The wind, the sun, and Soft Power

[imomus]

Some call it "the battle for hearts and minds", some call it Soft Power, others just use words like "influence". Whatever it is, "the world's sole superpower" seems to be losing it. A BBC poll this week found that "anti-Americanism is on the rise, and the more the US flexes its hard power -- the more it deploys troops abroad or talks tough diplomatically -- the more it seems to weaken its ability to influence the world."

Some other BBC polls paint a more general picture of the context. Yes, America is currently unpopular top dog. But not for long. By 2026, China will be the world's number one economy, with the US at number 2, Japan at number 3, and India in fourth place. America's current wars are the snaps and snarls of a slipping power. And attempts to pre-empt this fall -- remember the "new American century"? -- have only accelerated it.

"Is it simply the Bush administration's foreign policy or the whole image of America that is unpopular?", the latest BBC article asks. "Comparable surveys suggest that there is still strong support around the world for the values enshrined in US society. But it looks as though America itself is seen to be living up to those values less and less. As a result, America's soft power - its ability to influence people in other countries by the force of example and by the perceived legitimacy of its policies - is weakening."

This week even the US legislature seemed to grasp this. They moved to block Bush's plan to send 20,000 new troops to Iraq. Meanwhile, military figures seemed to want to soften their own image. A new heat (but not death) ray was unveiled, a machine that sits on the back of a humvee and literally projects "soft hard power" by blasting a very hot -- but harmless -- ray at people protesting America's presence in their land. When the ray hits you, it feels like you're on fire. But you don't die. You can still run away, live to fight another day. The ray gun can't work miracles, though. It can't make you love the people who fire it at you.

"Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in," says Marine Col Kirk Hymes, director of the development programme, in the BBC article about the ray gun. "The weapon could potentially be used for dispersing hostile crowds in conflict zones such as Iraq or Afghanistan. It would mean that troops could take effective steps to move people along without resorting to measures such as rubber bullets - bridging the gap between shouting and shooting."

"Bridging" is a rather poor choice of word. A bridge takes you from one place to another -- from shouting to shooting. Didn't the colonel mean "blocking" or "delaying" that transition? And shouldn't he have said that non-lethal weapons "de-escalate" rather than "escalate" force? Unless... the non-lethality is just there to allow you to reach for the trigger quicker. When you don't speak the language of the nation you're occupying, shouting is a waste of breath.

When soldiers do try to use Soft Power-type language, they end up saying ridiculous stuff. Last year Major General William Caldwell, the chief US military spokesman in Iraq, told journalists in Baghdad's fortified green zone that Iraq was "a work of art in progress":

"Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture. Blobs of paint become paintings which inspire." Is force, too, cultural? Are we sculpting and painting with flesh and blood? Tough love indeed, General Michaelangelo.



"It may be better for a prince to be feared than loved," says the Wikipedia article on Soft Power, quoting Machiavelli, "but the prince is in greatest danger when he is hated. There is no contradiction between realism and soft power. Soft power is not a form of idealism or liberalism. It is simply a form of power, one way of getting desired outcomes. Legitimacy is a power reality."

Personally, I think Aesop was a more astute political observer than Machiavelli. His fable "The Wind and the Sun" goes like this:

"The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: "I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveller to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin." So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on."

"Kindness," concludes Aesop, "effects more than severity."

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