Remembering Joseph S. Nye Jr.: Power, Diplomacy, and the Liberal Turn in International Relations

Joseph S. Nye Jr., who taught the world that power need not shout to be heard, died on May 6, 2025, at 88. In a field long dominated by force and fear, he pushed open a new vocabulary, one that made room for persuasion, legitimacy, and the quiet strength of ideas. His death marks the passing of a scholar who did not merely observe the world’s order, but rewrote its grammar.

Joseph S. Nye Jr. occupies an influential place in the evolution of International Relations (IR) theory. A rare scholar-practitioner, Nye not only shaped theoretical debates within the discipline but also influenced policy directly through his roles in the U.S. government. His core contributions – the concepts of “soft power, “smart power,” and “complex interdependence” – offered liberal alternatives to the realist orthodoxy that had dominated IR since the Cold War. These ideas formed part of a broader project of neoliberal institutionalism, developed most notably through his collaboration with Robert Keohane. Nye’s legacy lies not only in reimagining power beyond military might, but also in defending diplomacy, global institutions, and moral leadership at a time when U.S. foreign policy has increasingly leaned toward unilateralism and coercion.

Born in 1937 in New Jersey, Nye was educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard, and joined the Harvard faculty in 1964. Over a career spanning six decades, he served as Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, chaired the National Intelligence Council, and served as Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs. Nye was not only a prolific scholar, with over 30 authored books and scores of articles, but also an influential policymaker who advised multiple U.S. administrations. He was widely admired for his ability to translate complex theoretical insights into actionable foreign policy, and for maintaining a strong moral compass in his vision of global leadership.

Power Reimagined

Nye’s most notable theoretical innovation is undoubtedly the concept of soft power – the ability of a country to shape the preferences of others through attraction rather than coercion or payment. First articulated in his 1990 book Bound to Lead and later expanded in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), Nye argued that military and economic power were insufficient in an era of globalization and information flows. The global influence of American universities, pop culture, democratic values, and technological innovation demonstrated that legitimacy and admiration could accomplish what force could not.

This reconceptualization of power was a response to both the declinist literature of the 1980s and to realist assumptions that defined power strictly in material terms. For Nye, the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not a military victory but a triumph of ideas and values that delegitimized Soviet control. In his view, hard power and soft power should not be seen as opposites, but as complementary elements of what he later called smart power  – the strategic integration of coercive and attractive means to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Complex Interdependence and Neoliberal Institutionalism

Nye’s earlier collaboration with Robert Keohane on Power and Interdependence (1977) marked a foundational moment in what became known as neoliberal institutionalism. The book introduced the idea of “complex interdependence,” where state behaviour is constrained by multiple channels of interaction, the absence of a clear hierarchy of issues, and the declining utility of military force. This framework challenged the realist assumption of an anarchic international system governed solely by power politics.

By foregrounding economic, environmental, and transnational relations, Nye and Keohane reoriented IR theory to account for institutions, regimes, and norms as critical mediators of state behavior. As Andrew Moravcsik noted, Nye’s emphasis on asymmetrical interdependence and bargaining outcomes helped reframe how scholars understood preferences, not just capabilities, as central to international outcomes. Yet, despite these insights, neoliberal institutionalism has often been criticized for remaining too close to realist assumptions, particularly in its acceptance of the state as the primary unit of analysis and its emphasis on system-level rationality.

Critique of Trump-Era Diplomacy

Nye was a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy, which he viewed as dangerously dismissive of America’s soft power assets. Trump’s emphasis on unilateralism, budget cuts to the State Department, and disdain for alliances, Nye argued, undermined the very tools that had historically amplified U.S. influence abroad. Nye cited historical examples, including the Cold War and the Gulf War, to show how the combination of legitimacy, alliances, and values had produced more sustainable outcomes than brute force alone. In an era of global interdependence and transnational threats like pandemics and climate change, Nye maintained that the U.S. needed to exercise “power with others” rather than “power over others.”

He was especially critical of Trump’s background in New York real estate, which he believed conditioned the former president to favour short-term deals and transactional thinking over long-term strategic diplomacy. Nye argued that Trump’s style of leadership – brash, coercive, and heavily reliant on military and economic threats – showed little appreciation for the value of persuasion and legitimacy in international relations. In a Financial Times article, Nye called Trump a narcissist who “was not truly realistic” and warned that U.S. soft power would deteriorate under such leadership. Trump’s cuts to foreign aid and the weakening of institutions like the Voice of America were, for Nye, representative of this decline. He feared that these moves would not only reduce America’s influence abroad but also damage the very values that had historically set it apart.

In Nye’s assessment, Trump’s actions reflected a broader trend – the retreat of liberal internationalism and the resurgence of hard power paradigms. As Washington, Beijing, and Moscow returned to the strategic thinking of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, Nye’s subtler vision of global leadership was increasingly sidelined. Yet he continued to argue that in a world facing ecological, health, and cyber threats, the ability to attract and collaborate remained not just morally preferable, but strategically indispensable.

In a 2020 essay, Nye argued that the old liberal international order could not simply be restored but needed to be replaced by a more pragmatic, flexible framework grounded in variable coalitions for different global issues. He warned that ecological interdependence and cyber threats required multilateral cooperation, not nationalist retrenchment.

A Liberal Reinterpretation of Hegemony?

Although Nye rejected ideological labels, his work can be seen as a liberal reinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Like Gramsci, Nye emphasized the importance of moral and intellectual leadership, but while Gramsci viewed hegemony as a tool of capitalist domination sustained by consent, Nye framed soft power as a benign, even virtuous, means of international leadership. As recent scholarship comparing Nye to Gramsci and Robert Cox suggests, soft power can function as a form of hegemonic practice that embeds cultural and political norms into the global order.   

Yet this liberal framing has drawn criticism from Marxist and critical theorists. They argue that Nye’s soft power depoliticizes and obscures the structural inequalities embedded in global capitalism. While Gramsci’s concept of hegemony retains a critical edge by identifying civil society as a battleground for ideological struggle, Nye treats it as a neutral space where values flow organically. Moreover, Nye’s emphasis on elite institutions – Harvard, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley – as sources of attraction often glosses over whose interests are represented in this “attractiveness.”

Soft Power in Practice and Decline

Despite Nye’s insistence that soft power is primarily generated by civil society, its deployment has often remained state-centric. The U.S. Information Agency, Voice of America, and international aid programs have all functioned as tools of soft power, blurring the lines between persuasion and propaganda. Nye himself acknowledged the limits of soft power, stressing that it must be free from coercion, corruption, and co-optation to be effective. Still, critics argue that in practice, soft power has frequently been used to mask coercive strategies and to legitimize interventions under the guise of liberal values.

Moreover, in the wake of Trump’s resurgence, the soft power narrative faces renewed challenges. The damage to America’s credibility under Trump—from abandoning multilateral treaties to inciting domestic instability—has eroded the very values Nye championed. As Nye warned in his final interviews, soft power is fragile and can be squandered quickly if a country fails to live up to its own ideals.

Joseph Nye reimagined power for a world on the move, less by might, more by meaning. He championed diplomacy when it was unfashionable and mapped interdependence in an age of fracture. Yet, beneath his liberal clarity, critics saw a quiet defence of hegemony, not its undoing. Still, as the world slips deeper into coercion and distrust, his vision remains – urgent, imperfect, and undeniably vital.

[Photo by Chatham House, London, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.