It is poignant yet perhaps fitting to mourn Joseph Nye, the distinguished international relations scholar, just as his life’s work championing U.S. leadership and liberal internationalism has run aground in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.
Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” died at the age of 88 on Tuesday. His intellectual leadership, teaching, policy guidance, and diplomatic efforts shaped five decades of U.S. foreign policy. His thinking also molded the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—the collective of scholars, think tankers, officials, and civil society leaders that Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, once derisively labeled “the Blob.”
It is poignant yet perhaps fitting to mourn Joseph Nye, the distinguished international relations scholar, just as his life’s work championing U.S. leadership and liberal internationalism has run aground in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.
Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” died at the age of 88 on Tuesday. His intellectual leadership, teaching, policy guidance, and diplomatic efforts shaped five decades of U.S. foreign policy. His thinking also molded the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—the collective of scholars, think tankers, officials, and civil society leaders that Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, once derisively labeled “the Blob.”
Nye and his confederates held fast to the idea that there was little America could not accomplish if it played its cards wisely: rallying ironclad allies, arguing persuasively, upholding the moral high ground, and outflanking adversaries in what Nye sometimes described as a game of “three-dimensional chess.”
Punctuating decades of decline, the early months of Trump’s second administration have closed the chapter on the U.S.-led postwar order that Nye stood for. Nye’s intellectual progeny must now do as he did: cast out tired theories to summon hardheaded yet imaginative understandings of the emerging world order and how to position the United States within it.
Born in 1937 in a small New Jersey farming town, Nye studied as an undergraduate at Princeton University before receiving a doctorate and faculty post at Harvard University. His 1977 book, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, co-written with political scientist Robert O. Keohane, became an instant classic. A salvo against the dominant realism of the Henry Kissinger era, the volume drew on the U.S. experience in Vietnam and the 1973 oil embargo to argue that global interconnectedness posed a series of challenges that did not submit to raw economic or military might and instead demanded cooperation and collective institution-building.
Presaging later notions of globalization, Nye’s early work revealed a careerlong penchant for peeling back the layers of international power dynamics, exposing little-noticed forces that greatly influenced geopolitics.
Nye’s gift in spotlighting, analyzing, and labeling dynamics hidden in plain sight was on sharp display when he introduced the concept of soft power in a 1990 article in Foreign Policy. This term referred to countries’ ability to mold one another’s preferences and actions through the power of example, cultural sway, and moral suasion rather than economic coercion or military force.
Building further on the concept in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, Nye argued that the United States—with its origin story, constitutional values, and penchant for technological and artistic innovation—was uniquely situated to draw on less palpable sources of power, including to stave off its own relative decline as other nations rose. (A personal note: I was gratified when Nye magnanimously helped popularize my own variation on his idea, which I dubbed “smart power” in a 2004 article that argued for synthesizing Nye’s notion of soft power with hard power and using the two in concert.)
Nye would go on to write and edit nearly two dozen books on topics including nuclear security and ethics in foreign policy, as well as a novel titled The Power Game. His ideas crossed oceans and borders: The European Union, China, Russia and others have put soft power into action through cultural diplomacy, an emphasis on traditional values, and investments in seeding their languages and cultures abroad.
But more than anyone else, his work shaped U.S. foreign-policy makers into values-oriented institutionalists. Diplo-optimists, these ranks held fast to the imperatives of dialogue and cooperation. They had faith that national generosity—in the form of development aid, democracy assistance, defense guarantees, weapons, and favorable trade terms—would return priceless goodwill. These scholars and practitioners of international relations were trained on a toolkit of U.S. power that included multilateral bodies, treaties, alliances and a panoply of government-funded peace, development, and media organizations.
Nye himself was not just a theoretical defender of the role of institutions but a hands-on builder who had the skill to put his ideas into action. Charismatic and refined, Nye won over colleagues and foreign counterparts alike with his engaging demeanor, twinkling eyes, and unflagging passion for policy. He served in key national security roles in the Carter and Clinton administrations, including as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and chair of the National Intelligence Council. He was the author of a landmark 1995 report on the importance of U.S. engagement in East Asia, which foreshadowed the so-called pivot to Asia that would be realized nearly 30 years later during the Biden administration.
Nye was also instrumental in strengthening Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004. In recent years, he led the Aspen Strategy Group, convening luminaries in his lifelong quest to find order, meaning, and direction where others see only chaos.
