I Don't Care What You Call It, Just Make it Good Posted by Patrick Barry

Readers have probably picked up on the trend of foreign policy\national security experts speaking favorably about kinder, gentler means for achieving national interests, forms of inducement like certain brands of diplomacy, development assistance and promotion of American values.  Heightened emphasis on these instruments, called "soft power," contrasts strongly with the Bush Administration's approach, which was chastised for its over-reliance on coercive methods like sanctions or military action, ie "hard power."  Several bloggers and writers have picked up on yet another shift, from "soft power" to something called "smart power," citing Hillary Clinton's SFRC testimony as a prime example:

We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural — picking the right tool or combination of tools for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy. This is not a radical idea. The Ancient Roman poet Terence declared that “In every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.” The same truth binds wise women as well.

When people talk about the jump from soft power to smart power, one of the common explanations is that soft power, as a term, is rhetorically weak compared to smart power, doing nothing to dismantle the frame that progressives are just a bunch of weak-kneed ninnies.  Ilan wrote a piece about this for the American Prospect last year, which Steve Benen cited in descibing the phraseology evolution.  But it's also worth emphasizing that this is not just a bunch of rhetoric - there are real functional differences between the two concepts.  Soft power, and the techniques associated with it, exist at one end of continuum with hard power at the opposite end.  Smart power on the other hand, unites the two approaches in one strategy.  If the Bush years have shown us anything, it's that dependence on a limited set of instruments of national power actually winds up blunting those instruments, and weakening us overall.  Under the Bush administration, we've grown so accustomed to it being one or the other, soft power or hard power, that we forget that historically, they work best when used in tandem.  Smart power is therefore less a new-fangled concept or a neat rhetorical pivot, than it is just a simple way of conveying the shift back to balanced, well-executed foreign policy.

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