trouble with that. in rural louisiana, people think differently from san francisco where close to i live, so it is hard enough to manage that within an american context but you start talking about the diversity of levels of development and culture and everything else that exists in the world it is not a reasonable prospect. this is something i wrote about in my last book people american crossroads. you can hope for a much denser system of partial organization that overlapped and some are regional and some are functional and they provide global governance but not through a single world government. ..

>> the right to sovereignty for a state which seems to be accelerating in the post-cold war order especially with russia justifying its intervention in georgia by sort of a normative example of the west intervening in kosovo? do you think we're moving into a post-westphalian system? >> well, i don't think we are ever that deeply into a westphalian system. >> i agree. >> in the 19th sent you you -- century you may have had that in europe, but you think of the 20th century, you have all these marxists running around, you have the united states, you know, trying to do the same thing except in an anti-communist direction. i don't, in the 20th century, i

don't think anyone's respected sovereignty terribly well. and i don't, as an ethical matter, i think that, yeah, there's an important argument that you can make that if you really believe in a westphalian system, it produces a certain moderation in international relations because it means that you're not going to try to get involved in the internal politics of your neighbors and destabilize them and this sort of thing. but unfortunately, i just don't think we live in that kind of world, you know? globalization means ideas, people, influences are just traveling across borders all the time, and this idea we can hermetically seal countries off and say we're not touching them i don't think is realistic. >> thank you. >> hi. i took your class back in 1999. um, hi. so i thought, i read the book, i think i wrote him an e-mail, but he didn't get back to me. [laughter] i read the book and i'm, you know, as is my want and perhaps

the essay you wrote about plutocracy added to this, but i read it as a grand reputation, a very, you know, historically-referenced reputation of libertarian ideology what with the continued emphasis on how institutional decay, civilizations kind of live and die on their ability to tax, interestingly, which you don't mention. i think that that was, like, putin's whole -- i think that was one of putin's big -- >> well, their ability to tax legitimately. >> legitimately, yes, as opposed to the current system that we have right now. so i was wondering about that and, also, generally since you no longer live in d.c., has that changed your opinions about things? [laughter] >> well, it's made me much more comfortable in the summer. [laughter] no, but i think the issue of

taxation is really important because i think that it is, you know, a hallmark of a serious government that it is able to legitimately tax and that people are willing to pay taxes in order to support public services. and so i think one of the unfortunate elements that was thrown into our ideological mix, you know, as a result of reaganism was this view that, you know, in some quarters that, basically, all taxation is illegitimate or, you know, that you can never under any circumstances raise taxes and so forth. because i don't think you're ever going to have a serious country if that's your starting assumption. so, so i am not -- yes, you're right, i am not a libertarian. [laughter] and i will talk to you, but it's just i've been busy. so -- [laughter] >> you described tribal societies as a precursor to the

state. what does, what relevance does that bear to a country like libya where tribes are still tremendously important although they have a state? >> well, so it turns out we've discovered to our dismay that there are still many societies in the middle east that are organized tribally. when we stumbled into anbar province, we simply didn't realize, you know, that you had to go to the sheikh and get him to agree on behalf of the tribe rather than, you know, trying to organize elections and, you know, all this other stuff that americans are wont to do. and i think one of the big, you know, tunisia and egypt have had national identities and much more modern political systems than, let's say, yemen or libya or even jordan in which tribalism is still extremely strong. and one of the things we simply do not know about libya is the degree to which the current

conflict, you know, represents authoritarianism versus democracy, or whether it is a fight between gadhafi's tribe and another tribe. and that's one of the big dangers that we, you know, risked when we got involved -- i mean, i still think we had to do it because i think if he had been able to crush benghazi, it just would have been terrible. but that being said, you know, we just don't know a lot about that society and how it's actually organized. >> thank you. >> can -- can my friend jonathan pollack ask? he actually had his hand up. >> please come to the mic because this is on c-span. >> no, my question is -- >> come to the mic. >> okay, i'm coming, i'm coming. [laughter] >> don't have trouble with authority. [laughter] >> thank you. frank, alluded to charlestyly, and i understand and agree with much of what you say about that,

