Today if we talk about soft and hard power, it’s because Professor Joseph Nye theorized them in the late 1980s.

Nye is a Political Science researcher at Harvard University and throughout his long and prestigious career he has been a fundamental point of reference in US politics, which he helped to shape through his original studies. From 1977 to 1979, Professor Nye was Deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In 1993 and 1994, he served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence reporting for the President. During the Clinton administration from 1994 to 1995, Nye served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, while in October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed him to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, a body that discusses strategic issues and provides the Secretary and other senior Department officials with insights and ideas that can translate into courses of action.

Thanks to his ten-year experience in international politics and his revolutionary ideas, Professor Nye is certainly the most suitable person to provide a different perspective, compared to the realist one, of the current global situation.

We’ve recently managed to have a brief interview with the professor, who explained to us some key concepts of soft and hard power and how the major global powers are interacting today, with a small look at the future and the European situation.

Given that, especially in Italy, the public has difficulty understanding what soft power and hard power are, could you give us a brief definition?

Power is the ability to affect others to get what you want and it can be done in three ways: coercion, payment, attraction. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment.

What are the substantial differences between US, Chinese and Russian soft power?

Russia attracts primarily in parts of its cultural area in its former empire. China has wider aspirations and attracts by culture, it economic performance, and its economic assistance. The US attraction through its culture and civil society, primarily where liberal values are involved .No country has universal attraction to all audiences, but polls show that the US has more soft power than China or Russia at this stage in history.

The war in Ukraine has revolutionized the global order: Russia has further tied itself to China, and is now to all intents and purposes the junior partner in this bilateral relationship. When the war ends how can Russia be reintegrated into the international system? Will it be possible to untie it from China?

The Russia/China alignment will not be easily undone, but there are some tensions between them. It will be important to reintegrate a post Putin Russia into Europe to the extent that is possible.

In 2018, you wrote that the real danger is that China proves to be too weak rather than too strong, and thus fail to contribute to the multilateral order it did not help to create. Do you still believe so? Why?

No. Though I think China faces serious demographic and productivity problems, it is strong enough to seek to reshape rather than to contribute to the liberal international order.

For years, US security policy has identified China as the “pacing challenge” as it has been demonstrated (and demonstrable) that Beijing is working to try to counter US global economic/military power. In the light of the speed of Chinese rearmament, do you think that the “Thucydides trap”, which you believe is unlikely but still possible, is closer?

I still do not think that the analogy with Thucydides’s Greece fits well. I prefer Kevin Rudd’s metaphor of a “managed competition” between two strategic rivals who are not an existential threat to each other and who can gain from areas of cooperation such as climate change.

Around mid-2022, you believed that we were not in a “new Cold War”. However, the United States is trying to free itself from some ties with China (I am thinking, for example, of the microchip supply chain and therefore that of the Rare Earth Elements). So, I ask you: is decoupling actually possible? Given this attempt to cut these ties, is it still not entirely correct to speak of a “new Cold War”?

A full scale decoupling of the US (and Western) economies with China would be enormously costly to both sides. It is unlikely that will happen unless we blunder into a war. But selective decoupling of supply chains with military and strategic significance is likely. Nonetheless this is not like the Cold War where there was almost no economc, social or ecological interdependence with the Soviet Union.

In your opinion, how could the West reinvigorate soft power with non-aligned countries (especially African and Latin American ones)?

We should take their agenda seriously, particularly on development

In a recent interview with a South African international relations researcher, it emerged that non-aligned countries do not want to be the stage of confrontation between global powers. So, partnership proposals must have the sole purpose of mutual benefit, and not oppose the presence of rival powers. Do you think the United States and European countries are still capable of it?

Yes, there are joint gains to be made in development and climate.

Speaking of Europe, do you think that the European Union is a limit or a multiplier of the soft power capabilities of the individual member countries?

Definitely a multiplier!

Featured image from Chatham House

L'articolo “China-Russia axis hard to shake. The EU should not give up on Moscow.” Soft power according to Joseph Nye proviene da InsideOver.

It was not so long ago that global financial markets were hailed as the bringers of democracy. Yet between that time and now, a couple of crises showed that financial markets not only do not necessarily bring democracy to nations, but also sometimes jeopardise the stability of their economies.

Democratisation of finance was at the heart of the ‘subprime narrative’: efficient markets would promote ‘social housing’ without emptying taxpayers’ pockets, but rather filling those of savers.

