Smart Power: Joseph Nye And John Mearsheimer

Power has the ability to control a persons behavior and actions with the use of coercion, payment, and attraction. Theorist such as Joseph Nye and John Mearsheimer retain individual views of power. Where as Nye has a liberalist view by what is know as Soft Power, where manipulation is used with the absence of violence. Compared to Mearsheimer's realist view where Hard Power is the presence of violence and force. With the combination of both powers, balance is shown between the perspectives of Nye and Mearsheimer. This is called Smart Power. Hard power is more effective that soft power, hit the use of smart power dominates them both. Smart power is a concept put forward by Joseph Nye where soft and hard power are combined. An example of interactions regarding smart power is during World War II. The United States defeated, our enemy at that time, Japan with hard power by using atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but now, we have been creating institutions and alliances, also known as soft power, which have lasted until now. If only hard power was used, we would have not created alliances, but if we only used soft power, we would have lost to
As Nye has said, "The world is neither unipolar, multipolar, nor chaotic-it is all three at the same time." Unilateralism works more towards Mearsheimer's view of power, where you act on your own, but it's also possible to be multilateral if it is of self interest. An example of unilateralism is The Afghanistan war. Afghanistan was harboring terrorist who attacked the United States and further attacks might be anticipated, so military action would be needed to prevent this from happening again. This shows the US only doing this for self defense to protect their citizens. An example of multilateralism is in World War II. Countries came together to defeat the Axis powers. This shows countries working together and collaborating for the greater