jersey. very different things are happening today. for many reasons, but be you took all the teach for america alums out of the picture, i think you'd take away a lot of the energy and leadership in those pictures. >> does the teach for america movement have an ideological personality? >> um, i think that people come out of this -- and, you know, we probably have a bunch of, you know, we have a diverse community, and people come into it viewing the issue we're taking on in different ways and from different sides of the political spectrum. i think people come out of it sharing, largely sharing a few views.

>> joseph nye, a former dean at the kennedy school of government at harvard university talks about the changing nature of power in global affairs. this hour-long program was

hosted by the center for a new american security here in washington. >> let me tell you a couple of things about what i wrote this book and what i think it says to start the conversation. the book summarizes work i've been trying to do for 20 years or so about how do you understand our and america's position in the world. it goes back to -- a period when americans believe they were in decline, and in trying to answer why i didn't think americans were in decline, this is when i coined the term soft power. i looked at american military power and economic power. that's not all there is. there's also the ability to get others to do what you want as you attract and persuade him. that as i said is, as the term took off, but as we entered the

21st century there was a bit of reversion to more emphasis on hard power thinking we could do more with coercion then we could. there was also a new dimension of what was going on in power that was stimulated by the globalization and information revolution. so in trying to think about the work that i've done in the past, i looked back 20 years and 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 shifts. one is the shift, if you want, from west to east, sometimes it's called the rise of asia. it should be more of the return of issue. i call that power transition the normal shift of power among states. it's also called the rise of the

rest. we know a fair amount about the. the other is our diffusion, which is the shift of power from state, where the east or west, to nonstate actors. that's a lot harder for us to wrap our minds around the chapter in the book that those which this is the chapter on cyber power. the idea you can suddenly cross borders with electrons into damage and nobody knows what you're a state or a nonstate actor. that's really quite new and we haven't thought through what that means. let me talk for each of those rather quickly, and then we'll have time to discuss what i mean in practice. our diffusion -- power to fusion is a product of this in computing and communications. if you look at what happened to

computing power in the last quarter of the 20 century, declined 1000 full. 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, the price of something, the barriers of 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 -- you could do it. today anybody has that capacity. there are more examples of what can give to illustrate this, but the important point is not the governments are finished or they are not the most important actors, on the contrary they are. but this stage is much more credit. there are many more participants

on that stage again before. and information has essentially become so much more widespread that there are many more people able to play. egypt is a great example of this. if you look at the way you would have a choice between an autocrat and a muslim extremist is a spectrum of participants in politics in the middle east, it turns out there was the middle. information had filled in the middle. what's more, it is given and tools, twitter and facebook and so forth to courtney. this is new. as i said, when you talk about cyber, our inability has yet to develop a full strategy which we understand this, so power power diffusion is one the biggest change in the 21st century and will begin to rap or rock minds around. what it means is that of a much more subtle and sophisticated understanding of power and the strategies that involves.

classically, the mark of great power is the great british historian when it is the ability to prevail at war. the ability to prevail in court is still important, but it's not just whose army wins, it's also whose story wins. and that's ability to mix those two, 200 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 will get your strategy wrong. you have to think how you can combine those two into smart power strategies. so in that sense i think will need a much more sophisticated understanding of power and resources to create it in the 21st century than we have seen thus far. that's power diffusion which i think we should come back to in

a conversation. let me say couple words about power transition, the transition from states to other states. people talk about this as the rise of asia. it's really a turn of asia. in 1800 if he took a snapshot of the world from asia was more than half the worlds population and more than half the world's product. by 1900 it is still have the worlds population, only 20% of the world's product. what we are seeing now is what you might call return to normality. at some point in this entry, asia will be half the worlds population and have the world's product. it starts with japan in the late 20th century, goes on to korea, so-called asian tigers. and now it is gone to china, but the future will move to india. this is a process which is important and it is a tactic power, but it sometimes is summarized as the rise of china and the decline of the u.s.

