Reviews for Bound to lead

The average rating for Bound to lead based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-29 00:00:00 Lenny Fletcher Joseph Nye makes a convincing case in this book that the US really wasn't in decline in the last quadrant of the 20th century. In fact, he says that decline really isn't even the issue. The issue with figuring out where the US stands and what it should do on the global stage is to understand how the nature of power has changed and whether or not the US possesses new forms of power. This is where Nye's brilliant concept of soft power comes into play. We all know what hard power is; realist scholars have been focusing on it forever: military size and competency, technology, GNP, population size, geographic location, financial strength, etc. In those terms, one could say that the US declined from 1945-1990, but this would be a narrow way to understand that period. The US wanted economic centers in Europe and East Asia to recover because that contained communism and made everyone stronger, even if it eroded relative US superiority. This was the brilliant enlightened self interest of the postwar liberal international system. Moreover, the US "hegemonic moment" after WWII was never as dominant as many declinists suggest. In fact, US share of things like global GNP or manufacturing production declined more from 45-70 than it did from 70-90, the supposed age of stagnation, decline, and de-industrialization. The US also maintained a major edge in hard power into the early 1990's. Ok, so on to soft power. The idea here is that power is all about trying to get others to do what they otherwise would not do through some means. Soft power is a country's ability to influence others indirectly through the appeal of values, culture, institutions, cooperation, and trade. In a sense, countries have soft power, but it's hard to use. It works slowly over time as societies become more connected and interdependent, as they have throughout the second half of the 20th century. US soft power comes from a bunch of sources: the appeal of US lifestyle, pop culture, and values, the ubiquity of our goods, our advanced post secondary education system, the English language, the institutions we founded and continue to support, the rules around which we and our friends organized postwar international politics, etc. With soft power, the US has been able to shape the rules and institutions that govern international interactions, creating standards that most countries try to adhere to. This gives the US indirect but powerful interest over the rest of the world. Nye's central argument is that the US remains the world's leader in soft and hard power as of 1990. It's only when you measure the US share of power and resources against the rise of other centers of power and production that. US relative decline is not a problem as long as the US maintains sufficient hard power to provide stability to the international system of rules, institutions, and relationships it helped set up post WWII. I found Nye's book and his critique of the declinists (and the focus on decline) refreshing and relevant to the present. Countries that believe they are in decline often do erratic things. You know, like vote for Brexit or Trump? Or Sanders for that matter (not a moral equivalence here, but he does play on the notion of decline heavily). Understanding that the nature of power is changing (for example, countries can't just use force as nakedly as they used to, making it a less important tool of power) should help people panic less about the rise of other centers of power in the world. In fact, trying to cut yourself off from the world (protectionism and withdrawal from international institutions, two political errors rife in 2016) or stop the rise of those alternative power centers (other than the crazy or aggressive ones) often makes decline into a self-fulfilling prophecy by wreaking economic damage at home, reducing our soft power resources, and turning those other power centers against us. The real question around the issue of soft power as an American strength is whether people around the world really see us as we wish to be seen. Fukuyama would say that they largely do, or at least they are drifting in that direction. Huntington would say they really don't, that they are actually entrenching in a form of civilizational defense against Western universalism. Barber would say that US soft power is really just McWorld, the soulless, insidious neoliberal corporate agenda to homogenize the world that is sparking "jihad," or third world resistance and atavism. I land on the more optimistic side of this question, but I think a lot of it depends on how the US exercises its hard power around the world. As Nye suggests, the US should focus on bolstering international institutions and trade relations with other nations because these are the only good ways of dealing with the problems of interdependence (terrorism, refugees, climate problems, protectionism) that cannot be tackled unilaterally. The US should also be willing to play its hard power role as the guarantor of the openness and stability of the international system, as it did in the Gulf War, but it cannot let the exercise of hard power spoil the long term effects of soft power. I think George Kennan would have really liked this book. Kennan saw that the US way of life would most likely out-compete the communist way if communism could be contained and its most open aggression stymied. US attempts to stop peripheral communist aggression with hard power usually backfired (Korea was an exception), leading to the reduction of the appeal of our soft power. The US still lives in this dilemma today. Trust in our values, institutions, and cooperation with the world should give the US a long-term edge over the appeal of other systems around the world from Islamism to Chinese nationalism to various forms of "Third Wordism." Of course, as Nye warns, we have to first make sure that we are living up to those values and rules at home before they can have any effect abroad. I'm a classic liberal, and I think this is a crucial book for liberals to either read or get the main idea from. Foreign policy historians should check it out too. For everyone else, it's a bit dated, but Nye is still publishing and updating his discussions of soft power.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-15 00:00:00 Todd Chidester Review at