but what you haven't alluded to is how does the phenomenon of war and interstate war, in the particular, effect the evolution of systems as you see it? or is that something that -- >> well, no. so it drives state building, but it doesn't cease to drive state building after you get a state. it continues. like, you look at this city. there's this big five-sided building sitting next to the potomac building. where did that come from? where did the growth of the big federal government, you know, before the civil war the population of this city was something like, i don't know, 50,000 people. it was tiny. and then all of a sudden after the civil war it's several hundred thousand and all because, you know, the needs of war drove, you know, the increases in the need for civilian bureaucracies of various sorts. so i think that that is a process that continues to operate. one of the unfortunate things is that a lot of times reform can only be brought about by military threat and competition

because people are kind of mule-headed, and a lot of times they're stuck in certain ways. and unless they're really hit on the head by a 2x4 meaning by the threat of real military danger, they're just not going to, you know, do the things that are necessary. okay, thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> this event was hosted by politics and prose bookstore here this washington d.c. to find out more visit politics-prose.com. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback. twitter.com/booktv. >> up next on booktv, joseph nye, a former dean of the kennedy school of government at harvard university, talks about the changing nature of power in the global affairs. this hourlong program was hosted by the center for new american security here in washington.

>> let me tell you a couple of things about why i wrote this book and what i think it says to at least start the conversation. the book summarizes work that i've been trying to do for 20 years or so 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 publish inside 1990 which was a period when americans believed 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 american military power and economic power, and i said, you know, but this' not all there is -- that's not all there is. there's also the ability to get others to do what you want because you attract and persuade them besides coercing and paying them. and that, as they said, the term took off, but as we entered the 21st century, there was a bit of a reversion to more emphasis on

hard power thinking we could do more with coercion than 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're seeing. so we're trying to think about the work that i'd -- so in trueing -- in trying to think about the work i'd done in the past, i tried to look forward 20 years or so and, basically, argued that globalization and information revolution are producing two big power shifts. one is a shift, if you want, from west to east. sometimes it's called the rise of asia. it should be more the return of asia. 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

that. the other is power diffusion which is the shift of power from states, whether east or west, to nonstate actors. that's a lot newer and a lot harder for us to wrap our minds around. and the chapter in the book that illustrates this is the chapter on cyber power. the idea that you can suddenly cross borders with electrons and can do damage, and nobody knows whether 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 of each of those quickly, and then we'll have time to discuss what they mean in practice. power diffusion is a product of this extraordinary reduction in the costs of computing and communications. if you look at what happened to computing power in the last quarter of the 20th century, it

declined a thousandfold. 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 1935 if you -- in 1975 if you wanted to have instantaneous communications to washington to johannesburg to moscow and beijing, you could do it, but it was expensive, and you needed to be a government or a large corporation. today anybody has that capacity via the price of entry into an internet café. and then there are examples to give to illustrate this, but the important point is not that governments are finished or that they're 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 apartments on that -- apartments on that stage -- participants on

that stage than before, and information has essentially become so much more widespread that there are many more people to play. egypt was a good example of this. we used to think you only had a chance between an autocrat and extremist as the spectrum of participants in politics in the middle east. turns out there was a middle. information had filled in a middle. what's more, it had given them tools like twitter and facebook and so forth to coordinate. this is new. and as i said, when you talk about cyber, it's even more new in terms of our inability as yet to develop a full strategy which we understand this. so power diffusion is one of the really big changes in the 21st century, and we're only beginning to wrap our minds around it. what it means is we're going to have to have a much more subtle and sophisticated understanding of -- the ability to prevail at