i think that's the wrong way to understand what's 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's a whole chapter in the book which gives you facts and figures. decline is a very misleading metaphor. it assumes 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 the peak of its power. when it finally collapsed, and it collapse before another state, but under into decay. so we have no idea the trajectory of american power is. i think that's quite a long way to go still. the other problem with the term

decline confuses two things. relative power and absolute internal decay. in relative power other countries will come closer to the united states. this is the rise of the rest. i don't see absolute decay in the west. people to how do not see this? is going around us. take a look at history. americans go through cycles of believing we are in decline. sputnik and 50s without we are finished. the russians were 10 feet tall. after nixon close the window to the arab oil embargo, we thought that was the end. in the 1980s when ronald reagan had huge budget deficits, there was a widespread belief in decline. that's what i wrote about. my friend at yale wrote a book called the rise and fall of the great powers and said we're

going to go way the philip the second this thing. he got all the royalties. he said people believed in decline. now we're going through another bout of decline, which is set off by the 2008 recession. i suspect as the economy recovers will outgrow this one as well. but the point is i don't see this proof of absolute decay. problems in the country, yes. lots of problems. a couple in potato that body, the deficit and secondary education. but if you look at the american economy, world economic forum ranks as as number four, and the first three are small states, and china is around number 27. work 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 what as the rest of the advanced world is in the decline. and even china will have a demographic problem in another decade or so. i think all these things are reasons why the american society is not an absolute decline. i particularly like the comment that lee kuan yew once told me, were having lunch about this last year, and he said the chinese have the damage they can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people. the u.s. control on a couple of 7 million people. what's more, we can take those 7 billion recombined it in a way that the chinese can't because they are limited by ethnic and chinese national spirit so as long as you keep open that way, he said he places 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 it will continue likely to do well. goldman sachs has projected china will pass the americans in overall economic size by 2027. might even be earlier than that. it stands to reason one country has a population of 1.3 billion is growing at 10% a year, sooner or later the smaller population of 300 some million will be in equal size economy. but big mistake to go from the quality and size of gdp to economic equality. essentially they will be equal in size but not in composition. and if you look at gdp per capita as a better measure of the composition of economy, then u.s. is going to stay way ahead. china probably will be less in gdp per capita, somewhere around

2040, well into this century. the other thing is that these projections about china being equal to the u.s. in the 2020s are one dimensional. they look at economic power. they ignored military power. it's hard to see china declaring the u.s. in military power for another 20 years or so. they also ignored soft power. while china has major investments in soft power, in hu jintao they basically tell the 17th power congress they should invest in soft power, he mentioned they were not able to reject 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 beijing olympics, or you take the shanghai expo, greg confucius institutes, but then you go and to lock up folks,

talk about -- toss out the nobel prize assembly, you cut yourself in the foot. so until china changes, i don't see it being able to come close to the americans soft power either. you might say why worry about all this, why fuss? is this just another way, we are number one, pretending we are the green bay packers or something? the answer to that is no. power is not good or bad per se. power is as i say in the book is like calories and i. too little and you die. too much of it you get obese. and basically we have to think about power in terms of what are smart strategies compatible user power effectively? one of the reasons it matters is you misjudge the relationships of power in the world that you can make big power mistakes. there's the famous quote that

the war was called -- caused by the power of athens. people transpose to world war i, world war i was great by the rise of power of germany. and in many others are transporting it. to the future and saying the 21st century will be the rise of the power of china and the fear increase in the u.s. bad history. about history because if you look at britain and germany, germany had passed britain by 1900 terms of its economic power. if you believe what i said earlier, supported by facts that are in chapter six of the book, china is not going to pass the u.s. for another couple of decades, if then, which means we've done. 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 which says we press them harbor. the americans thinking we are in decline suffer from fear which means we overreact. we overreact the wrong way. so getting this wrong will be, or getting it right i should say will be one of the questions of the first decades of the 21st century. like power transition. i happen to think we can still get right though it will take careful management and a pretty good estimation of realities of power. let me conclude this and summarize it by saying as i think about power, i've used a metaphor, three-dimensional chess pool. on the top board you have military power. they are the united states is the only power, the only country that a check power globally. and i think it will stay that way for another couple of decades. if you look at the middle board

of economic relations among states, the world is multi-port. it has been for a couple of decades. this is the airport europe can act as a union. and what does act does act as a union, it is bigger than the united states. you have china, japan and others who can help to balance american power. so beautiful there he only top board, unipolar to i second more, go to the bottom board of transnational relations. things that cross borders outside the control of government, whether it be agents like terrorists caught in al qaeda or transnational crime syndicates, i wouldn't be the impersonal forces like transgenics or global change, power is chaotic. it makes no sense to use all your categories of unipolarity or multipolarity to understand this. the only way you can deal with these issues that actually great

