By Mathias Risse
America’s reputation for protecting human rights, for standing up for individual liberties and freedoms is a great source of soft power and attraction in the rest of the world.
Joe Nye passed away on May 6, as we learned though Jeremy Weinstein’s announcement on May 7. Joe was 88, but in this timing the news was unexpected. He still came in regularly, and it was quite recently that I exchanged greetings with him on the street as he was making his way to the school. From time to time, he even attended faculty meetings, and Tarek Masoud tells in his own way how much Joe was still part of our lives.
Joe was the dean who added a human rights center to HKS. It actually took two deans, because it was Graham Allison, the founding dean of the current version of Harvard’s school of government, who was HKS alumnus Greg Carr’s interlocutor when Greg initiated the founding and gave the original endowment. By that time, Allison was director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. So it was Dean Joseph S. Nye who on June 10, 1999, during the school’s commencement exercises, announced the founding of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He stated that “the center will conduct research, teaching, and training on the policies and actions of governments, international organizations, and individuals that affect the realization of human rights. The center's mandate also includes philosophical research on the concept of human rights.” A young firebrand reporter called Samantha Power was appointed as its founding executive director, and Michael Ignatieff became its founding director. Just last month, in April 2025 we renamed the center Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, following a generous gift by our long-standing supporter Vin Ryan.
To a broader audience Joe might have been best known for coining the term “soft power.” In his own words, soft power is “the ability to affect others without the use of coercion or payment, by means of attraction.” The term caught on, and one reason that Joe’s name so commonly appeared in public debates was that it was often mentioned that it was him who had coined the term wherever the idea of soft power was put to use. The term caught on both in the public mind and as a term with a good deal of analytical potential. After all, one can then inquire about how such attraction is generated and how it changes. The inquiry here indeed is about attraction and not about just anything that can wield influence but is not a military matter. Joe sensibly did not like it when the term was used too broadly because then it would lose its analytical potential. It was not just through his role in the founding of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy that Joe was connected to human rights, but also in his belief that human rights were central to American soft power, and that it was to a considerable extent through its soft power – its attractiveness – that the U.S. became a dominant presence in the world.
Joe coined the term “soft power” years after his reputation as an international relations scholar had been made through work he had done with Robert Keohane on the role of power in a world of complex interdependence. When he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Clinton, his understanding of American security was shaped by his work on interdependence. It was right after stepping down from his role in the Clinton administration in 1995 that he became dean of the Kennedy School, and as dean he wanted Harvard, and the Harvard Kennedy School in particular, to play an important role in an interdependent world.
In 2023, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Carr-Ryan Center published a collection of contributions by about 90 HKS faculty and affiliates under the title Making a Movement: the History and Future of Human Rights. Joe contributed a short piece in which he illuminated the role of human rights in foreign policy. “Many Americans have a general sense of a human community,” he wrote, “and support a foreign policy based, not just on international legal obligations, but upon moral considerations.” He reminded readers of George W. Bush’s initiatives related to AIDS and malaria in Africa as moral policies that enjoyed such support. “Helping others,” Nye added, “is one of the foreign policy objectives for which American presidents have found public support.” Joe always saw the complexity in matters of foreign policy, though. He noticed that Americans supported moral dimensions of foreign policy, but the soft-power angle was more about enlightened self-interest than about purely moral motivations. As he put it in another publication, “America’s reputation for protecting human rights, for standing up for individual liberties and freedoms is a great source of soft power and attraction in the rest of the world.” He added that “one of the areas that we will compete in is the fact that people would rather see an open society than one in which millions of people are locked up (...) in detention camps.” So indeed, human rights matter to foreign policy both from a moral standpoint and as a matter of soft power – but that still does not capture the whole complexity of foreign policy: “Foreign policy involves trade-offs among many objectives, including liberal values," Nye argued in his contribution to our 2023 publication. “Otherwise, we would have a human rights policy instead of a foreign policy.” Sometimes Joe would say that countries need “smart power,” a combination of both “hard power – military power and economic sticks – and “soft power,” to be effective. This is insightful precisely because soft power isn’t everything that isn’t military. What was to be done in particular situations required a deep understanding of the moment.
Joe agonized a lot about the proper role of moral thinking, human rights, and soft power in the overall context of foreign policy and in assessments of leaders. In his 2020 book Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, he proposed a “three-dimensional ethics” that considers intentions, means, and consequences. In judging presidents by this three-dimensional metric, he drew on three foreign-policy schools of thought: realism, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, in that order. “Human rights should not be framed as pitting values against US national interests,” he wrote about this approach in that book, “because values are part of America’s national interest. We should start with realism, but not stop there. Within the realm of the possible,“ and this is where he drew a lesson from the liberal approach to foreign policy, “we should assert our values in the manner in which they are most likely to make a difference.” But then – in a move characteristic of Joe’s ability to manage complexity – he qualified immediately that “if we do not start with realism, we will soon rediscover that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Cosmopolitanism enters in assessments of leader because we must also ask “whether a leader’s goals include a vision that expresses widely attractive values at home and abroad, but prudently balances those values and assesses risks so that there is a reasonable prospect of their success.”
Which presidents got Joe’s praise for their use of soft power? Kennedy generated quite a bit of soft power with his oratory, making America an attractive place because it had leaders who, for instance, would ask citizens to reflect on what they could do to help their country rather than how they could personally benefit. Nixon, especially with his approach to Vietnam, undercut a good deal of American soft power. Carter’s human rights policies (and the fact that he was the first president who made them a priority for American foreign policy) restored and developed American soft power. But Carter also had to find out the hard way that foreign policy was complex beyond what could be achieved via human rights. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq undercut American soft power. And then Joe added, in an article from 2020, that “when Barack Obama was elected, as judged by public opinion polls, there was a great revival of American soft power and that under Donald Trump, the polls show that American soft power is at an all-time low.” It is, in any event, not presidents alone that generate soft power, but also American civil society. One way or another, we all reflect to the world the attractiveness of being American, and the attractiveness of being in America. American soft power is everyone’s task.
I have recently commented from various angles on foreign policy under the current administration (see here and here and here). Here’s something Joe wrote that brilliantly captures what his soft-power approach has to say about these matters. “Sometimes people say soft power is too soft to accomplish anything,” he stated. “It’s an important part of the arsenal of power. When you ignore it, as we tend to have done, it turns out to be quite costly.” Indeed. We should recall here also Joe’s understanding of American security as something that needs to be obtained an interdependent world.
Joe was not only the founding dean of HKS’s human rights center, he was also the dean who hired me, in 2002. During his deanship (1995-2004), the faculty grew considerably, and I came in as an assistant professor at the tail end of this expansion. It was under another dean that I received tenure, in 2010. When word came down from Mass Hall that the president had approved my tenure and the dean passed the news to the faculty, a number of congratulatory messages arrived. One was from Joe. I thanked him for hiring me and giving me the opportunity to be part of this institution. He replied that “it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.” That is of course the kind of thing one says to a freshly tenured youngster, and I’m sure in this sense a lot of things counted among the best things he’s ever done. But I still remember exactly where I was when I read this on my phone. I had never felt quite as strongly that I belonged to this institution, an institution whose virtues Joe so distinctly embodied. Among the many things we all have reason to be grateful for to Joe Nye, my own most personal and heartfelt gratitude to him is for that moment.
Mathias Risse, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School
