This chapter examines US foreign policy as ‘smart power’, a combnation of hard and soft power, in the twenty-first century. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw George W. Bush place a strong emphasis on hard power, as exemplifed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was evident after 9/11. While the war in Iraq showcased America’s hard military power that removed a tyrant, it failed to resolve US vulnerability to terrorism; on the contrary, it may have increased it. The chapter first considers the Obama administration’s reference to its foreign policy as ‘smart power’ before discussing Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy, the role of power in a global information age, soft power in US foreign policy, and how public diplomacy has been incorporated into US foreign policy.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince and the Discourses in exile, after three weeks being imprisoned and tortured because he was falsely suspected of being involved in an assassination attempt against the Medici. Reading those works, and particularly the former, through the light cast by torture, casts a new light on Machiavelli’s argument about new regimes and on the use of torture in the US foreign policy in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, the chapter argues that torture is designed as an ideological process, a way to disrupt potential political communities and to replace them with audiences for the “fiction of power” and authority that new regimes create through physical torture and the displacement of populations.
We live in an era of pervasive connectivity. At an astonishing pace, much of the world’s population is joining a common network. The proliferation of communications and information technology creates very significant changes for statecraft. But we have to keep in mind that the Internet is not a magic potion for political and social progress. Technology by itself is agnostic. It simply amplifies the existing sociologies on the ground, for good or ill. And it is much better at organizing protest movements than organizing institutions to support new governments in place of those that have been toppled. Diplomacy in the twenty-first century must grapple with both the potential and the limits of technology in foreign policy, and respond to the disruptions that it causes in international relations.
La política exterior del gobierno de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: una típica política peronista del siglo XXI / The foreign policy of the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner government: a typical peronist policy in the twenty-first century