a new and more important challenge is from this bottom chessboard of the three-dimensional game, is by getting cooperation among government. that's going to require much more use of soft power as well as mixed with hard power. in the area of what we see is a need for a new and far more sophisticated strategies, which you realize we need to think of power sometimes as the zero-sum game, and sometimes as a positive-sum game. we need to think of power over others, for example, in reserving deterrence or naval balances. we also need to think of power with others. for example, dealing with climate change or pandemics or terrorist. we have to learn to do both of those at the same time. that's going to require much more sophisticated understanding of power, and how you combine hard in soft power into an effective smart strategies. to summarize, when hillary

clinton said in her inaugural hearings on the senate foreign relations committee that smart garment meaning all the tools in our toolbox. we're going to have to get much better using all the tools our toolbox then we have been so far. and in the process of encouraging that, as i try to write in this book. so that's enough for me. i grudge -- i'd much rather hear from you. over to you. >> thanks very much, jill. appreciate it and i wondered if i might start with a question before throwing the floor open. 20 years after the end of the cold war, 20 years after 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 american purpose? given which are written here, could you outline force just a few of the tenants using should underline the narrative of america's role in the world?

>> it's a good point. because i don't think you'll find a nice easy fashio -- i thk looking for the bumper sticker may not be very helpful. if i had to choose a bumper sticker, i say he's a smart our strategy that combines hard in soft power, or 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. unique both. what that means in particular is thinking through how do you maintain your position as a strong military power, and not squander their resources. how do you mean thinking economic strength at home and how to 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 work a lot on, and pioneers on, that's a good example which you combine heart in soft power. the polling is interesting because instead of saying i will maximize my hard power by how many i can kill, you say no, i want to maximize how me civilian minds i can win. and that is not measured by how many the enemy soldiers ideal. -- soldiers ideal. use both the resources of the state department and defense department and combined them into effective ways. in our political culture, we have this bizarre thing that we can't think clearly about this. we have a government of one giant and a lot of pygmies. it was in the an account 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's ridiculous. until we learn how to think more clearly about what smart power is, the need to combine hard and soft, we're not going to be very good at effective strategies. right now a congressperson from congresswoman i should say, who is a good friend of mine said you're absolutely right about needing to use more soft power. i just can't get up on a political platform and say that. there's something wrong about our ability to mount a smart power strategy women can't talk about, half or thirds of the components of what goes into using all the tools in the toolbox. that's what i tried to get at when i use smart power as by bumper sticker. it doesn't solve all problems but lisa tries to get people to

think in more sophisticated way about what is involved in combining the elements of power. >> on that note i was just wondering -- [inaudible] it seems like the american people don't always, they want to know who the enemy is, they think that will be a problem selling it to the american people. any idea on how to do that? >> it is a problem. it is a problem because it is much easier to clear white hats in clear black cats. when somebody is a white cat one minute and a black cat and another and sometimes is great, and yet the more difficult way to think your way through it. take a china. they are some areas where we and

china are rivals. if china tries to push us out from the coast, that's pretty much zero-sum. i think we will see much closer than that, but something we debate, but that could be zero-sum. if on the other hand we want to deal something, do something about climate change, the better china gets a climate change the better off we are. they are better off, we are better off. so in some situations where it is you some come and other its positive sum. there will be some that are mixed, some elements in both. it's hard to get the public to think in those terms. it's much easier, back in the cold war, there's iron curtain, a clear line, good guys on this site, bad guys on this site. in the world in which are the rise of the rest in a diffusion of power from state and nonstate actors will become a much more

complex world which will require much more subtle strategies. that's hard in our political culture, or politicians to explain that it's much easier to do the simple white hat, black hats. >> joe, you said 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 threats use high-tech subtle versions of asymmetry to come as you just said, try to lock us out of the first island chain are there? my would be in danger of having the world's greatest navy and air force, but many less in

terms of what we can actually do with that? >> i think that's a great question, and that's why i have a whole chapter in a book on cyber power. because if you think of the naval domain, americans appear to in the oceans i think -- you can say we have naval superiority and it's likely to stay. the question then gets to asymmetries. the interesting question, the chinese military talk about asymmetries. if i had, if i had minus one carrier and americans had 11, i would talk about asymmetries also. the question is can they really do it. i think if you look carefully to the cyber domain the americans are still way ahead on cyber offense. but at the same time we are more