war. now, the ability to prevail at war is still important, but it's not just whose army wins, it's also whose story wins. and that ability, 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're going to get your strategy wrong. you're going to have to think of how can you combine those two into smart power strategies. so i think we're going to need a much more sophisticated understanding of power and the resources that put it -- that create it in the 31st century -- 21st century than we have seen thus far. that's power diffusion, and i think we should come back to it in our conversation. let me say a couple of words about power transition, the transition from states to other

states. people talk about this as the rise of asia. t really the return of -- it's really the return of asia. in 1800 if you took a snapshot of the world, asia was more than half the world's population and more than half the world's product. by 1900 it's still half the world's population, only 20% of the world's product. and what we're seeing now is what you might call return to normality. at some point in this century asia will be half the world's population and product. it starts with japan in the late 20th century, goes on to korea, the so-called asian tigers, and now it's gone to china, but in the future it's 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'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 it's, there's a whole chapter in the 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 life span of a country is. we don't. life spans of countries are not like life spans of individuals. if you take something like rome, you'll see that rome lasted in power three centuries after it reached the 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. i think it has quite a long way to go still. the other problem with the term "decline" is it 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 say how can you not see this? you know, it's going on all around us. well, take a little look at history. we've looked a lot worse at other times in our history. what's more, americans go through cycles of believing we're in decline. after sputnik in the '50s, we thought we were finished, the russians were 10 feet tall. after nixon and the oil embargo, we thought that was the end. in the 1980s when ronald reagan had the huge budget deficits, there was a widespread belief in decline. that's when i wrote "bound to lead." my friend, paul kennedy, at yale -- great british historian -- wrote a book called "the rise and fall of the great powers" and said we were going the way of phillip ii of spain,

i said no, but paul got all the royalties because people believed in decline. now we're going through another bout of declinism which is set off by the 2008 recession. i suspect as the economy recovers, we'll outgrow this one as well. but the point is that i don't see this proof of absolute decay. problems 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 where the world economic forum ranks us as number four and the first three are small states and china's around number 27, or if you look at new technologies like nanotechnology, biotechnology or if you look at demographic factors like the fact that we'll keep our position demographically because we are a

nation of immigration whereas the rest of the advanced world, in fact, is going to decline and even china's going to have a demographic problem in another decade or so, i think all of these things are reasons why the american society's not in absolute decline. i particularly like the comment that was once told me as we were having lunch about this last year. and he said, you know, the chinese have the great advantage they can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people. but the u.s. can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion people. and what's more, we can take those 7 billion and recombine them in a way that the chinese can't because they're limited by ethnic on chinese nationalism. he said as long as you keep open that way, he said he'll 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 it will continue likely to do well. goldman sachs has projected that china will pass the americans in overall economic size by 2027, might even be earlier than that. it stands to reason if one country has a population of 1.3 billion and is growing at 10% a year, sooner or later the smaller population of 300 some million will be an equal size economy. but the big mistake to go from equality and size of gdp to economic equality, essentially, they'll be equal in size but not in composition. and if you look at gdp per capita as a better measure of the composition of an economy, then the u.s. is going to stay way ahead. china probably won't equal the u.s. in the gdp per capita until somewhere around 2040 or well into the 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 ignore military power. it's hard to see china equaling the u.s. in military power for another 20 years or so. they also ignore soft power. and while china has made a mayor investment -- major investment in soft power and hu jintao basically told the communist party that china should invest in soft power, they are not going to be able to project soft power as effectively as the u.s. so long as they take the authoritarian political position that they have. if you take the example of the beijing olympics or the shanghai expo, great confucius institutes, but then you go and lock up lew saw bow and shoot

yourself or in the foot. you undercut all that soft power you've invested in. so until china changes, i don't see it being able to come close to the americans in soft power either. now, you might say why worry about all this, why fuss? is this just another way we're number one and pretending we're the green bay packers or something? answer to that is, no. power is not good or bad per se. power, as i say in the book, is like calories and diet. too little of it, you die. too much of it 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 it matters is you misjudge the relationships of power in the world, you can make big policy mistakes. you know, there's the famous quote that the pell to news yang

