THE FUTURE OF POWER
In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev,
power was expressed in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, numbers
of men under arms, and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern
Europe. By 2010, none of these factors confer power in the same way: industrial
capacity seems an almost Victorian virtue, and cyber threats are wielded by non-state
actors. Politics changed, and the nature of power--defined as the ability to
affect others to obtain the outcomes you want--had changed dramatically. Power
is not static; its story is of shifts and innovations, technologies and
relationships. Joseph Nye is a long-time analyst of power and a hands-on
practitioner in government. Many of his ideas have been at the heart of recent
debates over the role America should play in the world: his concept of
"soft power" has been adopted by leaders from Britain to China;
"smart power" has been adopted as the bumper-sticker for the Obama
Administration's foreign policy. This book is the summation of his work, as
relevant to general readers as to foreign policy specialists. It is a vivid
narrative that delves behind the elusive faces of power to discover its
enduring nature in the cyber age.
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