climate change.

whatever it is, these are things that can be good for us and good for others and if we don't do it, it is not clear who else has the scale that we have to do it. so i think that ought to be a guiding principle for american foreign-policy. it is not that we are acting out of her national interest. is that we are defining our national interests in a broad-gauged way rather than a narrow way. and in the seventh chapter of the book i tried to go into that in some detail. on the question of academics and the government as a career, they are very different. in this sense, you know, when i came into the government in the carter administration for first-time my total managerial experience was i'd managed one person, my secretary and some people think i got the sign wrong on that relationship. and, so i got suddenly into an area where i was responsible for

non-nonporous ration gration policy and i had to not only nan nan -- manage a staff but i had to coordinate bureaus with hundreds of people in them. and it was on-the-job learning just like being thrown into the summing pool. if you didn't learn quickly you are going to drown. very quickly i learned if you try to do it yourself, which is your academic tendency, sit down in a closet and write the answer, you are going to drown. i have got to find ways to get these other people to support me. and perhaps that is where i discovered soft power. i found that attracting others to want to support it was crucial. and so i found ways for example and i would go to the secretary of state staff meeting in the morning. i could've taken that information which came from a small group of eight or 10 people and hoarded it. instead what i did was tell these other bureaus, guess what?

you come to my office and i will share this information with you. and i will also parcel of the work. so others wanted to come to my meetings because it was helpful to them and useful to them. so essentially i learned the idea of on-the-job delegation and soft power by essentially swimming in a pool. i didn't know how to swim, but at least it was the fear of drowning that perhaps help. but the other thing that is worth noticing about academic government work is the difference that time makes. in academia, the premium is to get the right answer. so you want to get an extension on your paper so that you can fine-tune it and get a few more footnotes and get an a. or you want to get this book written but it is not quite right and it might take me a couple of more years. here in government, and your

task to write a paper for the president to brief him for his meeting with the foreign minister of a visiting country, the president should meet with the foreign minister at 4:00 and you are working like crazy on his paper because it is not quite right, you finally get it quite right and he gets to the white house at 5:00. it is an f. not an a. it is an f. you have been far better to get the b+ in time been then the perfect product late. and that difference in terms of time and the role that time plays in the academic world and the government world is really quite difficult for many academics to get used to. there are just different prices that you put on times and so there are a lot of little things like that that you know is in the difference of the cultures.

but i founded my experience that it was quite exhilarating to go back and forth between two very different cultures. it meant that you are were pushed into a situation where, as they said one metaphor, you are there swim or drown or another way of putting it is it is a steep learning curve. one of the things that is most interesting is being pushed into the steep learning curves. e. in writing on this chapter on cyberin the book i'm still no expert but i had to make myself smart enough that i could write intelligently about cyberpower. that was a steep learning curve and anytime you have an opportunity to take one job which is comfortable and another job which has a steep learning curve, take the steep learning curve. it makes life a lot more interesting. >> in your book you reference the relationship between balance

of power and interdependence, i.e. u.s. saudi relations pertaining to oil insecurity. i was wondering what your case with the on the balance of power and interdependence pertaining to science and technology evolving at the rate of which it is now? >> well, it is an interesting question. technological change is so dramatic. it can exaggerate asymmetries and smooth them out. what i argue in chapter 3 of the book about economic interdependence is it is not interdependence in power. it is asymmetry and interdependence that gives power. so if i depend on you and you depend on me equally, there is not a lot of power that relationship but if i depend on you and you don't depend on me there is asymmetry.

that gives you a lot of power. as we try to understand how science and technology affects interdependence and similarly fx power science and technology can increase interdependence. the interesting question is does it increase the symmetry or the asymmetry in interdependence? in some areas of me and in some areas it may not. is hard to generalize that to go back to bob kaplan's question earlier, one has to ask for example if you are looking at the technological changes in cyber, how is it affecting those asymmetries? you can also the balance in asymmetries. in other words i may depend more on you in one area and you depend more on me in another area that gives you a balance of asymmetries of the case, the example you used of u.s. and saudi, we depended on saudi oil. saudi dependent on american military protection. so the balance of asymmetry mad

at a time when there was official oil embargo against the united states, in fact we weren't cut off. and in fact american naval ships were supplied with oil quietly at the time. so balance of asymmetry is also again making a difference. so you want to look carefully at each technology and ask how does it affect not interdependence but asymmetries and are there countered tactic valances of asymmetries? >> spoke at length about the cyclical nature of american decline and how currently it is paired with the fear of a rival china. i think part of that implication or one of the implications of that is that china has not walked log into our soft power and remains of their taurean and does not share the democratic values that we hold. and is there much debate about how china embraced economic civilization while refusing political individuation and i

