Outside the Beltway

Joseph Nye, 1937-2025

The scholar-statesman best known for coining "soft power" has died at 88.

James Joyner · Thursday, May 8, 2025 · 3 comments

Financial Times, “Joseph Nye, who coined the term ‘soft power’, dies aged 88“

Joseph Nye, one of the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners in the field of international relations and coiner of the term “soft power”, has died aged 88.

In a career spanning six decades, Nye made extensive contributions to political scholarship and served in two US presidential administrations, leading nuclear non-proliferation efforts and pushing for closer ties with Japan.

Most notably, he came up with the concept of “soft power” to describe a nation’s ability to get what it wanted “through attraction, rather than coercion or payment” — an idea he said US President Donald Trump had failed to grasp.

“Few contributed as much to our intellectual capital, our understanding of the world and America’s place in it,” said Antony Blinken, secretary of state under Joe Biden.

Nye’s career oscillated between theoretical and policymaking roles, which colleagues said gave him a unique insight into the mechanics of US foreign policy.

“I guess the big thing about Joe was, to me, he is the perfect academic who is able to do the highly theoretical international relations thinking and then turn it into policy,” said Dennis Wilder, a former CIA China expert and top White House Asia adviser to George W Bush. 

Nye graduated with a PhD from Harvard in 1964 and joined the university’s teaching staff. He was one of the founding faculty members of the modern iteration of the university’s Kennedy School of Government, a conveyor belt of leaders and policymakers. 

Alongside fellow academic Robert Keohane, Nye put forward the theory of “complex interdependence”, arguing countries can become so economically entwined that military force ceases to be the most important factor between them.

President Jimmy Carter put him in charge of his administration’s efforts on nuclear non-proliferation, a subject he continued to work on as head of Harvard’s Belfer Center, a research hub, from 1989 to 1993.

Nye returned to government under President Bill Clinton, who appointed him chair of the National Intelligence Council and an assistant secretary of defence, tasked with developing strategy on US security relations with the world at large — and in particular Asia. He was a leading advocate of the US-Japanese alliance as Chinese power in the region grew.

Randall Schriver, chair of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, praised Nye’s “innumerable contributions to the national security of the United States”. He said Washington’s alliance with Tokyo “has continued to flourish in no small part due to [Nye’s] efforts” and those of Richard Armitage, another prominent US diplomat, who died last month.

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In recent years, Nye was a staunch critic of Trump, who he argued did not understand the value of soft power. “His background in New York real estate gave him a truncated view of power limited to coercion and transactions”, he wrote in a recent Financial Times essay.  “True realism does not neglect liberal values or soft power. But extreme narcissists such as Trump are not true realists, and American soft power will have a hard time during the next four years,” Nye wrote.

Harvard Kennedy School, “Joseph Nye, Harvard professor, developer of ‘soft power’”’ theory, and an architect of modern international relations, dies at 88“

Joseph S. Nye Jr., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, whose ideas on the nature of power in international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students and made him one of the world’s most celebrated political thinkers, has died at the age of 88.

Nye developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism during six decades as a Harvard professor. He joined the faculty in 1964 right after earning his doctoral degree and went on to become a major force in developing the modern John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004.

Nye also put his ideas into practice in government, serving in key U.S. national security roles in the Carter and Clinton administrations and leading a host of transnational policy organizations such as the Aspen Strategy Group, which he helped found. That combination of academic rigor, engagement, and hands-on government service informed and enriched his research and teaching.

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Nye led the Belfer Center, then named the Center for Science and International Affairs, from 1989 to 1993. In those years, the center carried out groundbreaking research on the threat posed by lax controls over nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union as it came apart after the Cold War. That work directly shaped U.S. policy in guarding against the dangers from “loose nukes.” Nye went on to oversee nuclear weapons proliferation policy in the Clinton Administration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council and then assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

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Graham Allison, the founding dean of HKS and Nye’s lifelong friend and fishing buddy, said, “Joe was a pillar of Harvard, of HKS, and of the Belfer Center. His passion was advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the most critical questions of war and peace. He was proudest of having contributed both intellectually (as co-chair of the Avoiding Nuclear War project) and practically (in the Carter and Clinton administrations) to preventing nuclear war. And he was not just a friend, but a functional brother, whom I loved.”

Nicholas Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Security and a former career diplomat, said, “What really stood out for me was Joe’s commitment to be a servant leader in everything he did. Literally hundreds of us count Joe as our indispensable mentor. He was simply a giant at the Kennedy School and in our lives. I will miss his piercing intellect, great warmth, humor, and friendship.”

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Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. was born in 1937 and grew up in a small New Jersey farming town. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and then was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford before arriving at Harvard for his PhD. He joined the faculty in 1964, beginning a more than six-decade affiliation with the University. He quickly made a name for himself as an influential scholar of international relations. In the 1970s, Nye attempted to account for the growing influence of new forces, such as multinational corporations, transnational social movements, and international organizations, in global politics. In other words, as he would say in his influential 1977 book, coauthored with Robert Keohane, a framework for “the political analysis of interdependence.” That book, “Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition,” was often referred to as the foundation for neoliberalism.

