Cold War 2.0 And The Ukraine War: Is Soft Power Dead

The war over Ukraine- the unfortunate opening salvo of Cold war 2.0 – has sparked both debate and policy re-orientation globally over the ‘utility of force’ or hard power and its primacy in international relations. The unstated corollary or even implication is that ‘soft power’- a concept and phrase popularized by Joseph Nye of Harvard university- is dead. It may be stated here that Nye along with his academic collaborator, Robert Keohane, had also coined the concept and idea of ‘complex interdependence’ – a condition where, roughly speaking, trade linkages and crisscrossing capital flows- either of a ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ nature would beget peace and even democracy across the world. But, paradoxically, what is being witnessed is a ‘global democratic recession’ , the occlusion of soft power and the inversion of ‘complex interdependence’.(The reference is to the superimposition(or meshing) of sanctions on complex interdependence to elicit a desired outcome with respect to Russia and employing this as a test case for a possibly similar confrontation with China).

The scope of this essay is limited to soft power. While there is a somewhat loose relationship between soft power and complex interdependence, the latter will not be discussed. The question then is: Is soft power dead? Was the concept-later qualified by Nye as ‘smart power’(a synthesis between smart and hard power)- always a mushy one- academic in nature but irrelevant to the ‘high politics’ of International Relations? Or does soft power have abiding relevance?

A brief discussion of International Relations is warranted here. The theory and practice of IR revolves around the basic unit of the same- the state form of

political organization- and what underpins either: Power. While the state is the grid of IR, power constitutes its sine qua non. Shorn of mushy (but good hearted) attempts to inject themes other than power into interstate relations, the will to power forms the elemental quest of states. And while power has different forms, permutations and combinations, hard power and the ability to project this power is the ultimate for a state or states. Obiter dictum, Stalin’s wry and cynical riposte, ‘how many tank divisions does the Pope have’,’ dismissed by many as an overstatement of hard power, actually holds.
 

This is the hard, cold fact of international relations. But, hard power, the actual determining and determinative factor of interstate relations, has limitations, not merely conceptually but also in practical, applied terms. The major one is that it has diminishing returns. Second, if the war over Ukraine, is held to be the ram rod example then obviously, a response to it, say in hard power terms, requires interstate co-operation. Co-operation can be elicited in basically two ways: one is, shared values by a group of states (or entities- say the United States, and the European Union) or through shared interests. It may, for instance, be in the short -term interest of a given state to bandwagon with the West over this particular issue not in its long -term interest. How to ensure co-operation in this case?

Compellence is one method. But compellence can yield co-operation only up to a point. Both diminishing returns and half- hearted co-operation and unwillingness sets in, rendered more poignant if there are domestic constituencies to be ‘catered’ to. How then can co-operation – both long and short term- be arrived at, between states of different and diverse natures?

Through soft power is the answer. The concept, as I interpret, is not only about shallowly defined values but also about an expansiveness and graciousness that others can notice, perceive and feel. Does, the question is, the west contemporarily, have this expansiveness? Difficult to answer but the answer is not in the affirmative. Over the past few years, the West has not only turned inward but is at odds with itself. It’s not necessarily a divided house, to employ a metaphor but an entity that is drifting. The obvious corollary here is that if the

 

West has become rather incoherent, its ability for and its soft power capability axiomatically gets diminished. Can the West recover this? Probably. How? Getting its act together would be the most facile way of putting it. But, the real and enduring way to re- imbibe soft power into the vitals of the West would be to dig and delve into its finest philosophical traditions and employ these as ‘lived reality’ within. The rest can follow. To conclude by answering the core question posed in this essay, soft power, as a concept, is not dead. Neither is it ephemeral. But practicing and applying it is both art and craft.

(The author has a Masters with Distinction in International Relations from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He worked as Associate Editor of Kashmir Observer.)