war was caused by the rise of the power of athens and the fear it create inside sparta which people have transposed to world war i. world war i was created by the rise of power in germany and fear created in britain, and then many others are transporting it to the future and saying the 21st century will be the rise in the power of china and the fear it creates in the u.s. bad history. bad history because if you look at britain and germany, germany had passed britain by 1900 in terms of it economic power. if you believe what i said earlier and supported by fact 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 which says we can press

them harder. and the americans thinking we're in decline suffer from fear which means we overreact or react the wrong way. so getting this wrong will be one of the -- getting it right, i should say, will be one of the big questions of the first decades of the 21st century. and power transition. i happen to think we can still get it right, though it's going to take careful management and a pretty good estimation of the realities of power. let me, let me conclude this and summarize it by saying that as i think about power, i've used a metaphor, the three-dimensional chess board. on the first or top board you have military power among states, and there the united states is the only power, the only country able to project power globally. and i think it's going the stay that way for another couple of decades. if you look at the middle board of economic relations among states, the world is multipolar,

and it has been for a couple of decades. this is the area where europe can act as unit. and when it does act as a unit, its economy is bigger than the united states. in addition, you have china, japan and others that can help the balance american power. so unipolarity on a top board, multipolarity on the middle board, go to the bottom board, things that cross borders outside the control of government whether it be agents like the terrorists in al-qaeda or transnational crime syndicates or whether it be impersonal force like pandemics or global climate change. power in this domain is chaotically distributed. it makes no sense to use categories of unipolarity or multipolarity to understand this. the only way you can deal with these issues that are actually creating new and more important challenges to us from this bottom chez board of the

three -- chess board of the three-dimensional game is by getting cooperation from governments. and that's going to require much more use of soft power as well as mixtures with hard power. in that area what we see is a need for a new and far more sophisticated strategy which we realize that we need to think of power sometimes as a zero sum game and sometimes as a possum game. positive sum game. we need to think of power over others, for example, in preserving deterrents or naval balances. we also need to think of power with others. for example, dealing with climate change or pandemics or terrorism. we have to learn to do both of those at the same time. this is going to require much more sophisticated understanding of power and how you combine hard and soft power into effective smart power strategies. just to summarize, when hillary clinton said in her inaugural hearings before the senate

foreign relations committee that smart power meant using all the tools in our tool box, we're going to have to get much better at using all the tools in our tool box than we've been so far. and in the process of encouraging that is why i wrote this book. so that's enough from me. i'd much rather hear from you. over to you. >> thanks very much, joe. appreciate it. and i wonder if i might start with a question before throwing the floor open. twenty with years after the end of the cold war, 20 years after the publication of "bound to lead, "it seems to me in many ways the united states is still trying to define the role of american power in the world. what is, what are we trying to do with american power and american purpose? and given what you've written here, could you outline for us just a few of the tenets that you think should upside line the narrative of america -- underline the narrative of america's role in the decades to come? >> it's a good point, nate,

because i don't think you're going to find a nice, easy slogan. sometimes you'll say what can replace containment. i think looking for the bumper sticker may not be very helpful. if i had to choose a bumper sticker, i'd talk, i'd say use a smart power strategy that combines hard and soft power or in the book i talk about the need to overcome this difference between liberalism and realism. and i say somewhat facetiously i consider myself a liberal realist. i don't find this dichotomy very useful. that you need both. 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? and 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 work a lot on and have been pioneers on, that's a good example in which you combine hard and soft power. coin is interesting pause instead of -- because instead of saying i'll maximize my hard power by how many i can kill, you say, no, i want to maximize how many civilian minds i can win, and that's not measured by how many 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 combine them in effective ways. in our political culture, we have this bizarre thing that we can't cleary about this. we have a government -- clearly about this. we have a government of one giant and a lot of pygmies. so there was an account which was in the pentagon which secretary gates said should be

