For many decades, ASERI associate students and faculty have looked to the notion of Soft Power – first articulated by the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye – as a key reference point for our collective understanding of international relations.
Our times, dangerous, clearly call all this into question. The clearest message of the third decade of the 21st century is that hard power is back. The extravagances of President Donald Trump's second term are the most visible example of this, as he reduces spending on soft power tools like Voice of America and cuts hard power programs with soft power benefits like USAID, while attacking former partners through pricing policy. Trump has weakened historic alliances built on shared values and affirmed in their place a transactional approach in which any "quid" given by the United States deserves an immediate "pro quo" from the ally.
However, there are indicators that a broader concern for reputation remains an important part of security. One such indicator is the focus that actors such as Putin and Xi devote to strengthening their own reputations through billion-dollar propaganda programs, simultaneously working no less intensively to undermine the reputations of others through media disruptions and disinformation. One can also look to the Gulf countries' growing investments in hosting and participating in mega-events as evidence of the persistent focus on image and prestige issues.
My personal response to this changing scenario has been to propose a notion of "Reputational Security" as a way to reorient Soft Power, away from its exclusive emphasis on the positive, and towards attention to the different ways in which a bad reputation can "repel" and an absence of reputation can "harm". while a positive reputation requires sound political choices to ensure that it is based on reality.
There is no escaping Trump's world: bilateral relations of real politick have re-emerged as a central feature of our age. In his now-celebrated remarks at Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted that "nostalgia is not a strategy" and spoke of a future based on collaborations based on the intersection of interests, rather than abstract rules.
Yet, even if we accept a world where interests are at the heart of everything, we shouldn't rule out a role for Reputational Security concerns. My comparison would be the automobile: we all know that the internal combustion engine is about fire and steel; The steel in the engine contains and channels the fire: the explosions of the fuel/air mixture push the pistons forward... But try running a petrol car without adding lubricants: rotating gears and pistons that move back and forth - so beloved by car commercials - always need an intermediate layer to prevent counterproductive wear between the parts around them. Oil is not an optional extra!
The mechanisms of public diplomacy play a role similar to that of a lubricant in the world's transactions. Consider the history of the most obvious relationships built on shared interests: alliances in times of war. Even in such marriages of convenience, the extent to which the audiences of the allied countries understand each other matters. It is a key determinant of how much and how quickly an alliance can move and what it can achieve.
Perhaps the Anglo-American alliance in World War II was an overdetermined inevitability based on shared interests and culture, but it didn't seem so at the time. British investment in Reputational Security (accentuating the positives through shrewd engagement; minimizing or eliminating the negatives through reforms) was an important part of fostering American assistance early enough in the war to make a difference. Perhaps — to quote an old song — "the Yanks" were "coming" in World War II anyway, but the value of public diplomacy work in advancing that inevitability and minimizing hiccups in coalition warfare should not be diminished. Bilateral relations lacking an emphasis on mutual learning – such as the US-USSR relationship – were more easily derailed when interests diverged at the end of the war.
Our new old world of hard power – and naked self-interest – still needs attention to mutual understanding, and to the mechanisms that build and sustain it. It's hard to keep an ally that your audience doesn't really appreciate. Soft power and reputational security must remain on our research agendas, regardless of Trump's preferences.