Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW The uses and limits of 'soft
power' Charm Offensive
by Joshua Kurlantzick
Reviewed by
Benjamin A Shobert
When in 2004 Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government dean Joseph Nye
published his book Soft Power: The Means to
Success in World Politics, he entered the
rarified air of a handful of scholars who have
conceptualized and branded something that
perfectly captured an idea
central to modern life.
Nye's development
of the term "soft power" has found its way into
the world of fellow academics, foreign-policy
analysts and political leaders, most of whom have
been able to use Nye's idea constructively.
As he conceived of it, soft power is "the
ability to get what you want through attraction
rather than coercion". This is exercised through a
combination of tangible offers of aid and economic
assistance along with intangible efforts to
elevate the nature of a country's cultural and
political engagement with the forums of world
governance.
Joshua Kurlantzick's new book
Charm Offensive: How China's
Soft Power Is
Transforming the World is a balanced and
elegant application of Nye's concept of soft power
to the question of how China is engaging the
world.
Kurlantzick's analysis manages to
avoid the fallacies common in a number of recent
books on China. He acknowledges the risks of
China's rise with illustrations that show he
clearly appreciates the potential complications as
the interests of China and the United States
competitively overlap.
But Kurlantzick
also acknowledges the positive changes China and
its leaders have made; in fact, at times when he
illustrates how the country is employing soft
power in its favor, the reader is left with the
sense that Kurlantzick appreciates the thought
behind such exercises. More important, he shows
that the Chinese ascent in areas of soft power
cannot be understood without an appreciation of
the US descent in these same areas.
As a
consequence of his approach, the resulting book
provides a nuanced introduction into how China's
leadership is developing its own foreign policy.
This new policy is not only a response to the
opportunity presented through the United States'
inability to employ soft power on its behalf, it
is also a strategy born of a realization in
Beijing that its past meddling in low-level
internecine regional conflicts did nothing to
advance China's prestige in the world or its
economic situation.
America's currently
sustained advantage in all matters related to hard
power - projection of military force and sheer
economic clout - means that Beijing must evolve
another foreign policy if it is to present a
reasonable alternative to countries that are
ideologically opposed to the US.
Loitering
throughout Kurlantzick's analysis of China's
ability to employ soft power is the painful
realization that the US has squandered much of its
own accumulated soft power. This strength, the
product of a country that has embodied some of the
greatest insights into human governance and which
chose to interject itself successfully into two
World Wars in the last century, has been severely
damaged through policy missteps that Kurlantzick
traces back to the administration of president
Bill Clinton.
The "flat world" of
globalization, so stridently advocated by Clinton
and the current presidency of George W Bush,
simply did not create the improved quality of life
it promised for many Third World countries.
Consequently, these countries now view China's
model, and China's influence, as the only feasible
option they have at their disposal. This is an
important point for Kurlantzick because without
it, an analysis of China's use of soft power could
too easily descend into predictable condemnations
of the country's relationship with nefarious
dictators and corrupt bureaucracies.
These
are certainly valid points, and ones Kurlantzick
emphasizes, but he does not shy away from the fact
that the inadequate results of the past 20 years
of US soft power have created an opening for any
competing ideology, of which China's hybridized
embrace between a centrally planned economy and
open market is only the most recent and viable
alternative:
China seems to have enjoyed striking
success and poverty reduction other developing
nations can't help but notice. At the same time,
the Washington Consensus has failed many
developing nations. During the late 1980s and
the 1990s, many African and Latin American
nations opened their economies, slashed tariffs,
and undertook other painful economic reforms,
yet few nations in either Latin America or
Africa saw their economies take off. Even when
these poor regions boosted growth, it seemed to
have no measurable impact on employment, leaving
masses of unemployed people willing to try
another economic model, and leaders groping for
answers as well (p 57).
Kurlantzick
makes the point that China is still learning how
to conduct itself on the world stage and will
inevitably make its own mistakes. Driving the
country forward in its emphasis on employing soft
power is not only a desire to advance its
particular brand of political philosophy, but a
deeper desire to rebuild national credibility
greatly tarnished over the past 150 years.
As a country, China carries with it the
pre-1949 humiliation of being used by colonial
powers, coupled with a still-unsettled anxiety
over the condition Mao Zedong's era left behind:
"The idea that China had become a rising power
swept through the domestic and foreign media,
partly replacing images of China as a weak state
preyed upon before 1949 by foreign powers and then
decimated by Mao's changes. And like the United
States in the
Head
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11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
Soft Power Is
Transforming the World is a balanced and
elegant application of Nye's concept of soft power
to the question of how China is engaging the
world. 
