What is it like to have a career that spans both academia and government? In this captivating interview with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a distinguished scholar and former U.S. government official, we explore the multifaceted life of a man who has profoundly influenced the field of international relations. Nye, a University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is renowned for creating the concept of 'soft power,' a cornerstone in global politics today. His illustrious government career includes roles such as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State.
In this conversation, Nye reflects on his extensive work at Harvard and other universities, as well as his time in government, shedding light on the interplay between academic theory and practical governance. Central to the discussion are his pioneering concepts of soft power and leadership, particularly his views on the power of persuasion. As Nye eloquently puts it, "Persuasion is about making others want to do what you want," contrasting it with coercion and emphasizing its vital role in both daily life and effective leadership. Nye also offers a deeply personal reflection on the process of writing his memoir, A Life in the American Century. He reveals the importance of his wife, Molly, in his life, saying, "In the memoir, I say that life is like an onion or a set of concentric circles. The outer circles are one's public accomplishments, government publications, and so forth. But the innermost circle, for me, is love. That starts with my wife... Without the stability that inner core provides, you can get pretty much blown about on those outer circles." He acknowledges her as a true partner, stating, "This is not just my book—it's her book as well."
In summary, this interview weaves together a diverse range of themes to offer a comprehensive look at the personal and professional life of a scholar and public servant who continues to shape both academia and global policy-making, thus providing invaluable insights for anyone aspiring to follow in his footsteps.
Interview by Sorina I. Crisan – Matthey de l'Endroit, PhD
Q1. A Life in the American Century (2024) feels at times as being peppered with short love notes to your wife, which emphasize your gratitude to her for the support, patience, and love she has shown you throughout your career. Can you please share your views on the importance of having a supportive partner for someone who has high career ambitions?
Answer: In the memoir, I say that life is like an onion or a set of concentric circles. The outer circles are one's public accomplishments, government publications, and so forth. But the innermost circle, for me, is love. That starts with my wife, then family, and then friends as you move outward through the circles. Without the stability that inner core provides, you can get pretty much blown about on those outer circles. But if you have that stability from someone who is truly a partner in life, it gives you a sense of being able to cope with other things. So, I owe her a lot. And I tried, in those 'little love notes,' as you put it, to signify that this is not just my book—it's her book as well.
Q2. I would like to go further into this topic. You mentioned that you're aware you placed a heavy burden on her and are very grateful to her. Can you briefly address the impact of frequent work-related travel on your marriage and how you managed to maintain such a strong relationship despite all the travel?
Answer: Molly, my wife, is an artist who works with ceramics. She used to have an art gallery, called Gallery on the Green in Lexington. Obviously, that’s hard to combine with the degree of travel I had, but it’s also not like holding a job where you have to be in the office, which meant that sometimes she could travel with me. So, we had a lot of shared experiences by traveling together.
But it also meant I was very reluctant to take trips longer than just a few days unless it was absolutely necessary. The travel created a sense of tension, and we tried to alleviate it by having her accompany me whenever possible and by avoiding unnecessary trips.
Q3. In hindsight, how did your transition from government to academia impact your relationship with your wife and her career?
Answer: When I left the government after the Carter administration and returned to teaching at Harvard, it gave me more time to support Molly. This allowed her the opportunity to start an art gallery with some of her friends as partners, and I felt my role was to be supportive.
Even with an academic life, there were still tensions and pressures on time, but I was much more aware that I 'owed her one,' so to speak. When considering whether a trip or activity was necessary, I found myself turning down more things."
Q4. I would like to shift our focus now to the topic of needing to find oneself. Born into a “strongly isolationist family” (p. vii), you argue that when you arrived at university, “no one knew” your name and you “had to find an identity” (p. 7). Further, it was during your college years that you also worked at a mining camp, at which time you felt like you “needed to prove” yourself (p. 7). All throughout your career, you appear to have had a constant search for the “self” and a need for “reinvention,” as you shifted your work from academia to government, and from writing to public speaking, and vice versa. Why was it important for you to “find an identity” and “prove yourself” during your college years? And why was it crucial that you constantly redefine or adapt your identity all throughout your career?
Answer: I think all humans, as a social species, ask themselves, 'Who am I?' and 'Where do I fit in this larger picture?'
We initially start by defining ourselves in relation to our parents. Then, at school, we define ourselves in terms of our classmates. When I went from a small school to Princeton University, I was the only person from my school, while many of my classmates knew each other from larger schools, sometimes with 10 or 20 people from the same place. Once again, I had to ask myself, 'Who am I?' and 'How do I judge where I fit?'
The reason I mentioned the mining camp experience in my book is related to what the author Warren Bennis refers to as 'crucible moments'—intense experiences where a person discovers or reshapes their identity. At the mining camp, I was dealing with miners who couldn't have cared less about Princeton, East Coast schools, or anything of that sort. In that circle, you proved yourself by lifting a heavy creosoted timber in a mine or by shoveling ore into a cart to be taken out and dumped. My experiences there put everything else into perspective.
On my way back to Princeton from the mining camp, I chose to hitchhike alone across the country, which took about five or six days—I can't remember exactly. But during that time, I had to rely on the kindness of strangers for transportation. These experiences taught me to be less concerned about how any particular group of people defined me and more focused on realizing that I had to define myself. While this changed with different contexts, the core of who I am is something I had to figure out.
