The Seesaw of Power

The 20th century ended with the United States as the unchallenged superpower in the world. In the 21st, while America’s military might has remained dominant, the “soft” powers of wealth and information have distinctly shifted — the former increasingly to the East, and specifically to China, the latter to a new, transnational cyberrealm of instant information and communication.

Kishore Mahbubani, top, Dambisa Moyo, center, Joseph S. Nye Jr., bottom.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., Dambisa Moyo and Kishore Mahbubani have dedicated much of their professional lives to following these changes. Nye, professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, coined the term “soft power” in 1990 and has continued to explore the subject since, most recently in The Future of Power...

Moyo: I think the jury’s still out, if I may use the cliché, in the sense that it’s not so clear any more that the broader international community values the institutions that the United States can offer in the way that they did perhaps a few decades ago. It’s not obvious that institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. have the gravitas that they had, and it’s not obvious to me that countries around the world are still aspiring to be more like America in the way that they did when I was growing up in Zambia.

I think the West missed a trick, because it adopted — certainly in Africa and many of the poor emerging economies — an attitude of “do what we say and not what we do.” The whole idea of incentives, which has been the backbone of the success in Western economies, is not something the West transplanted into places like Africa. The approach to economic development in Africa has been focused on aid; it’s been focused on what someone called “learned helplessness.”

That’s left quite a bitter taste. Economically, many countries — not just in Africa, but Brazil, Chile — now turn to China. China gives them a real opportunity to sell agricultural products that have been locked out of the West through subsidy programs. It’s an opportunity for Africa to trade, which is a key piece of the puzzle for economic development. A continent of one billion has been less than 2 percent of global trade. The Western press will say, “Oh my God, China’s raiding Africa. It’s colonialization. Africans are being abused.” But it’s much more nuanced than that. People don’t believe that America is interested in Africa’s welfare beyond perhaps a few charity concerts and sending a few bits of aid money. People don’t really believe that America is interested in job creation in Africa and creating long-term sustainable economic growth...