Then came the crisis, and the consequent need for ever more massive bailouts, not of this or that operator, not of this or that market, but of markets as such

In fact, for the last thirty years there has been nothing more multinational than financial markets, which have prospered thanks to a systematic campaign aimed at dismantling national barriers against capital mobility, a dismantling carried out and sought precisely by states themselves. And indeed, almost more decisively by ‘left-wing’ governments than by ‘right-wing’ ones.

The representation of globalisation as an apparently inevitable process arises even more directly for finance than for other domains, on the assumption that by promoting the liquidity and depth of markets, capital mobility produces the typical beneficial effects of scale economies. Wide and border-free markets, so it has been claimed for years, on the basis of their alleged allocative efficiency, distribute resources in the most judicious way, since they operate on the basis of mechanisms that are as rational as they are impersonal, i.e. without regard for anyone.

Capital mobility is a mode of voting, carried out by what Noam Chomsky called in 2010 the ‘virtual senate’: “Financial liberalisation also creates what some international economists have called a “virtual senate” of investors and lenders, who ‘conduct moment-by-moment referendums’”.

Chomsky’s not too veiled reference is to Renan’s famous formula: the ‘plébiscite de tous les jours’ (everyday plebiscite). Except that Renan referred to the nation, whereas, with a radical reversal of meaning, here the ‘plebs’ called upon to vote are the global creditors of national economies…

This is the reality of modern capitalism, one would say. It remains to be seen whether this reversal of the balance of power has at least a basis in efficiency. For if the globalised finance of globalised markets could exhibit an evident allocative superiority, there would be nothing left but to surrender to progress. But right here begins the critical part of our discourse.

The efficient markets hypothesis, mainly associated with the name of Eugene Fama, rests on the assumption that, with a greater or lesser degree of precision, markets are able to price the fundamental risk of an asset, with only temporary deviations bound to be reabsorbed. Now, this assumption was challenged very early on, well before the GFC, by Shiller in his famous 2003 article. The irony, or rather the hypocrisy, is that in 2017 the Bank of Sweden’s prize in honour of Alfred Nobel for  economics was awarded jointly to Fama and Shiller.

The great crisis of 2007 took it upon itself to disprove this supposedly efficient assessment capacity of markets.  Particularly in the case of the sovereign debt crisis, a mostly concordant literature argues that a large part of the risks priced in by financial markets are risks created by markets themselves and by vagaries in market sentiment. Here too, a large literature on multiple equilibria now tells us that expectations can heavily distort the evaluations of fundamentals, especially in the case of sovereign debts: “Sovereign bond markets are potentially subject to multiple equilibria. At a low interest rate, the probability that the debt is sustainable is high, justifying the low rate.  Think of this as the good equilibrium. But there may well be another one, in which investors get worried, ask for a higher premium, increase debt service, and in so doing make their worries self-fulfilling and make debt unsustainable. Call it the bad equilibrium. Multiple equilibria can emerge nearly at any time, but they are more likely in the current circumstances when investors are edgy”

Let us now turn to the latest crisis, related to the pandemic. If the advanced economies were able to be saved from collapse, this was essentially due to the joint action of national governments, which passed large deficits, and their central banks, which supported them with systematic asset purchase policies.  The end effect has been, even un Europe, a greater financial stability than during the 2007 crisis.

What is the moral here? That we must shy away from the temptation to absolutize: no one, neither states, nor central banks, nor markets, is capable alone of effectively pursuing the efficiency objectives that all of us rightly deem important in finance. No one: neither national public bodies nor international private actors.

What the pandemic and the exit from the crisis give us is therefore a very specific political task: that of balancing the action of all three players in the name of the goal of a sustained, sustainable and socially acceptable growth.
If quantitative easing policies have saved the day so far, they have done so by vastly increasing inequalities, i.e. at a social price that it is no longer reasonable to continue to pay. New ways have to be found.

L'articolo Global financial markets, present and future proviene da InsideOver.

There is no greater show of China’s global ambitions than its Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Announced in 2013, the Belt and Road is the largest investment plan in human history. It promises over a trillion dollars in investment across the world, but more than that, the Belt and Road is meant to give birth to a new world, one that is integrated, interconnected, and globalized. But not like the globalized world of yesterday. This would be a world where all roads lead to Beijing.