transfer today the state department. and when it was transferred to 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, to reinforce each other, we're not going to be very good at effective strategies. right now is a congressperson, congresswoman i should say who is a good friend of mine said, you know, you're absolutely right about needing to use more soft power. i just can't get up on a political platform and say that. well, there's something wrong about our ability to mouth a smart power strategy when we can't talk about half or a third of the components of what goes into using all the tools in the tool box. so that's what i tried to get at when e use smart -- when i use smart power as my bumper sticker. at least it tries to get people to think in a more sophisticated way about what's involved in combining the elements of power.

>> can thank you. thank you. >> thank you for coming to meet with us. on that note, i was just wondering how you sell this to the american people. i think you said foreign policy and how it seems like the american people don't always, you know, they want to know who's the enemy and who's not, and do you think it's going to be a problem selling that to the american people? in do you have any idea how to do that? >> well, it is a problem. it is a problem because it's much easier if you have clear white hats and clear black hatses and that's all there is to it. when somebody is a white hat at one minute and a black hat at another and sometimes it's gray, then you have a more difficult way to think your way through it. take china. there's some areas where we in china are rivals. if china tries to push us out

from the coast to the second island chain, that's pretty much zero sum. i think we're going to stay much closer in than that. that's something we can debate in another context. that could be zero sum. if, on the other hand, we want to deal something -- do something about climate change, the better china gets at climate change, the better off we are. they're better off, we're better off. so in some situations where it's zero sum and other situations it's positive sum. and there'll be some that are mixed, elements of both. so it's hard, it's hard to get the mix to think in -- to get the public to think in those therms. it's much easier back in the cold war there's an iron curtain, there's a clear line. there are good guys on this side, bad guys on that side, and the world in which you have the rise of the rest and a diffusion of power from state to nonstate actors is kind of a much more complex world which is going to require much more subtle

strategies, and that's hard in our political culture for politicians to explain that. it's much easier to do the simple white hat/black hat. >> you said that the u.s. 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 the iraq and lately in the afghanistan. might, for instance, a power like the chinese use a much more hi-tech, subtle version of asymmetry to, 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 meaning less in the terms of what we can actually do with it?

>> i think that's a great question, and that's why i have a whole chapter in the book on cyber power. because if you think of the naval domain, american superiority in the oceans, i think, is -- you can say we have naval superiority, and can it's likely to stay. people say, oh, my goodness, china's developing a carrier. there's a long distance between that and 11 carrier task forces as you know better than anyone. so the question gets to asymmetries. and the interesting question, the chinese military talk about asymmetries, and if i had one -- if i had minus one carrier and america had 11, i would talk about asymmetries too. question is, can they really do it? i think if you look carefully in the cyber domain, the americans are still way ahead on cyber offense. but at the same time we're more vulnerable in others because we

depend more on cyber. so the question we have to figure is how do we improve the resilience and robustness of our systems? people have made a lot of fuss about the df-21 ballistic missile which can hit a carrier. guess what? we can use cyber the other direction on that as well as they are thinking they can use a ballistic missile. so cyber cuts in multiple directions. there's also the point people say there's no deterrence in cyber. well, yes, there is deterrence. it's a different type of deterrence. it's not the deterrence in which you bomb their city after they bombed your city. it's a deterrence through entanglement. why is it that chinas has so many dollars and doesn't dump their dollars to bring the u.s. to it knees? because they would bring themselves to their ankles. the same thing, why doesn't china use cyber to, essentially, bring the americans to their

