Smart Power.(The Talk of the Town)(United States diplomatic relations)

During the late campaign, various excitable conservatives warned that the next Administration, if it turned out to be a Democratic one, would be guided by what one of them referred to as "Marxist tendencies." We won't know for sure about that till this week at the earliest. But there are already signs that the dialectic favored by the forthcoming novus ordo seclorum may well display what Sean Hannity would probably not call "Hegelian tendencies."

Thesis: Hard Power. The kind fetishized by the outgoing Bush crowd, especially Cheney. Guns, bombs, tanks. Humvees, Hueys, M16s. All about blood and guts. Antithesis: Soft Power. The kind preferred by certain thinkers and political scientists, including, most prominently, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard. Movies, books, songs. Ideals, diplomacy, moral authority. All about hearts and minds. Synthesis: Smart Power. The kind favored by--well, here's Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State-designate, in her opening statement, last Tuesday, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

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.

Up here in New York, another wise woman was surprised and delighted by the fuss down there in Washington: the coiner of the phrase, Suzanne Nossel. "Smart Power" was the title of an article Nossel had written in a 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, the same magazine in which George Kennan, ...