Beyond Tanks and Troops: Joseph Nye and the Enduring Legacy of Soft Power

The death of Joseph Nye has been recorded as the loss of one of the foremost figures in the effort to understand and explain global politics...

The death of Joseph Nye has been recorded as the loss of one of the foremost figures in the effort to understand and explain global politics.

Introducing the concept of "soft power" into the international relations literature with a touch of conceptual engineering, Nye was also its most composed and persistent advocate.

Nye made his most important contributions to international relations theory with his new approaches to neoliberal institutionalism, interdependence theories, and the concept of power.

The book Power and Interdependence, co-authored with Robert Keohane, is recognized as a foundational work that challenged the boundaries of the power politics emphasized by realists.

The concept of “complex interdependence” offered an alternative explanation to the power struggle narrative dictated by realism.

Of course, his most significant and renowned theoretical contribution was "soft power." Nye first introduced this concept in a 1990 article in Foreign Policy magazine, and elaborated it further that same year in his book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power.

According to Nye, a country could influence the behavior and attitudes of others not only through military force (hard power) or economic sanctions, but also through its culture, values, the legitimacy of its policies, and its capacity to serve as a model.

Expanding the traditional realist notion of "power = military/economic coercion," Nye emphasized the importance of the question, "Whose story wins?" rather than "Whose army wins?"

He even cited the fall of the Berlin Wall as an example of this phenomenon, stating, "The Wall did not fall to artillery fire, but to the sledgehammers of people whose minds had changed."

Of course, there have always been those who view Nye's definition of “soft power” as a mere propaganda maneuver or ideological camouflage. In fact, Nye represented the persuasive, gentle but persistent face of liberal reason against the hardened face of realism.

In fact, as Nye himself noted, the concept of soft power has been an important tool for explaining the source of the United States' enduring superiority to those who argue that the United States is in decline.

In his 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye further popularized the concept, arguing with concrete examples that U.S. foreign policy must complement military strength with moral leadership and cultural appeal.

Nye's theoretical framework goes beyond the narrow perspective of measuring a country's power solely by the number of tanks and planes it has, revealing that intangible elements such as culture, ideology, and institutions can also be decisive in the international order.

Later adopting the term "smart power," Nye’s discourse became a part of U.S. diplomatic rhetoric in the early 21st century.

Notable among his works are The Paradox of American Power (2002), where he argued that even as the sole superpower, the U.S. could not act unilaterally, and The Future of Power (2011), which continued this line of thought.

Nye also held various public positions within the US administration. Indeed, in a report he prepared for the Pentagon in 1995, later known as the “Nye Report,” Nye argued that strengthening the US presence in Asia and its alliance with Japan would serve as a counterweight to China's rise.

This report would later be seen as an early harbinger of the “pivot to Asia” strategy.

Criticizing Trump’s "America First" slogan as devolving into "America alone," Nye maintained that damaging alliances would harm America’s long-term interests.

He characterized the Trump administration’s distancing from allies and withdrawal from international agreements during the 2020s as a squandering of American soft power.

In April 2025, just a few weeks before his death, during a program at Harvard Kennedy School, he warned that populist leaders like Trump were weakening the rules-based international order, saying, “They are not putting America first; they are leaving America alone.”

The concept of soft power has also been subject to intense criticism. For example, John Mearsheimer, in his 1994 article “The False Promise of International Institutions,” argued that liberals overestimate the value of institutions, asserting that the UN or other institutions cannot prevent wars when the interests of great powers clash.

Critics have also questioned which specific tools soft power relies on, how success is measured, and how clear causal links are established.

Some have interpreted Nye’s emphasis on soft power as an attempt to make American hegemony more palatable. I find myself sympathetic to that view.

In the final analysis, Nye was a strategist aiming to maximize U.S. interests only through cultural hegemony rather than brute force. As such, he was inevitably serving the project of maintaining America's dominant global position.

Nye's "smart power" formula was a more pragmatic effort. It regarded hard and soft power not as oppositional, but as complementary frameworks a form of “bargaining with realism,” so to speak.

Describing the world as a three-dimensional chessboard, Nye highlighted that while the levels of this game do not overlap, they are nonetheless interconnected.

A state might prevail on the military level, yet lose on the cultural and normative plane.

Therefore, controlling the narrative is at least as important as controlling tanks. Nye’s greatest intellectual legacy may lie in this multi-layered way of thinking.

Some have dismissed this as naïve I disagree. On the contrary, I see it as a strategic mindset nourished by the composed patience of the liberal tradition.

Nye was an intellectual who believed that states are not solely driven by interest maximization but sometimes also seek meaning through the construction of cultural hegemony.

Ultimately, conquering minds has always mattered more than conquering land. Nye will be remembered as a thinker who theorized and defended this very perspective.