Joseph Nye on Soft Power Competition with China | Nobel Peace Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk

I caught up with the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the legendary IR scholar

Joseph Nye at the 2023 Aspen Security Forum (Dan Bayer/Aspen Security Forum)

The Aspen Security Forum last week was a target rich environment for collecting excellent interviews for the podcast. This is one of the more high profile international security conferences and it tends to attract some big names, both inside government and from academia, media and civil society. Fortunately for you and I, several attendees agreed to sit down for a Global Dispatches interview.

My guest today, Joseph Nye, hardly needs an introduction. He’s the legendary international relations scholar and former head of the Harvard Kennedy School who coined the term “Soft Power.” (If hard power is getting others to do what you want through coercion, soft power is the ability to get others to do what you want through attraction.)

I was most interested in having Joe describe the state-of-play of Soft Power competition between the USA and China. You should listen to our entire conversation, but I would flag his s…