Joseph Nye was due to attend a cybersecurity workshop at the Cabinet Office in London in 2014 but the Mall was closed for the state opening of parliament by Elizabeth II. He was unable to reach Whitehall. “I missed my appointment while a crowd waited for a little old lady driven by in a horse and carriage. Only in Britain could a 21st-century issue wait for an 18th-century parade,” he wrote in A Life in the American Century (2024), adding: “At least it was a good one, and good for British soft power too.”
While the US flooded the world with Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola and the Voice of America, British soft power was not to be underestimated, ranging from David Beckham, the Beatles and the British Council to the BBC and the 2012 London Olympics. In the 1960s and 1970s the Queen was an important tool of British soft power — her reconciliatory state visit to Germany in 1965, her state visit to Japan a decade later and her trip to Saudi Arabia in 1979, the first by a female head of state, all demonstrating that the country retained its international authority.
Nye coined the term “soft power” at his kitchen table in 1989 while writing Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990) during a sabbatical at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He described soft power as “the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment”, adding on another occasion: “It’s not just whose army wins. It’s whose story wins.”
The idea came to him while considering a response to The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) in which the British historian Paul Kennedy argued that the US was in long-term decline. “Why should it matter to Britons whether the Americans are, or believe themselves to be, in decline?” he wrote in The Sunday Times in July 1990. “Schadenfreude, or enjoyment at seeing Britain’s rebellious colony experience the fate of the motherland, could be one cause. But a better one is that the US remains the largest economic and military power in a world which requires increasing co-operation.”
Nye, whose softly spoken, paternalistic mentorship influenced American politicians of all colours, went on to explain: “I developed soft power as an analytic concept to round out my description of American power and add to my reasons for why the American century was not over.” As the theory crossed from academic debate to public discourse, he noted that “some people used it to mean anything non-military, while others exaggerated its attraction compared to hard powers of coercion or payment”.
Other countries also wanted a slice of the action. In 2007 President Hu Jintao of China declared soft power to be his country’s objective with Nye being invited to advise the country’s foreign minister over a private dinner in Beijing. Similarly, Australia adopted soft power as a means of improving diplomatic relations with its neighbours.
They were not alone. In an article for Monocle magazine, Nye explained: “The Roman Empire rested on its legions but also on the allure of Roman culture and citizenship … At the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall collapsed not under a barrage of artillery but from hammers wielded by people whose minds had been affected by western soft power … Volodymyr Zelensky used his talents as an actor to attract sympathy from western media and parliaments, which could be transformed into weapons to increase Ukraine’s hard power in its war with Russia.”
Soft power appealed to Bill Clinton when he won the presidency in 1992, but after 9/11 the idea proved less attractive to American voters. “What are the US armed forces for, if not to be used?” came the cri de guerre. Determined to exact revenge for those atrocities President George W Bush associated himself with “hard power” and when Barack Obama, like Clinton an internationalist in outlook, entered office Nye helped to combine the two concepts in the phrase “smart power”.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, used the term “smart power” 13 times during her 2009 confirmation hearings when explaining how she would tackle Islamist terrorism. “The ancient Roman poet Terence declared that ‘In every endeavour, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first’,” she declared. “The same truth binds wise women as well.”
Meanwhile, Nye remained committed to championing soft power as a tool of US foreign policy. “Seduction is always more effective than coercion,” he wrote in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004). “And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.”
Joseph Samuel Nye was born into a “strongly isolationist” family at home in South Orange, New Jersey, during the flu epidemic of 1937. He was the son of Joseph Nye, a Wall Street trader, and his wife Else (née Ashwell), a secretary in New York. Benjamin Nye, a Puritan, had arrived in Massachusetts in 1639 and the house he built in 1678 still stands in the small town of Sandwich, Cape Cod, where it is run by the Nye Family Association. Nye’s grandmothers were more recent immigrants, from Ireland and Germany. “My earliest memories are of World War II, the atomic bomb and the death of Franklin Roosevelt,” he wrote.
The family moved 15 miles west to the rural hamlet of New Vernon so that Nye and his three sisters could grow up on a farm. “On Saturdays it was often my job to kill, pluck and dress a chicken that we would eat for the Sunday noon meal.” He was sent to Sunday school, later contemplating a career in the ministry, and was educated at Morristown Beard School, where his younger sister’s classmate was Mary “Molly” Harding. They were married in 1961 and she later ran an art gallery in Lexington, Massachusetts. Molly died in December and he is survived by their sons, John, Ben and Dan.
Before their marriage, Nye read economics, history and politics at Princeton University, hitch-hiking to Alaska for a summer job in the Granduc copper mine on the Canadian border. Like Clinton he won a Rhodes scholarship, playing rugby and studying philosophy, politics and economics at Exeter College, Oxford. The Oxford drinking culture was tougher than anything he had experienced in Alaska, though he took advantage of being in Europe to explore widely, visiting Morocco, Auschwitz and Moscow.
At Harvard University he took classes from Henry Kissinger and JK Galbraith. He then travelled across east Africa on a Ford Foundation grant, returning to complete a PhD thesis on whether the pan-Africanist leaders of the region could keep their promises to preserve the common market inherited from the departing colonialists. The story of their failure formed his first book, Pan Africanism and East African Integration (1965).
Back in the US he lectured at Harvard, taking time out to examine why five small Central American countries were able to sustain a flourishing common market while those in east Africa were not. He later became dean of the university’s John F Kennedy School of Government, devoting much of his time to increasing the number of women and Republicans among the largely male and Democratic faculty.
Nye and his Harvard colleague Robert Keohane went on to develop the concept of neoliberalism in foreign policy, though he came to regard the term as too simplistic. They published Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (1977) a book that he proudly noted “was still being used in graduate courses in international relations four decades after it was first published”.
All this theoretical work proved useful when he joined Jimmy Carter’s administration as a security official specialising in nuclear non-proliferation, a subject on which he later published several books and papers. However, “as an academic it was a new experience to see my name in critical editorials and headlines or to be hauled before a Senate committee for a hostile grilling”.
Nye returned to government in the Clinton administration, serving as assistant secretary for defence and then chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which co-ordinates intelligence estimates for the president. He was tasked with developing US strategy on security relations with the rest of the world, especially Asia, where he played a key role in improving relations with Japan, a country that in 2002 embraced soft power with its “Cool Japan” branding.
Donald Trump’s first presidency upended much of what Nye believed in, with the new administration investing significantly less money and rhetoric in soft power than its predecessors. “Polls showed that American soft power declined considerably in 2017,” he wrote, a subject he expanded upon in his penultimate book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents And Foreign Policy From FDR To Trump (2019).
Nye enjoyed the great American outdoors, taking every opportunity to go fishing, hunting and camping with his sons. On one occasion while sailing down a remote river in Alaska they rounded a bend and came face to face with a 9ft grizzly bear standing on the bank with her four cubs. “I jumped out to try to hold the raft before we floated into her, but she got down on all fours and charged us,” he wrote. “Fortunately, she broke off the charge about 15 yards from us and ran off into the tundra with her cubs. Otherwise I might not be writing this.” He also observed how camping in Alaska made “a refreshing change and is a good reminder that the power of nature is greater than the power of Washington”.
Joseph Nye, political scientist, was born on January 19, 1937. He died of undisclosed causes on May 6, 2025, aged 88