Counter‐terrorism, Smart Power and the United States
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12356 |
| Author | Pauline Eadie |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
Counter-terrorism, Smart Power and the United
States
Pauline Eadie
University of Nottingham
Abstract
This article examines smart power, specifically in relation to US counter-terrorism initiatives, focusing on US foreign aid as a
soft power instrument. Economic aid and military aid are disbursed under the auspices of USAID and the military is tasked
with soft and hard power strategies that have proven problematic to manage as ‘an integrated grand strategy’. Identifying
variables that accurately indicate the success or otherwise of smart power as a counter-terror strategy is problematic. Never-
theless a tentative correlation can be drawn between high levels of US aid and low levels of trust in the US in frontline Islamic
states. This has led to slippage between hard and soft power and un-smart policy. Consequently a gap has emerged between
what the US hopes that the international community will respond to in terms of smart power as a counter-terror initiative and
what actually happens. The US has tended to revert to hard power tools in the face of this gap. I argue that foreign aid must
not only be soft but ‘sticky’in order for smart power strategies to succeed.
Policy Implications
•While US smart power draws on the sentiments of liberal internationalism this has been significantly undermined by a
resort to armed conflict and power politics in frontline Islamic states, specifically Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
•The US needs to develop credible self-awareness of its appeal, or lack thereof, and contextual intelligence.
•Smart power strategies should be viewed from the stance of the audience not those who deploy it. It also needs to be
reflexive.
•The US must devise effective strategies that counter the threat of terrorism otherwise it is in in danger of continuing to
waste money while also underwhelming the rest of the world with its lack of effective leadership.
•Foreign aid can be considered as both soft and hard power. If it is deployed as soft power it needs to also be ‘sticky’so
that it can create benign dependency.
In April 2008 Richard J. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye Jr. pre-
sented a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee called ‘Implementing Smart Power: Setting an Agenda
for National Security Reform’. Armitage and Nye (2008, p. 3)
see smart power as ‘an integrated grand strategy that com-
bines hard military power with soft “attractive power”’.
Whereas ‘hard and soft’powers are descriptors, ‘smart’
power embodies evaluation. Smart power is a non-coercive
strategy that aims to attract ‘others’
1
to a set of goals and
values or a desired agenda. As there is a great variation
among ‘others’, smart power must be reflexive and intelli-
gent in the face of differing contexts and cultures.
Nossel first mooted smart power in Foreign Affairs in
2004. She equated smart power to liberal internationalism
and advocated a post 9/11 foreign policy ‘focusing on the
smart use of power to promote US interests through a
stable grid of allies, institutions, and norms’(Nossel, 2004,
pp. 131–142). Armitage and Nye (2008, p. 4) developed
smart power ‘in large part as a reaction to the global war
on terror, a concept that we consider wrongheaded as an
organizing premise of US foreign policy’. Nossel (2004, pp.
131–142) expressed similar sentiments, saying that while the
Bush regime ‘adopted the trappings of liberal international-
ism, entangling the rhetoric of human rights and democracy
in a strategy of aggressive unilateralism [...] the militant
imperiousness of the Bush administration is fundamentally
inconsistent with the ideals they claim to invoke’. In other
words the United States has not been very smart in terms
of its counter-terrorism policy. Nevertheless smart power
was invoked, and indeed embraced in policy circles, as a
strategy capable of directing future US foreign policy in a
fashion that married the seductive message of soft power
with the authority and resolve of hard power. International
actors would align themselves with the aims and values of
the US and they would do this more or less willingly.
Smart power did not crystalize as a policy until the Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) launched a
bipartisan Commission on Smart Power in 2006. The CSIS
published a report in 2007, ‘A Smarter More Secure America’
(Armitage and Nye, 2007). The report took stock of Amer-
ica’s role in the world and sought to devise ‘smarter’ways
of wielding American power. Various think tanks continue to
thrash out ways to operationalize smart power. In a later
report entitled ‘Putting “Smart Power”to Work An Action
Global Policy (2016) 7:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12356 ©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 3 . September 2016 323
Research Article
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