Mandarin for the Warlords: The Harvard School of Empire Building
Harvard professor Joseph Nye, a former senior
Pentagon functionary, is one of the longest serving and most influential
advisers to US empire building officials. Nye has recently re-affirmed
the primacy of the US as a world power in his latest book, Is the
American Century Over? And his article, ‘The American Century will
survive the Rise of China’ (Financial Times, 3/26/15, p. 7). These
publications are in line with his earlier book, Bound to Lead, and his
longstanding view that the US is not a declining world power, that it
retains ‘supremacy’ even in the face of China’s rise to global power.
Nye’s views of US world
supremacy have served to encourage Washington to wage multiple wars ;
his view of US economic power has allowed policy-makers to ignore
fundamental weaknesses in the US economy and to overestimate US power,
based on what he dubs, ‘soft’ and ‘military’ power.
In tackling Professor Nye’s work, we are not dealing with a ‘detached
academic in the ivory tower’ – we are taking on a high level political
influential, a hardline military hawk, whose views are reflected in the
forging of strategic decisions and whose arguments serve to justify
major government policies.
First, we will proceed through a
critical analysis of his theoretical assumptions, historical arguments
and conceptual framework. In the second part of this essay, we will
consider the political consequences, which have flowed from his analysis
and prescriptions. In the conclusion, we shall propose an alternative,
more realistic, analysis of US global power, one more attuned to the
real international position of the US in the world today.
Nye’s Analysis is Ossified in His Distorted Time Warp
Nye’s segmentation of power
into three spheres – economic, military (hard), and diplomatic/cultural
(soft), overlooks the inter-relation between them. What he dubs as
‘soft power’ usually relies on ‘hard power’,