Nye’s hope sprang eternal about the prospects for U.S. power. (Many of his books had the word “power” in the title.) But near the end of his life, he wrestled in earnest with the question of whether the United States was in decline. His 2024 memoir, A Life in the American Century, concluded that U.S. dominance might survive another few decades but would look different than it had in his lifetime. He reflected, presciently, that while much of the consternation over the country’s prospects focused on China, his own “greater concern” was “domestic change” that could harm U.S. soft power. “Even if its external power remains dominant,” Nye noted, “a country can lose its internal virtue and attractiveness to others.”
Over the last eight years, the foundations of the belief system that Nye helped construct have corroded beyond repair. The first Trump administration showed the world a bombastic, mercurial, and sometimes ruthless side of U.S. power. A humbled Biden administration proclaimed that America was “back” only to struggle to reconcile its commitment to newfound humility with the ability to project power persuasively in an international landscape that, as Nye had predicted, was growing progressively more diffuse and contested.
The initial months of Trump’s second term have brought a stunning abdication of Washington’s commitment to soft power that Nye helped instill. The current administration has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); cut funding for civil society groups engaged in humanitarian and human rights work; recast Voice of America as a mouthpiece for the pro-Trump One America News Network; curbed immigration and foreign visas; attacked U.S. universities and research; and reduced Washington’s global diplomatic footprint.
Meanwhile, Trump’s indifference to the trans-Atlantic alliance; indulgence of Russian President Vladimir Putin; threats against Canada, Panama, and Greenland; and ricocheting tariff policies have cracked the bedrock of the country’s postwar identity.
Nye witnessed this unwinding. Just a week before his death, he said in an interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto, “I am afraid President Trump doesn’t understand soft power. If you think of power as sticks and carrots and honey, he leaves off the honey. But if you could have the three reinforce each other, you get a lot more done. You can also economize on carrots and sticks if you have the attraction of honey. So when you cancel something like USAID humanitarian assistance, or you silence the Voice of America, you deprive yourself of one of the major instruments of power.”
Nye’s arguments about the exercise of U.S. power, innate to generations of us in the policy world, have no grip on the current crop of national security leaders. Nor do they seem to matter much to a majority in Congress or the public, who have witnessed Trump’s wrecking of long-standing instruments of U.S. prowess with scarcely a shrug.
Nye (right) testifies alongside former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage during a hearing on post-9/11 U.S. strategy before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in Washington on Nov. 6, 2007.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Nye was a product of the postwar era. Nearly 5 years old when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and a week shy of 9 as 13,000 troops paraded up Fifth Avenue to celebrate the Allied victory in 1946, Nye grew up watching a generation of young Americans rise in defense of freedom, save the world from tyranny, and position their nation astride the globe. He came of age during the Cold War as the Soviet Union offered a foil for an idealized United States and the specter of nuclear annihilation loomed. Emotive forces—glory, sacrifice, camaraderie, fear, and resolve—framed the world that Nye saw, explained, and molded.
As the memory of these signature struggles faded, 9/11 gave the United States a renewed sense of purpose, but it also spurred a reflexive overreach that marked the beginning of the end. Protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fueled by illusions, incentives, and inertia that long outlasted the invasions’ original logic or purpose.
At this point, rising cohorts of Americans can recall no major triumphs in U.S. foreign policy. The globalization that Nye recognized as inevitable exacted a high cost for workers and communities in the United States and accelerated unprecedented income inequalities. Its benefits, including cheap goods and relative peace and prosperity, were ones Americans increasingly took for granted. Nye and Keohane’s concept of interdependence has morphed from a vision of solidarity and shared fate to a set of zero-sum entanglements to be escaped. Trump’s America is not a team player. It sees longtime allies as impediments or, at best, accomplices, rather than partners or friends.
Now, Nye’s intellectual progeny face the task of trying to guide an almost unrecognizable United States beyond the world as he knew it. Though he could not predict when, Nye foresaw that the American century that had defined his career would reach an end. While he thought perceptions of U.S. rectitude and attractiveness might wane, few expected it to happen so fast.
In Nye’s conception, the United States’ identity and its liberal ethos were inextricably intertwined. That fusion allowed all of us in the foreign-policy ranks to advocate for the country we loved and the values we held as if they were one and the same. Despite our nation’s endless betrayals and lapses of virtue, we never lost sight of what America stood for, nor gave up our faith in its better nature.
Under Trump, the country and the set of principles we long associated with it are being cleaved apart. Nye’s disciples must now learn to navigate—and perhaps one day again bridge—the gap between a beloved nation and the treasured values that its current government has left behind. As we lament the loss of Nye, we must also grieve the vanishing world he bequeathed us.