vulnerable because we depend more on cyber. the question we have to figure is how do we improve the resilience and robustness of our systems. just taking this issue, pushing americans passed the first island chain, people made a lot of fuss about the of 21 ballistic missile which can hit a carrier. guess what? we can use cyber and in the other direction on that as well as they are thinking biggies ballistic missile. so cyber cuts in multiple directions. there's also the point people say there's no deterrent in cyber. yes, there is a deterrent. a different type of deterrent. it's not the deterrence which you bombed the city after the bomb your city. the deterrence through entanglement. why is it that china has 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

chinese use cyber to essentially bring the americans to their knees? because they could bring them to their ankles. and i think is -- we have to begin to think through what these asymmetries mean. there'll be some military domain or we will remain ahead. there'll be other military domains where i don't think you can count on superiority. i think you can't count on a priori in cyber but which we can develop smart strategy to make sure they cannot remove our capabilities in the naval domain. and that is where we should be trying to hold strategies. >> you said you consider yourself a liberal -- niall ferguson, professor at harvard, just published an article stating the obama administration is responsible for egypt, it was

a disaster as oliver willis how would you create the administration to respond by looking forward to how they should respond to iran and the other countries domain? how would you look at that? >> i think obama's response in egypt is not a disaster. this is a good example of what i mean by this strategy. if you think about should i abandon the government, should i forget the government, no, sorry. governments are still the most important actors that isolate major objectives of the hard power world like balancing iranian strategy, like maintain the peace between israel and egypt. to just say oh, the sooner we over the ballpark the better, as though you wind up with chaos after that. that's not a foreign policy. a human rights policy is part of a foreign policy. it's not a foreign policy. it's a human rights policy. if you think of stability only working with the government and

you ignore civil society, particularly in this civil society's empowered by the diffusion of information, that's an inadequate foreign policy also. the trick for obama or for any government now is how do you deal with governments and also do with the people in tahrir square. of military aid for example, gives you some influence over the government. that's a form of hard power. your narrative did you influence over the people in tahrir square. i think the obama administration was trying to walk this tightrope. and obviously it wobbled several times. but i think it got down that tightrope relatively well. so i think meal is wrong. news loves to simplify things. i don't think he got this one quite right either. but i think it's a good illustration that he's a friend of mine. i would tell him this if he was sitting where you're. we've had lots of fun with it. i think the key here is to learn

how are you going to combine your hard power dealing with a government, and a 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. >> you give a second and third look for another turn around the table here. jeffrey? >> i was wanting if you could tell more about how u.s. could possibly change -- [inaudible] 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 could balance that, a very thin line? >> it is hard and their policy positions we take which are

unpopular enemies are support initial. is not popular in much of the arab world. those difficult things to overcome. but if you realize american soft power just doesn't grow out of american policy, gross largely out of our civil society, that's important because sometimes when we had a policy the government is following which makes is very unpopular, we can also have a soft power narrative that helps save us if you want. go back to vietnam. i think back to the vietnam war. america was enormously unpopular around the world. people were marching in the streets all over to in the american protest. but what were they singing? they weren't singing the communist songs. they were singing martin luther king's we shall overcome. that's the level of our societal soft power. similarly, after the iraq war very unpopular policy terms, but in terms of you look at the

polls, even in the arab world, not to mention the muslim world more broadly, issues like culture and technology, science and technology, the american still had a fair amount of appeal. so we're going to have to realize a large part of our ability to project is not just government. it's society. chris is an expert on this. we should never answer this. but we should be supporting the governments role in developing soft power. part of public diplomacy in the doa. but the most important thing you can do is increase the contact between americans and other parts of society. there's a wonderful statement of walter cronkite's who was a famous broadcaster, which he said the most important part of human communication is not the 6000 kilometers distance that you covered, it's the last

three feet, the face-to-face communication. the reason is because there's credibility. when you're talking face-to-face in interaction with another human being, you judge that person, you assess them. have a sense that it is credible or not. when you're listening from a broadcaster coming from a government, you often lose credibility. so policy matters. i missing policy doesn't matter but the point is if we think a projection of soft power a summit with the government does or public diplomacy or broadcast or so forth, and a simple government narrative, we are missing a major point. the fact that there are 750,000 foreign institutes in the united states, the fact that the bill and melinda gates foundation is working on eradicating malaria in africa, these are the things that are true, or hollywood in

