Earlier this month, the American scholar and diplomat Joseph Nye passed away. Nye was an pivotal scholar in the study of American power and how media and information were important elements in the success of the United States exercising its hegemony in the aftermath of World War II. Nye’s most important conceptual contribution to the study of power in global politics was his coining of the term “soft power,” which he defined as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments and arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” (Nye 1990, 2004) This understanding of power became an important idea as the United States attempted to wrestle with the challenges of globalization and the prospect that US primacy, if still relatively secure on the military front, was now going to be contested by the rest of the world as their economies began to catch up to the US and access to digital media and a global audience became easier to acquire. Thus, with Nye’s passing, an opportunity exists to reflect on some of Nye’s more impactful insights and how they might help understand the new media terrain of the present moment that is seeing seismic changes. Indeed, the collapsing US liberal world order continues to baffle thinkers and decision-makers around the world and it is only by seeing how a very mainstream practitioner of “soft power” understood power in global politics can some comprehension prevail. Finally, it sets up a much deeper conversation about strategy in the new media terrain and how thinkers like Guy Debord were ahead of their time in seeing the emerge of a “spectacular war” long before the true nature of media power was fully understood.

Power itself can be understood as “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes you want.” (Nye 2020) This definition, provided by the rationalist thinker and former policy wonk Joseph Nye, comes in three basic forms: threats of coercion (sticks); inducements or payments (carrots); and attraction and persuasion that makes others want what you want.”(Nye 2020) Coercive power is usually understood to include the use of violence or coercion in order to compel an actor to do something they might not otherwise wish to do or deter them from something they desire to do. Inducement is a form of power that brings about the results but does so as the result of the delivery of some benefit, such as through a “deal” of some kind that might include a payment or some other material benefit. As stated above, soft power, according to Nye, is “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments and arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” (Nye, 1990, 2004)

All three forms of power that Nye mentions combine two variables: resources and relationships. Resources are understood as those tangible assets that give you the capacity to threaten, coerce, persuade or seduce. Military power is one obvious example of a tangible asset that gives a state the ability to makes threats and impose physical violence on the object of that power, thus compelling the target to change their behavior. However, military capability need not always by coercive—using military resources to provide things like disaster relief after a natural catastrophe would in this case be an example of a soft power resource. Economic resources like access to cheap oil or a generous allotment of critical natural resources may contribute to the creation of military capabilities, but they also could be used as assets for other forms of power, such as manufactured goods that can be used for trade. Small but wealthy countries that may not have much in the way coercive resources may nevertheless be quite potent due to the availability of credit or financial resources. In the realm of soft power, media resources are obviously a precious asset that can be used to promote, persuade and seduce not only the leadership of foreign governments, but the general publics in other nations as well, who then become pressure agents on their own government for a policy change that is in the interests of the original state. However, as mentioned above, a state providing humanitarian assistance through its military will be using a traditional coercive resource in a way that projects soft power.

The variable involved in this discussion is relationships. This variable focuses on the ways and abilities of one actor to alter the behavior of the other. This aspect of the discussion is important as simply possessing the resources of power represents only a potential—the real test of power comes when those resources are deployed and the measurable effects they have. When it comes to coercion or inducement, most forms of relational power take the form of compellance or deterrence. As described by Andrew Heywood, “A may exert influence on B in one of two ways: either by getting B to do what B would not otherwise have done (compellance), or by preventing B from doing what B would otherwise have done (deterrence).” (Heywood, 2014) Nye, however, argues that relational power is much more complicated that a simple compellance/deterrence dichotomy, and argues that this framework actually only represents the first “face” of relational power. Beyond this first face is a second face of power that consists of a situation where “A controls the agenda of actions in a way that limits B’s strategy (and where) B may or may not be aware of A’s power,” and a third face that describes a situation where “A helps to create and shape B’s basic beliefs, perceptions and preferences (and where) B is unlikely to be aware of this or realize the effect of A’s power.” (Nye, 2011) Each face of power may emphasize a different assortment of power resources–military capability being most effective in the first face and media resources being essential assets in the third face–but all resources will have applications in all the various faces of power.

What emerges from this discussion is the wide variety of ways power can be packaged and exercised. In looking at the context of the spectacle, one sees a world where power resources consist of a wide range of discursive practices and media capabilities that give actors that may not wield a great deal of traditional coercive power the ability to still exert substantial influence through other means to bring about their interests. Moreover, Guy Debord’s notion of the “spectacle” (see previous posts) is also an example of Nye’s second and third faces of power—the ability to shape and shift beliefs and perceptions of the world and to calculate one’s own personal interests along the contours of this world (which may not match one’s own interests). Debord writes “the spectacle is the permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws.” (Debord, 1967, 2014) Debord is describing a type of relationship that exists between individual consumers and the images, information and entertainment they consume where the latter exercises a substantial amount of influence over the former.

What is also interesting is the language that Debord uses in describing this relationship as a kind of “war” where media capabilities engage in discursive combat to “win” the minds and imaginations of the masses. In “fighting” to control these minds and imaginations, however, they are also creating and altering the environment and terrain of the battle itself. In the twenty-first century, this means that those who can deploy an army of information warriors adept at wielding the digital information weapons of the present age do merely influence or modify a consumer’s wants, needs and desires, but create the space from which the wants, needs and desires are generated. Whereas in the context of the past, information capabilities could generate propaganda to augment a tangible material reality where the outcome of any conflict was always determined, now, in the words of P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, these capabilities have “since morphed into the nervous system of modern commerce. It also become a battlefield where information itself is weaponized.” (Singer and Emerson, 2018)

While it would be heresy to put Nye and Debord in the same political or ideological boat, there is nonetheless an appreciation on the part of both individuals of how power can (and should) be thought about in more flexible ways, especially in a media saturated society. In making these cases, both are drawing from a much longer tradition of thinking about conflict and war through unconventional means that can be traced by to the writing of Sun Tzu and the famous line from The Art of War that the highest expression of skill for a general is to win a war without having to fight. Inspired by this phrase, future posts will explore this idea in more depth, trying to discover the still obscured strategic insights of political struggle in a digital world that features new weapons, new tactics and indeed, a new terrain of contestation.