The Belt and Road was already running into its fair share of problems before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the world. Back in 2013, the Belt and Road made a lot of sense. The West was weakened by the 2008 financial crisis and China was becoming the center of the global economy. We appeared to be entering another golden age of globalization. Political shocks had challenged that system, but they did not break it. If the coronavirus does, then the conditions the Belt and Road needed for success may be lost forever.

How Did Countries First React to the Belt and Road Initiative?

The first condition that was needed was a pliable world. The Belt and Road may be led by China, but it is a multilateral project. China can only involve itself abroad to the extent that it is welcome. Over 70 countries have already signed up to the project, and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment have been realized from East Asia to East Africa. Ports, highways, bridges — the list is endless. But for as long as the Belt and Road has been in progress, resistance has also been building.

Malaysia was one of the first countries to sign up to the Belt and Road, agreeing to multiple projects worth well over $100 billion. But then, in the 2018 election, a new Prime Minister was elected on an outspokenly anti-China and anti-Belt and Road platform. Not long after, he canceled several Belt and Road projects, citing a need to reduce debt accrued by the previous government.

In Central Asia too, popular resentment against China has not been abated by the project. The Belt and Road was announced in Kazakhstan, and the country is essential to the Belt and Road’s land route, and yet locals are suspicious of the project and fear Chinese encroachment will hurt their country, not help it.

It is Difficult to See How China Can Emerge From This Crisis in a Favorable Light

And then the coronavirus arrived late last year. Instead of using its early recovery to build international goodwill, China is using it to sow discontent abroad and enhance its own prestige. Its confrontation with the US is growing, and elsewhere in Europe calls are increasing to treat China as an adversarial power. Former Portuguese Minister for Europe Bruno Maçães observed recently that he had “never seen so much anti-Chinese feeling in [his] life.” It is difficult to see how China can emerge from this crisis in a favorable light.

Another condition that was needed for a successful implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative was a globalizing world. The Belt and Road assumed that the world would become more globalized. There could not have been – and was not – a Belt and Road during the Cold War. It is only thanks to free trade, the free movement of goods and people, and open borders that the Belt and Road could be proposed. In other words, a liberal world order.

The Belt and Road May Find National Boundaries Aren’t As Flexible as Hoped

The Belt and Road was a perfect strategy to replace American dominance. It only required China’s favorite strategy – to quietly grow and wait. China saw enough revolution in the 20^th century. Since Mao’s death, Beijing has instead worked within the system, adopting what works and abandoning what doesn’t, and the regime has not only survived – but thrived – because of it. But if that system fails to return, the Belt and Road may come up against the same national boundaries that have always blocked aspiring empires.

This gets us to one of the most important practical conditions for China’s ambitions to succeed – the free movement of labor. For the Belt and Road to function, China needs to be able to undercut competition for infrastructure projects abroad. How does it do that? By shipping in Chinese labor. Though local workers are used in some countries, these projects usually involve thousands of Chinese workers being brought in and paid low wages while living under strictly-controlled conditions.

With countries around the world outright banning foreign nationals amid a growing global economic recession — and with China calling its citizens home — who will be left to build these great projects? It is entirely possible that the world returns to normal once the pandemic has passed, but even in that timeline it would be well over a year – if not more before that happens. Even if this does not stop the Belt and Road, it will most certainly delay it.

If China faces a de-globalizing world hostile to its ambitions where Chinese labor and investment are met with unease and suspicion, the Belt and Road is dead. The coronavirus has proven yet again to the West that coexisting with China is difficult enough, let alone allowing Beijing to lead global affairs and dominate trade. So even presuming conditions return to normal and China can proceed with its signature endeavor, who’s to say the world will stand idly by and allow it?

L'articolo Coronavirus May Kill China’s Belt and Road Initiative proviene da InsideOver.

The coronavirus crisis is global, but it has had different impacts, and provoked different responses, in each country it has hit. Moreover, because the world’s two most powerful countries have been — for different reasons — at the center of the crisis and are not looking better in the eyes of the rest of the world for how they have handled it, these events will have an enduring influence on global politics. The pandemic has revealed flaws in geopolitical structures as well as domestic political systems and has accelerated the unraveling of what until a few years ago looked like an irreversibly globalizing world. This pandemic requires global cooperation on an enormous scale, but global institutions, multilateral organizations and powerful states have proven woefully unable to accomplish this. 