its own way. these are things that are generating a lot of american soft power. the more the government stays out of the way of that, the more it is able to support it with a cut off so it is not government controlled. that's i think the right way to generate american narrative. >> i'm just wondering what keeps you up at the entrance of threats to the u.s. you seem very optimistic and i'm just curious what makes you worry. >> there are things that make me worry. and, in fact, i deal with in the book. when i used to chair the national intelligence council, i would say to the various analysts after they have done their own alignment of scenarios and assign probabilities to them, now done what you think this will all, which makes you sensitive subject putting.

so as i write the sixth chapter of the book, which i say i think on balance of the americans that can still be most powerful country in the next couple of decades, i ask myself the question, what can make it all wrong. a variety of things. we fail to handle our secondary education problems. the one thing that answers your question of what would make me 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, to curtail access to the outside, you know, hunker down. that would immediately undercut that power that we get data quoted from leak one blue. it would be a way for us to shoot ourselves in our foot. and i think there's a high a

series of a large took a much larger than 9/11 terrorist attacks that played into a polling, hunker down, isolation curtail similar which is another way of cutting a soft power. that while i think we do ourselves considerable damage. but that's the one that probably more than others seems to be on my mind. >> you talked about being able to use power in concert with others, and i'm wondering what you think about a multilateral institutions like nato would it is multilateral but kind of built in the cold war era for hard power purposes. do you think there is a role for

an institution like that? do you think you should change with the future of that going forward, kind of blend the power? >> the united states has an extraordinary capacity to work with allies. i mean, there's no conventional wisdom of the 19th century that alliances are temporary. your ally today is your enemy tomorrow, and these are mere contingencies. look at nato. is something that starts in 1949 and is to going today. i was a security conference as are others, who it was interesting to see these countries to have a lot in common. they work closely together. when i was responsible for native affairs in the pentagon, one of the things that struck me was how excruciatingly boring nato meetings were, but that was all to the good. there were a lot of kidneys, a lot of mid-level people who work getting to see each other not only agreeing on policy things

but developing networks. so when you want to pick up the phone and say we've got a fuss over something that was someone on the other in the new you and the face-to-face way that you can get this thing solved. so i think nato still has a role. it's not the same role that it had in the heart of the cold war but it still is an extraordinary important part of reassurance. and the reason that our military power remains important, a variety of reasons, but one reason is reassurance. look at the situation with china. china doesn't reassure its allies. it scares them so those allies want the americans. america reassures its allies. it's the soft power part of our alliances that makes it so effective. and i think as anne-marie anne-e slaughter politico she's the outgoing director of policy and planning that state is not come back to the woodrow wilson school, said the real secret of america's success is our ability to create and maintain networks.

some of those are formal alliances, some are not. but if the world is going to take more network power to supplement hierarchical power, this more complex situation, the americans are probably better at creating that network power than anybody else. nato issues one good example. so i remain a believer in nato's importance. it's not going to play the same role it played in the cold war but it's still very important in this reassurance. >> joe, i have a policy then a process question. the policy question you spoken very well of the integration of smart power, soft power hard power. perhaps talk unless about two what is this i would ask you, what do you think, what ends you think american power should be directed to achieve, and what i

think may be more useful for getting people in the room, you've had a great career of mixing, what are the lessons that carried over from the academic community through service in the government, and what do you wish you had known when you got the government, to the academy? >> the first question is easy to answer than the second. but on the question of to what ends of the american power, if you look at the united states role in the world, as the largest country if we don't do some public goods that help ourselves but help others, nobody else will. there's a theory of collective action that goes back that says it's easy to freeride. only the biggest dozen freeride because when the biggest freeride, they notice a difference. but if you're a small actor and

you're not going to miss much difference when you freeride or don't rewrite. you might as well free ride. americans were free riders in the '20s and '30s. china is a free rider to some extent today. it can't afford to be much longer but the americans do come in makes a huge difference when we take a lead on something or we don't. whether it be military stability, whether it be financial stability, whether the climate change. whatever it is, these things could be good for us and good for others. if we don't do it it's not clear who else has the scale we have to do it. so i think about to be a guiding principle for american foreign policy. it's not that we are acting out of our national interest. we are defining our national interest in a broad gauge weight rather than narrow way. in the seventh chapter of the book i tried to go into that in some detail. on the question of academics and government as a career, they are very different. in the sense, you know, when i

