page_title: Smart power
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Smart power / Origin
caption_attribution_description: English: The cover of Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York, N.Y.: Public Affairs ISBN: 978-1-58648-225-1.
context_page_description: In international relations, the term smart power refers to the combination of hard power and soft power strategies. It is defined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as "an approach that underscores the necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships, and institutions of all levels to expand one's influence and establish legitimacy of one's action."
  Joseph Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under the Clinton administration and author of several books on smart power strategy, suggests that the most effective strategies in foreign policy today require a mix of hard and soft power resources. Employing only hard power or only soft power in a given situation will usually prove inadequate. Nye utilizes the example of terrorism, arguing that combatting terrorism demands smart power strategy. He advises that simply utilizing soft power resources to change the hearts and minds of the Taliban government would be ineffective and requires a hard power component.
context_section_description: The origin of the term "smart power" is under debate and has been attributed to both Suzanne Nossel and Joseph Nye.
  Suzanne Nossel, Deputy to Ambassador Holbrooke at the United Nations during the Clinton administration, is credited with coining the term in an article in Foreign Affairs entitled, "Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism", in 2004. In a more recent article for CNN, she has criticized the Trump administration for its "tunnel-vision" foreign policy that neglects both soft power and smart power. She writes: "..Trump seems oblivious toward the brand value of what Joseph Nye has called the 'soft power' that comes from projecting appealing aspects of American society and character abroad. He is also indifferent to my own concept of 'smart power,'or the imperative to engage a broad range of tools of statecraft, from diplomacy to aid to private sector engagement to military intervention."
  Joseph Nye, however, claims that smart power is a term he introduced in 2003 "to counter the misperception that soft power alone can produce effective foreign policy."  He created the term to name an alternative to the hard power-driven foreign policy of the Bush administration.  Nye notes that smart power strategy denotes the ability to combine hard and soft power depending on whether hard or soft power would be more effective in a given situation.  He states that many situations require soft power; however, in stopping North Korea's nuclear weapons program, for instance, hard power might be more effective than soft power.  In the words of the Financial Times, "to win the peace, therefore, the US will have to show as much skill in exercising soft power as it has in using hard power to win the war." Smart power addresses multilateralism and enhances foreign policy.
  A successful smart power narrative for the United States in the twenty-first century, Nye argues, will not obsess over power maximization or the preservation of hegemony. Rather, it will find "ways to combine resources into successful strategies in the new context of power diffusion and the 'rise of the rest.'" A successful smart power strategy will provide answers to the following questions: 1) What goals or outcomes are preferred? 2) What resources are available and in which contexts? 3) What are the positions and preferences of the targets of attempts at influence? 4) Which forms of power behavior are most likely to succeed? 5) What is the probability of success?
caption: Joseph Nye's book describing the concept of "soft power"
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