OPINION> Columnist
‘Smart Power’ to kick-start a new epoch in the U.S.history
By Li Hongmei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-01-19 13:55

‘Smart power’, the phrase sprinkled through Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and used by Secretary of State-designee four times in her opening statements and nine times during her testimony, is supposed to be the phrase of the week immediately preceding Barack Obama’s Inaugural Ceremony scheduled on Jan.20th.

What is ‘smart power’? Harvard intellectual Joseph Nye Jr. wrote in 2006 in an op-ed for the Boston Globe describing it as ‘the ability to combine hard and soft power into a winning strategy.’ When it was repeatedly referred to by Clinton on Jan.13, nonetheless, the open-ended phrase would concern finding the ratio of soft to hard power needed to yield optimal results.

As Clinton was quoted as saying, ‘ we must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military political, legal and cultural—picking the right tool or combination of tools for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy.’ Smart power, as a blend of soft and hard, sounds more acceptable at the time to Americans than the tough and dumb power, which estranges friends, privileges force, undermines the U.S. credibility and proclaims war without end.

In the outgoing Bush administration, after all, the Americans have tasted a dose of the hard power featuring unilateralism, which has proved the undoing to the mythology of American possibility. Today's globalization and the scattering of world power, however, demand a new U.S.humility. As is widely acknowledged, wealth has now migrated to an archipelago of new powers known as BRIC, including China, Brazil, Russia and India, as well as the Gulf states. With the rise of these emerging economies, a diversity of political views would come into being.

‘When you are down, you need friends,’ as was remarked by an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC, think tank. That being the case, Clinton was right to say in her speech, ‘we must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries,’ especially in the Muslim world, she might have added.

Rarely has so much hope vied with so much anxiety as in the final hours before Barack Obama will be sworn in with Lincoln’s Bible beneath his hand and become the 44th U.S. president and the first African-American one in the U.S. history. It is still uncertain how well he would incorporate the very concept of smart power into ‘magical realism,’ which he vows to seek after in an endeavor to reverse the decline of the U.S. influence; but one thing seems certain: the worst ever economic downturn since the 1930s, which actually helped him win the presidency, is going to hang over at least the first 18 months of his presidency, with the Treasure bare, people deluged in debt, and confidence choked with Madoffs.

Perhaps today’s America could look back to 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his tenure with the economy devastated by the Depression. He said then, ‘this nation asks for action and action now.’ There came his 100-day New Deal accompanied by a torrent of legislation and speeches designed to kick-start the country. Obama has also been vowing a similar flurry of actions. But he is also prudent enough to talk down expectations saying that things are going to get worse, as he may realize an excess of realism could undo him.

Realism aside, Obama maintains two ‘magics’ of his own: language which he wields better than any recent president, and the bond he has established with the American people. May the U.S. become a smarter power under his leadership by investing more in the global good as well as in the renewal of the U.S. influence.