just wondered what your thoughts on baby the united states change it gets soft power strategy towards china so it might buy into that in the future? >> well, the question of whether china's political system is going to work for the long term or not an open question. jokingly, we sometimes call it market leninism. you know, there is a willingness to use markets but you want to lessen the communist party to control. that is the elite group. one of the big questions that china is going to have to face is can you continue that? i mean what are the problems of doing that as you get to higher levels of her cap at income? if you look at experiences in places like south korea or taiwan or elsewhere, after you get a certain level of per capita income, there is more of a demand for participation and if there is more of a demand for

participation you have a problem of how do you adjust to that? how do you rule a middle-class society? china hasn't coped with that yet but, as they think about this, i don't expect them to become like american democracy, but i think there is an interest in ideas that are coming out not just in america but europe and elsewhere as they try to think their way through this. so i don't think that it is our job to do you know, to make the chinese like us. in are there sense of the word, to make them look like us or act like us. i think they are going to evolve in a certain direction on their own. before an american ambassador to china pointed out 20 years ago i think that there are more chinese free now than at any time in chinese history, that if china has floral eyes, not

democratize, pluralize coming no longer have to wear a mao jacket. you cannot travel abroad. there are lots of things you can do. you can even go on the internet even though there is a great firewall. there ways to jump over the firewall. the chinese have more freedom than they had before. this is likely to continue. i don't think it is going to be a sudden change but i think it is going to be a continuous change. that means a lot of american ideas get through. a lot of other ideas get through and the chinese will we combined in their own way. so, you know nobody knows what the future of china will be, including hu jintao and c. jinping, but i think it is not going to look in 20 years the way it looks now. >> we have time for two more questions. >> the u.s. hasn't yet worked out an effective integrated hard and soft power.

how realistic do you think it is that the u.s. will be able to create an effective smart power synergy? >> while it is interesting. if you look at, if you look at the statement that donald rumsfeld made, it is quoted in the preface in my book on soft power. he followed me at a keynote speaker at an army conference after he up in the morning speaker and one of the general said what about soft power? he said i don't know what it means. robert gates, secretary of defense come even when it is serving in the bush of administration in 2007, gave a speech saying we need to invest more in our soft power and it may be odd for a secretary of defense to plead for more resources from the state department but that is what i'm saying. so there is a big change just in the process of what

administration as you have seen a change in personnel and then what gates and hillary clinton worked together in this administration. there has been a surprising comitie of a willingness to have stayed in defense of work together. it takes a long time that she changed the course of the supertanker. government bureaucracies don't change quickly and particularly when you have 435 hands on the wheel which is congress, given the case i gave you a minute or two ago about in a program that was transferred. so are we making progress toward a smart power approach to strategy? yes. are we there yet? no. a long way to go. part of it is bureaucratic inertia but part of it is the political culture, that same reason that a congressman says i can stand up and justify this aid program if it is in defense.

i can't support it at the same level if it is in the state. we have got a get a lot smarter in our political discourse before we can really have a smart political strategy. >> what i take away is the very personalities -- what is the next that? how do we take it from the personality -- and put the right law or institution in place or the organization. i know there've been proposals in the past about our national security organization but what do we need to do in order to take it out of the realm so you always have somebody that has the same kind of accommodation? >> well, you are right. you can't predict what the top leaders personalities going to be. and that can make a big difference. on the other hand, you can try

to get an idea to approach more broadly understood in the opinion of the public and then in the broader public. in 2007, richard armitage and i chaired a commission at the csis on smart power which was bipartisan. and the idea was to have a group of significant republicans and significant demo talk about exactly that, how do you get beyond the idiosyncrasies of personality to be something which is more broadly understood in the policy discourse? jim lochner has had this project to think about how you read -- reorganized the government. cnas makes a contribution here. many places are beginning to think about this, so it is not going to happen quickly, but if it just relies on personality, you are right, then it can be

changed as the personality changes but if you get a broader consensus or understanding of the points i'm trying to make in this book about the need for a smart power strategy and if you in fact get into the minds of congress and the press and gradually politicians start telling that more broadly to the electorate than maybe it may be less personality dependent. but you know in a democracy, it basically depends on consensus from the low. it is not a fast process. >> joe, thank you very much for great conversation. thanks too for your continued friendship with cnas. most particularly our interns were not only an important part of the team here but important part of the ethos to the place and we know you are off to new york to -- so we will get to hear more. thanks to all of you for coming in thanks for our interns for

coming back and joe has a few minutes i think to chat and sign books before running for his plane. please join me in thanking him for this afternoon. [applause] >> remarks from joseph nye at the university distinguished service professor and former dean of the kennedy school of government at harvard university discussing the changing nature of power and global affairs. to find out more visit book tv.org. >> we are at the conservative political action conference talking with author mark joseph about his next upcoming book. please tell us what it is in title? >> wildcard the promise of sarah palin. >> and tell us a bit about the book and how you came up with the idea? >> i wrote it during the 08 campaign and continue to read it since then. my publisher did not think it would get out in time for the campaign s