three knees? because it could bring them to their ankles. and l that, i think, is the -- we have to begin to think through what these asymmetries mean. there'll be some military domains where we will remain well ahead. there'll be other military domains where i don't think you can count on superiority. i think we can't count on superior in cyber, but in which we can develop smart strategies to make sure that they can't remove our capabilities in, let's say, the naval domain. and it's -- and that is where we should be trying to develop strategies. >> dennis. >> you said you consider yourself a liberal -- [inaudible] neil ferguson, professor at harvard, just published an article in "newsweek" stating that the obama administration's response to egypt was a disaster. as a liberal realist, how would you grade the administration's response, and looking forward

towards how they should respond to iran and the other countries that may have similar revolts, how would you look at that? >> i think, actually, obama's response on egypt is not a disaster. and this is, this is a good example of what i mean by needing a strategy. if you think about should i abandon the government, should i, should i forget the government, well, no. sorry. government is the most important actor. i still have major objectives in the hard power world like balancing iranian strategy, like maintaining the peace between israel and egypt. to just say, oh, the sooner we overthrow mubarak the better, and suppose 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. on the other hand, if you think of stability only working with the government and you ignore civil society particularly in this civil society that'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 deal with the people in tahrir square? your military aid, for example, gives you some influence over the government. that's a form of hard power. your narrative gives you some influence with the people in tahrir square. and i think the obama administration was trying to walk this tight rope and, obviously, it wobbled several times. but i think it got down that tight rope relatively well. so i think neil is wrong. neil loves to simplify things. i don't think he got this one quite right either. but i think it's a good illustration of -- he's a friend of mine, so i'd tell him this if he were setting where you are, and we've had debates and lots of fun with it. but i think the key here is to learn how are you going to combine your hard power, dealing

with the government, and your 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. >> we can get a second, third look for another intern around the table before going someplace else. jeffrey? >> i was wondering if you could speak more about how the u.s. should possibly change -- [inaudible] you just mentioned given that middle east is largely made up of people of a certain age group that off maybe anti-american and how you think we should balance -- [inaudible] it's, obviously, a very thin line that you walk. >> well, it is hard. and there are policy positions we take which are unpopular in the middle east. our support of israel is not popular in much of the arab world, and those are difficult

things to overcome. but if you realize that american soft power doesn't just grow out of american policy, it grows largely out of our civil society, and that's important because sometimes when we have a policy that the government is following which makes us very unpopular, we can know -- 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. people were 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 martin luther king's "we shall overcome." that's 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, so forth, the americans still had a certain amount of appeal that gave us soft power. so we're going to have to realize that a large part of our ability to project a narrative is not just government, it's society. and we ought to be -- kristin is a real expert on this, we should have her answer it. but we should be supporting the government's role in developing soft power as partly public diplomacy in the voa and the various radio stations and so forth. 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 and which he said the most important part of human communication is not the 6,000 kilometers of distance that you cover, it's the last 3 feet, the face-to-face communication. and the reason is because

there's credibility. when you're talking face to face in an interaction with another human being, you judge that person, you assess them, you have a sense if it's credible or not. when you're listening to a broadcast that'sing from the government, you think government has its own reason to tell me what it's saying on the broadcast. i suspect it. so you often lose credibility in those kinds of context. so policy matters. i'm not saying it doesn't, but the point is if we think the projection of soft power as simply what the government does, more public diplomacy, more broadcasts, so forth, and a simple government narrative, we're missing a major point. the fact that there's 750,000 foreign students 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 it own way. i mean, these are thing that are

generate ago lot of american soft power. and the more government stays out of the way of that or is able to support it so that it's not government controlled, that's, i think, the right way to generate american narrative. >> john? in the back. >> hi, dr. nye. i'm just wondering what keeps you up at night the terms of threat toss the u.s. you seem very on optimistic, and i'm just curious what makes you worried. >> oh, there are things that make me worry. and, in fact, i deal with it in the book. when i used to chair the national intelligence council, i would say to the various analysts after they'd done their alignment of scenarios and assign probabilities to them, now tell me what could make all this wrong. which makes you sensitive to the assumptions you've put in. and so as i wrote the sixth chapter of the book in which i

