US political scientist Joseph Nye, who co-authored the international relations theory of neoliberalism together with Robert Keohane and coined the term “soft power,” has died at the age of 88, according to Harvard University.
During his six decades as a Harvard professor, Nye helped develop the John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS), where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004. The faculty’s graduates include many prominent US politicians.
In a statement on Wednesday announcing his passing, HKS said that Nye’s “ideas on the nature of power in international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students and made him one of the world’s most celebrated political thinkers.”
The scholar “developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism,” the statement read.
Nye introduced the theory of “soft power” in the early 1990s to describe the ability of countries to get what they wanted from other nations “through attraction, rather than coercion or payment.” He later came up with the concept of “smart power,” stressing the effectiveness of combining hard and soft power into a single foreign policy strategy. The term was frequently mentioned by the administrations of US presidents Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and Barack Obama (2009-2017).
President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) put Nye in charge of his administration’s nuclear non-proliferation efforts. Under Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and served as assistant secretary of defense.
Former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Nye as “a friend and mentor to so many, including me” in a post on X. “Few contributed as much to our intellectual capital, our understanding of the world and America’s place in it,” he wrote.
Nye had recently been increasingly critical of US President Donald Trump, accusing him of neglecting soft power and “bullying” other countries, including America’s allies. “Extreme narcissists such as Trump are not true realists, and American soft power will have a hard time during the next four years,” he wrote in an article for the Financial Times in March.
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