Nye resisted that label, preferring to call himself a liberal realist. But he also found labels in general unhelpful, he told the Harvard Gazette in 2017: “I think pigeonholing of people in theoretical categories stops thinking rather than advances it.” 

It was Nye’s theory of “soft power” that may be his most important scholarly contribution. If his earlier work had attempted to explain the growing importance of interdependence, soft power analyzed the nature of global power itself. In its simplest terms, as Nye wrote in his book “Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power,” the idea was that “if you can get others to want what you want, you can economize on sticks and carrots.” 

The idea was crucial to understanding the enduring power of the United States at a moment when many thought it was in decline. “I looked at our military power and our economic power, and I said, there’s still something missing, which is the power to get what you want through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment,” Nye told the Harvard Gazette. 

Nye’s approach helped to highlight the power of a country’s culture or civic society, and it has been crucial in understanding that power could be measured in more ways than just army divisions and aircraft carriers. 

Active as a writer and commentator to the last, Nye had continued to offer his analysis on American foreign policy in the age of Trump, warning that the country’s soft power was being squandered.

“When you come into office, the first things you say are that you’re going to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, no matter what; or you say that we’re going to retake the Panama Canal, which reawakens all of the Latin American suspicions about American imperialism; or you abolish AID, which is an agency which makes Americans look more benign through its assistance,” Nye said in a recent PolicyCast interview. “Basically, these suggest that you’re not even thinking about America first, you’re thinking about America alone.”

But he ultimately believed in the enduring power of American attraction: “The fact that people can stand up and criticize the government, and that that will be published by a free press—that attracts people abroad to American values. So I tend to be optimistic over the long run about American soft power because I think there’s a lot of resilience in our society.”

As he put it in a separate interview last month, “It’s a bad spell, but I think we will survive it. I have no doubt. As I ended my memoir, ‘I still have a faint ray of guarded optimism.’ It’s getting a little fainter, but it’s not extinguished.” 

One hopes that optimism is ultimately borne out and that American soft power has not died with its progenitor.

Oddly, despite his stature as both a scholar and statesman, news of Nye’s passing circulated slowly. As best I can tell, none of the major US news outlets has so much as published an obituary.

Daniel Drezner shares his thoughts:

My last newsletter discussed the death of American soft power and the possible effects that would have on U.S. foreign policy. My analysis was predicated on Joseph Nye’s original conception of the term, which he initially developed in 1990 and then fleshed out in multiple subsequent books.

Based on a PolicyCast podcast he recorded last month, it would seem that Nye would have agreed with my assessment. He said, “When you come into office, the first things you say are that you’re going to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, no matter what; or you say that we’re going to retake the Panama Canal, which reawakens all of the Latin American suspicions about American imperialism; or you abolish AID, which is an agency which makes Americans look more benign through its assistance. Basically, these suggest that you’re not even thinking about America first, you’re thinking about America alone.”

In a cruel twist of fate, American soft power was not the only death recorded this week. On Wednesday the Harvard Kennedy School of Government announced that Nye himself had passed away at the age of 88.

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I’m not entirely sure Nye gets credit for coining neoliberalism, but he did develop the idea of complex interdependence with Robert Keohane. Between that and soft power, Nye deserves credit for developing multiple important concepts decades ago that continue to be relevant in current debates about international relations.

Joe was not just an ivory tower scholar, however. He might have been the Platonic ideal of a scholar who easily bridged the divide between theory and policy. As he recounted in his memoir A Life in the American Century, Nye also served in the U.S. government multiple times, with stints as deputy secretary of state, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. He also served as Dean of the Kennedy School in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In other words, Nye survived and thrived as a scholar, a policymaker, and an administrator. It is a rare person who can excel at all three roles. As Nicholas Burns noted, “Joe was a protean man — founding father of the Kennedy School, brilliant academic, admired senior government official. What really stood out for me was Joe’s commitment to be a servant leader in everything he did. Literally hundreds of us count Joe as our indispensable mentor.” Similarly, Dennis Wilder, a former CIA official and White House adviser to George W Bush, told the Financial Times that, “I guess the big thing about Joe was, to me, he is the perfect academic who is able to do the highly theoretical international relations thinking and then turn it into policy.”

I got to know Joe over the last two decades through multiple conversations on a variety of panels, roundtables, and conferences. What always struck me about Joe was how he carried himself as a senior scholar. Like Bob Jervis, Nye was devoid of the pettiness that often consumes even senior academics. He was always generous with his advice, and he was never perturbed by serious debate. To put it more plainly, I want to be like Joe Nye when I grow up.

A laudable goal, indeed.