think on balance the americans are still going to be the most powerful country in the next couple of decades of this century, i asked myself that question: what could make it all wrong if the and there are a -- wrong? and there are a variety of things. if we fail to deal with the deficit, handle our secondary education problems, there are a variety of things. but the one that 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, and hupger down. that would immediately undercut that power that i get that i quoted. it would be a way for us to shoot ourselves in our foot. and i think there's a last too high a probability that we could react that way. in other words, that a series of

large-scale, much larger than 9/11, terrorist attacks that played into a, you know, pull-in, hunker down isolation curtails civil liberties which is another way of upside cutting our soft power, that world, i think, we could do ourselves considerable damage. and so that's the one that probably more than others keeps me up at night. >> you talked about being able to use power in concert with others. and i'm wondering what you, what you think about, um, a multilateral institution like nato where it is, yes, it is multilateral, but kind of built in the cold war era for hard power purposes. do you think there's a role for an institution like that? do you think it should, it should change? what's the future of that going

forward, a kind of blend of hard and soft power? >> well, the united states has an extraordinary capacity to work with allies. i mean, there's an old conventional wisdom of the 19th century that alliances are temporary, you know? your ally today is your enemy tomorrow, and these are mere conveniences. look at nato. you know, here's something that starts in 1949, and it's 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've worked closely together. indeed, when i was responsible for nato 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. it was a lot of committees. a lot of mid-level people coordinating, seeing each other, not only agreeing on certain policy thicks, but just -- things, but just develops

networks. somebody on the other end of the phone knew you, and you could 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 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, 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 actually makes them so effective. i my as anne marie slaughter put it, the outgoing director of policy and planning at department of state, said the real secret of american success is our ability to create and maintain networks. some of them are formal alliances, some of them are not.

but if world is going to need more networked power to supplement hierarchical power in this more complex situation that i've described, the meshes are probably better finish the americans are probably better at preparing that network power than anybody else, and nato is just one good example of it. so i remain a believe that it's important, nato's still very important in this reassurance and networking role. >> john? >> joe, i have a policy question and then a process question. the policy question you've spoken very well of the integration of smart power, soft power, hard power. but perhaps talk a little bit less about to what ends? 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've had a great career of mixing academic study of international relations and then practice. what are the he is sons that have carried over well from the academic community to service in the goth. and what do you wish you'd known when you got to government that the academy didn't teach you. >> well, the first question is easier to answer than the second. [laughter] but on the question of to what end of american power, i think if you look at the united states' role in the world as the largest country, if we don't produce public goods that help o ourselves, but help others, nobody else will. there's a theory of collective action which says it's easy to free ride. only the biggest doesn't free rise because when the biggest free rides, they note t the difference. but if you're a small actor ask you're not going to notice much difference whether you free ride or don't free ride, you might as

well free ride. so i think that ought to be a guiding principle for american foreign policy. it's not that we're acting out of our national interest, it's that we're defining our national interest in a broad-gauge way rather than a narrow way. and this in the seventh chapter of the book i try to go into that in some detail. on the question of academics and government as a career, they are very different. in the sense there's, you know,

when i came into government in the carter administration first time, i had -- my total managerial experience was i had managed one person, my secretary, and some people say i got the sign wrong on ha relationship. [laughter] -- on that relationship. of so i got sudden ply into an area where i had no not only manage a staff, but i had to coordinate bureaus with hundreds of people in them. and it was on-the-job learning. it was the proverbial being thrown into the swimming pool, and if you didn't learn quickly, you were going to drown. and if you try to do it yourself -- which is your academic tendency -- you're going to drown. i'd say, i've got to find ways to get these other people to support me. and perhaps that's where i discovered soft power. i found that getting others, you know, attracting others to want

to support you was crucial. and so i found ways, for example, i would go to the secretary of state's staff meeting in the morning. now, i could have taken that information which came from a small group of, you know, eight or ten people and horded it. instead, what i did is tell these other bureaus, guess what? you come to my office, and i'll share this information with you, and i'll also parcel out the work. so others wanted to come to my meetings because it was helpful and useful to them. so, essentially, i learned this idea of on-the-job delegation and soft power by, essentially, swimming in a poll when i didn't know how to swim. but at least it was the fear of drowning that, perhaps, helped. but the other thing worth noticing about academic and government work is the difference that time makes.