came into government in the carter administration the first time, my total manager experience, i managed one person, my secretary. and some people think i got the sign wrong on that relationship. so i guess i do into an area where i was responsible for nonproliferation policy, and i had to not only manage a staff, i had to coordinate bureaus with hundreds of people in it. and it was on the job learning, like being thrown into the swimming pool, if he did learn quickly, you're going to drown. and very quickly i learned if you try to do it yourself, which is your academic tennessee, set down in a closet and write the answer, you're going to drown. i say i've got to find other ways to get these people to support the. perhaps that's where i discovered the soft power.

i found that getting others, attracting others to want to support you was crucial. and so i found ways, for example, i would go to the secretary of state stepping in the morning and i could've taken that information which came from a small group, eight or 10 people and ported it. instead what i did was tell these other bureaus guess what, you come to my office and i will share this information. and i will also parcel out the workers others wanted to come to my meetings because it was helpful to them, useful to them. so essentially i learned this idea on the job delegation, and soft power by essentially swimming in a pool when i didn't know how to swim. but at least it was the fear of cutting that perhaps help. the other thing that is worth noting about academic and government work is the

difference this time makes in academia the premium is to get the right answer. do you want to get an extension under papers so you can fine-tune and get a few more footnotes, get in a. or if you want to get this book written but it's not quite right, it might take me a couple more years to come you take a couple more years here if your income 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 presence meet with foreign minister at 4:00 and you are working like crazy on this paper because it's not quite right, you finally get it quite right at the white house at 5:00 you get an f. it's not a minus, you get an f. you want to get a d+ product in

time rather than a perfect product way. and the difference in terms of time to roll the time plays in academic world is quite difficult for many academics to get used to. there are just different prices you put on time. so there's a lot of little things like that that you notice any difference in cultures. but i find it -- battle in my experience, it was quite exhilarating to go back and forth between two very different cultures. it meant that you were pushing a situation where, as i said in one metaphor, qb to swim or drown, or another way of putting it, it's a learning curve. even like the chapter on cyber in this book, i am still no expert but i still had to make myself smart enough so i could

write intelligently about cyber power. that was a steep learning curve. anytime for the interns come inside have an opportunity to take one shop which is comfortable and another job which has a steep learning curve, take a steep learning curve. it just makes life a lot more interesting. >> in your book you reference the relationship between balance of power and interdependence, i.e. u.s. that is relations pertaining to oil and security, i was one in which we take would be on the balance of power and interdependence pertaining to science and technology evolving at the rate at which it is now. >> well, it's an interesting question. technological change is so dramatic that it can exaggerate asymmetries, or it can mouse.

what i argued in chapter three of the book about economic interdependence is it is not interdependence against power. its asymmetry against power. so if i depend on you and you depend on me equally, there's not much power in that relationship. but if i depend on you and you don't depend on me, there's asymmetry that give you a lot of power. as we try to understand how science and technology affect interdependence, similarly affect power, science and technology can increase your dependence. the interesting question is does this increase asymmetry? in some areas it may and in some areas it may not. it's hard to generalize. but go back to the question earlier, one has to ask what you're looking at the technological changes in cyber, how is it affecting those

asymmetries. given also the bowels of asymmetries. i may depend more on you in one area, you depend more on me in another area. that gives a battle of asymmetries. the example you use, u.s.-saudi, we depend on saudi oil. saudi depend on america's ultimate military protection. the balance of the asymmetries met at a time when there was an official oil embargo against the united states, in fact we were not cut off. and, in fact, american naval ships were applied -- supplied with oil quietly at the time. so bouts of asymmetries can also make a difference. so you want to look carefully at each technology and ask how does it affect not in the dependence but asymmetries and other counter acting balances of asymmetries. >> you spoke at length about the

cyclical nature of american decline, how currently it is paired with fear of a rise in scheppach part of the implication, or one implication of that is china has not bought into our soft power. it does not share the democratic values that we hold. there's been much debate about how china has embraced economic civilization while refusing political civilization. i'm just wondering your thoughts on maybe the training changing its soft power strategy toward china by that any future? >> i think the question of whether china's political system is going to work for the long-term or not is an open question. jokingly, we sometimes call it market leninism. you know, there's a willingness to use markets but you want, use lenin to control the congress