Coronavirus Has Laid Bare the Deep Structural Problems in the US Healthcare System

We Americans frequently tell ourselves that the world looks to us for leadership in times of crisis. This notion is closer to jingoistic sloganeering than empirical reality, but it is true that as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, the United States can play an extremely valuable role in solving global problems. It is equally true that during the current coronavirus crisis, the US has done the opposite. While this is partially due to the dangerously uninformed buffoonery emanating from the White House, the coronavirus has also laid bare structural problems in the US healthcare system that has made the American response to the current crisis slow and inadequate.

Coronavirus Has Also Highlighted China’s Vulnerabilities

The US is not the only powerful country that has been particularly flummoxed by the coronavirus. The virus began infecting and killing people in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. While some praised the Chinese government for moving quickly, the lack of transparency and freedom there led some Chinese experts to report overly optimistic findings to their superiors in the initial stages of the pandemic, thus slowing the response to the virus and contributing to its spread. In recent weeks, China and the US have found themselves in a propaganda battle over who is to blame for the spread of the virus that has been petulant, dishonest and unhelpful on both sides. This has revealed that both the Chinese system of Leninist corporatism and the US experiment with populism and democratic rollback are incapable of addressing the crisis, and thus serve as poor models for the rest of the world.

Coronavirus Has Sidelined the UN

The pandemic has also significantly sidelined the role of the UN. Similarly, in Europe it is not the EU, but the member states themselves that have been on the front lines of this health crisis. Even deep alliances like those between the US and the UK, Japan or South Korea — which have frayed badly in recent years due to Donald Trump’s ill-conceived America First policy — now seem almost irrelevant in the fight against Covid-19.

As states rush to arrest the spread of the coronavirus and bolster their economies, it is worth remembering that it didn’t have to be this way. The pandemic has struck at a moment when the acceleration of globalism of recent years interacted in a toxic manner with a resurgent populism from Beijing to Washington to London to New Delhi that is making the crisis much worse than it had to be. If the US had been able to provide some real leadership, if the Chinese government had been more forthcoming about the crisis in its early days, and if global health protocols had been created quickly to address the spread of the coronavirus, the world would look very different today.

We are in the Midst of a Surreal and Unprecedented Moment

Unfortunately, those things did not happen; and we now find ourselves in the midst of a surreal and unprecedented moment. Nonetheless, it is likely that this crisis will pass. When that happens, the global political system will have been substantially rearranged. To start, the two most powerful countries will have revealed themselves to be radically incapable of cooperation or true leadership. This will leave an enormous vacuum in the geopolitical order that will likely contribute to an acceleration of the breakdown of global systems and alliances, while making it clear beyond doubt to European powers that the US is no longer a reliable ally, and certainly no leader in fighting various serious global challenges.

It is also likely that once the most intense phase of this crisis passes, there will be a backlash against globalism. Some countries, including almost certainly the US, will reevaluate the wisdom of relying on international supply chains for so many important health and consumer products. Other countries, particularly affluent European ones — as well as the US — may tighten border controls significantly. Both of these measures would have a huge impact on the global economy, possibly forcing China to negotiate differently with the rest of the world. 

Our global political institutions and systems have thus far failed to effectively combat the pandemic, just as they have failed to address other life-threatening challenges. Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed climate change out of the headlines and out of the minds of many policy makers, but it has not gone away. Climate change is still lurking out there. The only way to address that looming disaster is through cooperation, sacrifice, trust in science and data, compassion and a willingness to change our lifestyles. These are the tools that appear to be in short supply now, but which are needed to defeat the coronavirus pandemic as well.

L'articolo How The Coronavirus Has Already Changed Geopolitics proviene da InsideOver.

Yet another less than generous comment on rural America. Mr. Jackson Kernion, a philosophy instructor at Berkeley University, recently tweeted: “I unironically embrace the bashing of rural Americans. They, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions. Some, I assume are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.” Mr. Kernion subsequently apologised for the tone of the comments, describing them as “crass” and “mean”. Such remarks are, however, no rarity and you could easily be forgiven for thinking that elements of the US elite hold rural and small-town Americans in contempt, considering them mired in ignorance, bigotry and backwardness. Speaking before an LGBT fundraising audience in New York during the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton notoriously commented “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it… Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America”. In 2008 presidential hopeful Barack Obama argued along similar lines concerning small-town voters in the Midwest: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. The recent furore over the (unreleased) movie called “The Hunt” in which rich liberals hunt down blue-collar Americans for sport until eventually the hunted turn on the hunters is indicative of the tense atmosphere.