in academia the premium is to get the right answer. you want to fine tune your paper and get a few more footnoteses and get an a. yes, i'll grant an extension. or, you know, you want to get this book written, but it's not quite right, and it might take me a couple more years. if you're in government and you're tasked to write a paper for the president to brief him for his meeting with the foreign minister of a visiting country, and the president is supposed to meet with the foreign minister at 4:00 and you're working like crazy on this paper because it's not quite right, you finally get it quite right and t at the white house at 5:00, it's an f. not an a, it's an f. you would have been far better than getting the b product on time than a perfect product late.

and that difference in the role that time plays in academic world and in a government world is really quite difficult for many academics to get used to. i mean, they're just -- there are just different prices that you put on time. so there are a lot of little thicks like that ha you -- things that you know the difference in the cultures. but i find it, i found in my experience it was quite exhilarating to go back and forth between two very different cultures. it meant that you were pushed into a situation where as i said in one metaphor you either swim or drown, but another way of putting it is to be push spood a steep learning curve. even writing the chapter on signer in this book i had to, i'm still no expert, but i had to make myself smart enough about cyber that i could write intelligently about cyber power. that was a steep learning curve.

and anytime, for the interns, 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 just makes life a lot more interesting. >> in your book you reference the relationship between balance of power and interdependence, ie u.s./saudi relations pertaining to oil and security. i was wondering what your take would be on the balance of power and interdependence pertaining to science and technology evolving at the rate in which it is now. >> well, it's an interesting question. technological change is so dramatic that it can, it can exaggerate asymmetries and interdependence or it can smooth them out. what i argue in chapter three of the book about economic

interdependence, it's not interdependence that gives power, it's asymmetry in interdependence gives power. so if i depend on you and you depend on me callly, there's not much par in that -- power in that relationship. but if i depend on you and you don't depend on me, there's asymmetry that gives you power. so as we try to understand how science and technology affect dependence and power, it can increase interdependence. the interesting question is does it increase the symmetry or asymmetry in interdimension? in some areas it may and in some areas it may not. it's hard to generalize, but to go back to the question earlier, one has to ask, for example, if you're looking at the technological changes in cyber how is it affecting those asymmetries? now, you can also have a balance

of asymmetries. in other words, i may depend more on you in one area, you depend more on me in another area. that gives you a balance of asymmetry. so the example you used of u.s. and saudi, we depended on saudi oil. saudi depended on america ultimate military protection. so the balance of asymmetries meant that at a time when there was an 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 balances of asymmetries also can make a difference. so you want the look carefully at each technology and ask how does it effect not interdependence, but asymmetries, and are there counteracting balances of asymmetries? >> please. >> you spoke at length about the cyclical nature of american decline and how currently it's paired with a fear of a rising

china. i think part of that implication or one of the implications of that is that china has not bought into our soft power, it remains authoritarian, does not share the democratic values that we hold. and there's been much debate about how china has embraced economic liberalization while refusing political liberalization. i just wondered your thoughts on maybe the unite changing it 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 is an open question. jokingly, we sometimes call it it -- [audio difficulty] that's the elite group. one of the big questions that china's 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 per capita income? if you look at the experiences in places like south korea or taiwan or elsewhere, after you get a certain level of per capita income, there's more of a demand for participation. and if there's more of a demand for participation, you have a problem of how do you adjust to that, how do you, how to you rule a middle class society? and 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 and 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 that it's our job to, you know, to make the chinese like us in either sense of the