party. one of the questions that china will have to face is can you continue that. what are the problems of doing that as you get to higher levels of per capita income. if you look at expenses in places like south korea or taiwan or elsewhere, after you get a certain level of per capita income in those more of the demand for participation. and there's more demand for participation, you have a problem of how do you adjust to that. how do you rule and middle-class society. and china hasn't coped with it. 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 of america but of europe and elsewhere as they try to think their way through this. so i don't think it is our job to make the chinese like us, in

either sense of the word. to make them look like us or act like us. i think they will evolve in certain directions on their own. a former american ambassador to china pointed out 20 years ago i think that there are more chinese free now than any time in chinese history. that as china has brutalized, not democratized, pro lites communal longer have to wear a mao jacket. you can. you cannot travel abroad. there are lots of things you can do. you could even go on the internet come into the great firewall, way to jump over the firewall. chinese have more freedom than he had before. this is likely to continue. i don't think it's going to be a sudden change, but i think it's going to be a continuous change. that means a lot of american ideas get through. a lot of other ideas get through. the chinese will recombine them in the only. nobody knows what the future of

china will become including the chinese. but i think it's not going to look in 2 20 years the way it looks now. >> we have time for two more questions. [inaudible] the u.s. hasn't 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, develop an effective smart our strategy? >> well, it's interesting. if you look at, if you look at the statement that donald rumsfeld made, if it is quoted in the premise in a book on soft power, he followed me as a keynote speaker at an army conference, and one of the general said what about soft power. and he said i don't know what it

means. robert gates, secretary of defense, even when he was serving in the bush administration in 2007 gave a speech saying we need to invest more in our soft power, and it may be odd for secretary of defense to plead for more reasons for resource for state department but that's what i'm saying. so there's a big change just in the process of one administration, as he seemed a change of personnel. and then with the gates and hillary clinton worked together in this administration, there's been a surprising comedy of a willingness to have state and defense work closely together. it takes a long time though to change the course of the supertanker. i mean, government bureaucracy don't change quickly. and particularly window 435 hands on the wheel, which is congress, given remember the case they give you a minute or

two ago about an aid program that was transferred. so, are we making progress toward a smart power approach to strategy? yes. are we there yet? no. long way to go. and 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 it is in the state. we've got to get a lot smarter in our political discourse before we can really have a smart political strategy. >> i want to follow up on a question you just answered because my take away is very personnel pressure what's the next that? have to take it the personality and put, right law or institution anyway, certain

organization but i know there's been proposal in the past about how to revamp our national security organization. what do we need to do in order to take it on the rome of personality quirks you don't have a rumsfeld what you always have somebody who has that kind of accommodation. >> you right. you can't always predict what the top leaders personality is going to be. and that can make a big difference. on the other hand, count you contrive to get an idea to approach more broadly understood on the attentive public and then in broader public. in 2007, richard armey and i co-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 democrats talk about exactly that, how do you get this be on the idiosyncrasies of personality to be something

which is more broadly understood in the policy discourse. gym locker has had this project to think about how you reorganize the american government. cnas makes a contribution here. many places are beginning to think about this. so it's not going to happen quickly, but it just relies on personality, you're right, that it can be changed as the personality changes. but if you get a broader consensus or understanding of the point i'm trying to make in this book about the need for smart our strategy, and if you get into some mines in congress, and the press, and graduate politicians start telling that more broadly to the electorate, then it may be less personality dependent. but any democracy that basically depends on consensus from below, it's not a fast process. >> joe, thank you very much for a great conversation.

thanks also for your continued friendship to cnas, most particularly towards interns were not on an important part of the team here, at an important part of the ethos in place. and we know you're off to new york to tape charlie rose so we will get to hear more. [inaudible] >> but thanks to all of you for coming. thanks to our interests are coming back. joe has a few minutes to chat and sign books before running for his plan. please join in thanking them for this afternoon. [applause] >> remarks from joseph nye, a university distinguished service professor and former dean at the kennedy school of government at harvard university. discussing the changing nature of power and global affairs. to find out more visit otd.org. spent what i would like to