“Hickville”

Disparaging “Hickville” did not start with Barack Obama in 2008. In 1920 Sinclair Lewis published “Main Street”, a yarn satirising a fictionalised version of the author’s home town in Minnesota that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. It is sometimes said that God made the village and the devil created the city but Lewis effectively flipped the adage, portraying small-town life as provincial, self-satisfied and dreary. The book struck a chord and was a pivotal moment in American cultural history.

In part, these attitudes are just plain old fashioned snobbery but in part, they also reflect liberal contempt for perceived backwardness that goes back to the very origins of the ideology. Liberal hatred and fear of backward reactionary Czarist Russia was a key factor in the Crimean War of 1853-56. In the 1870s the Kulturkampf in Germany saw Protestant liberals backing Bismarck in his struggle against the Catholic Church and its medievalism. In Britain, the Welsh who clung to their language rather than adopt English, the language of progress, were according to an infamous educational report of 1847 “ignorant, lazy and immoral”.

The coastal-interior divide

But hating the hicks also forms part of a very contemporary trend. Commentators have noted an increasing divide between well-educated urban elites who favour globalism, globalisation and the international lifestyle. As the American historian Christopher Lasch pointed out in “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy”, they feel more in common with their counterparts in foreign countries than their fellow countrymen out in the sticks who value patriotism and conservative social values. The division has arguably intensified since the election of Trump in 2016 as the east and west coast urban areas tended to vote for Hillary Clinton and the interior, the small town and the rural areas tended to back the real estate magnate and reality show star. Having to live with a President elected by people they consider rednecks and hillbillies has been no easy task for America’s liberal establishment.

Rednecks and hillbillies

There is debate about the exact origins of these terms. According to one theory Redneck has its origins in the Scottish Bishops Wars of 1639-40 when the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters signed in their blood and wore red pieces of cloth around their necks as distinctive insignia. Indeed, Redneck seems to have first appeared in print in a travel book about the South published in the 1830s to denote Scottish Presbyterians in Georgia. According to another theory it simply derives from white agricultural labourers in the antebellum South getting their necks sunburned while working in the fields. The website of the US Congress library states the term gained currency in the early twentieth century on account of the red bandana worn by striking miners in West Virginia in 1921 who called themselves the Redneck Army. In any case, as William Safire points out in his “Political Dictionary” the term is used by urban progressives to disparage southern whites whom they deem insufficiently liberal. Yet at the same time, the victims of this abuse have often reclaimed the term for themselves, wearing it as a badge of honour to indicate authenticity, rootedness and steadfast adherence to American values.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a hillbilly is an “awkward or simple person especially from a small town or the country”. Antonyms are “cosmopolite” and “sophisticate”. More specifically, the term refers to people from Ulster, the lowlands of Scotland and the north of England who clustered in the Appalachians in the 1600s and 1700s. They must be distinguished from the WASPs who settled in the North-East. Again the precise etymology of the term is not clear. It may have originated with those Ulstermen who supported the Protestant King William “Billy” III of Orange who defeated the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Alternatively, the word may be a blend of “hill-folk” and “billy”, the latter being a Scottish word meaning fellow or companion.

Rebelling against the establishment

J.D. Vance, author of the 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy: Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” and a proud son of the Appalachians himself, has highlighted the issues facing his community: unemployment, welfare dependency, family breakdown, heroin and falling life expectancy. Feeling overlooked and ignored by the coastal elites, rural and small-town Americans tended to support Donald Trump in 2016. That decision was not born out of ignorance, bigotry or nostalgia for the Confederate States of America; it was a perfectly reasonable and rational choice. It has been cogently argued that the areas most exposed to globalisation, and free trade with China in particular, are precisely the areas that suffer from the type of problems described by Vance. But a vote for Trump in 2016 was not just a vote against Hillary Clinton; it was also a vote against the globalist and chamber of commerce brands of conservatism that has been espoused for decades by Republican Presidents and candidates. Indeed, whether and to what extent to which Trump can respond to the economic and political concerns aspirations of rural and small-town American and maintain their support will be a key factor in the outcome of the 2020 election. It is no surprise that “Hickville” has been drawing so much fire from the establishment in recent years. The targets of these insults and slights should wear them as a badge of honour.

L'articolo Hating the American Heartland proviene da InsideOver.