THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 73 combination of soft and hard power”). A Life in the American Century touches on these subjects, but Nye’s other works are a superior source on their theoretical underpinnings and real-life applicability. In a self-deprecating manner, he mentions how President Barack Obama, when told that the author had just written a new book, quipped, “Everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.” Much of the book is given over to reminiscences about his stints in public service. Nye, in pellucid prose, describes his time as deputy under secretary of State for security assistance, science and technology during the Jimmy Carter years. Based on sustained interactions with the Hill on a wide variety of issues, he discerned that “we spend more time negotiating with Congress than with other countries!” Recent biographies of Carter by Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird have given the former president’s administration high marks in some areas. Nye concurs, asserting: “If Carter’s foreign policy were a stock, we might predict its price among historians to rise over time.” During the Clinton administration, Nye served as chair of the National Intelligence Council and then as an assistant secretary of defense. His discourse on his time at the Pentagon is particularly gripping. Whether it was jetting off to sites around the globe or attending a swirl of meetings in Washington, he was always on the go and dealing with crises. Nye’s verdict on Bill Clinton? He “was a superb politician with an important ability to relate to people and pull them together.” Clinton also correctly warned, in nonhubristic fashion, that “we cannot police the world.” Nye’s years in the government came to a close when he accepted an offer to serve as the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1995. In the 2000s, one notices a gradual shift in his overall intellectual focus toward the consequences of globalization, including how to deal with China’s expanding economic clout. Nye is a charter member of the foreign affairs establishment, and his autobiography is chock-full of references to the bewildering array of organizations he has been affiliated with. A sampling: the Aspen Strategy Group, Atlantic Council, Bilderberg Group, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, Ditchley BOOKS The Odyssey of a Scholar and Public Servant A Life in the American Century Joseph S. Nye Jr., Polity Press, 2024, $29.95/hardcover, e-book available, 254 pages. Reviewed by Joseph L. Novak Joseph Nye has been one of America’s premier theorists of statecraft and foreign policy for decades. From his perch at Harvard University, he has written a score of well-received books and numerous articles. He has also rotated in and out of high-level government positions, including at the State Department. A Life in the American Century provides an absorbing chronicle of his rise to the halls of power and influence. Nye begins by evocatively describing his rustic early years growing up in New Jersey. Born at home in 1937, he describes his family as a “mix of immigrants.” He lived on a farm adjacent to a town that had “one stop light, one church, one grade school, one gas station, one small village store which doubled as the post office.” He thrived in school and went to college at Princeton. He won a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently enlisted in a doctoral program at Harvard. It’s a profoundly American story of a young person who, with talent, perseverance, and some luck, moved up the ladder. As an academic, Nye went on to earn renown for formulating the concept of “soft power,” which he defined as “the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion and payment.” He also popularized the neologism “smart power” (i.e., “the successful Nye avers that the U.S. government over the years has had to learn the hard way that “our power always had limits.”
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