When I returned to Princeton, I felt I knew who I was.
Q5. Persuasion has been a critical element in your roles as a husband, father, government official, public intellectual, teacher and mentor, and analyst and writer (p. 236). How do you define ‘persuasion,’ and with hindsight, what has been its role and impact on your work?
Answer: Persuasion is the ability to influence others to do things you want them to do. We all use it constantly in our social interactions, though people sometimes underestimate its importance in politics. For example, President Eisenhower, who was a military man and a general before becoming president, once said that simply ordering people to do things with the threat of coercion isn't the right way to lead. He believed you should get people to do things because they want to—that's persuasion. He compared ordering people with the threat of coercion to assault.
Persuasion is about making others want to do what you want, and it's something we all use daily. We don’t run around beating each other over the head—though some people might—but persuasion is crucial to our social lives. In my own work, when I developed the concept of soft power, which is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment, it grew out of this understanding that persuasion is vitally important.
Q6. On creating the theory of ‘soft power,’ you mentioned that it was “a concept” you “outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 [that] was now [in 2007] a significant part of the great power competition and discourse,” especially when the Chinese President “declared soft power to be their national objective” (P. x). What led you to develop the concept of soft power, and how has it influenced global politics?
Answer: I developed the concept of soft power while trying to assess America's power in the world at the end of the 1980s, during a time when many believed the United States was in decline. I added up the military power and the economic power, but I realized there was still something missing—the ability to influence others to do what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment. That's what I called soft power. I published this idea in my 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, but the concept was originally developed as an analytical tool.
It was a great surprise when political leaders in other countries, particularly former Chinese President Hu Jintao, began to embrace the concept. When Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power, I thought, 'Boy, that concept has come a long way from the kitchen table.'
But more important than that personal satisfaction is the broader realization of the importance of soft power and persuasion. If we are to understand how societies and political systems function, we need to recognize that not everything revolves around coercion or payment. While those may dominate in some countries and situations, in most democracies, they do not. That’s why an understanding of soft power is crucial for understanding life and politics in a democracy, and even beyond.
Q7. How did you expand the concept of soft power beyond international relations? And as your work has become so well-known and referenced, what kind of pressure has this placed on you?
Answer: If you're in the business of ideas, there's always the question of developing ideas. When it comes to soft power, I originated it, as I mentioned, in the context of international relations. But one of the things I did in developing it was to connect it to leadership. So, in 2008, I wrote a book called The Powers to Lead, where I argued that soft power isn't just about international relations, but also about leadership in everyday life. Then a few years later, in 2011, I followed that with another book called The Future of Power, in which I tried to integrate various types of hard power, such as economic and military, with soft power, and I also examined how they would function in a cyber environment. In that sense, I didn't create an entirely new concept every time I published a book, but I worked to broaden the initial idea and apply it in different contexts.
Q8. In the memoir, you mention that you “wrote in 2021: ‘With time, I have come to realize that concepts such as soft power are like children. As an academic or a public intellectual, you can love and discipline them when they are young, but as they grow, they wander off and make new company, both good and bad. There is not much you can do about it, even if you were present at the creation’” (In Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power: The Evolution of a Concept”) (p. 82). Why do you apply human characteristics to the concepts and theories you create, and how has this approach influenced your work?
Answer: When I developed the concept in 1989, there was a widespread belief that the United States was heading in the same direction as Spain in its decline or Edwardian England. Paul Kennedy, the great British historian, had written a book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which became a New York Times bestseller and supported this view.
I disagreed with that idea, and in explaining why, I developed the concept of soft power. However, as the concept became more widely used, it was also misused. Some people started to think of soft power as anything other than military power, believing that all economics was soft power. Others dismissed it as too vague, saying it didn't explain anything. This is what I mean when I say that your ideas, like children, can be adopted or misinterpreted by others. But all you can do is try to stick to the basic guidelines you set out from the beginning.
Q9. Academia often requires a ‘nomadic life,’ where career growth depends on moving to places where opportunities arise, especially if one is supporting a family. You mentioned that obtaining a doctorate was “good insurance” for you (p. 16), but today, a doctorate doesn’t guarantee job security in academia. How do you view the current state of academia and job opportunities for new PhD graduates?
Answer: Academia is difficult because it operates in a world of ideas, and some ideas are more popular or fashionable than others. When you're looking for employment, sometimes the ideas that you have or are most original are not the ones best suited for securing a job. Many PhDs, for example, those from Harvard in classical literature or English, are finding it difficult to get jobs as universities shift focus from classical liberal arts to fields like STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—which is what students tend to demand today.
These trends in academia make plotting a career path difficult. You have to be prepared to move where opportunities exist. Many people end up teaching in places they never thought they'd live or taking jobs that aren't exactly what they wanted. So, there’s a degree of insecurity, a certain a degree of nomadism. However, if you enjoy teaching and interacting with people, passing along ideas, then no matter where you "pitch your tent," there's an intrinsic satisfaction that comes with it.
Q10. You’ve done many back-and-forth transitions between academia and government, and have realized early on the importance of getting reacclimated to the new work environment by first listening and then acting. What are some examples of key management skills you needed to learn in order to advance and grow in your academic and political career? And what are some key transferable skills you’ve noticed between academia and government that have helped you navigate both fields successfully?
Answer: Academia and government differ significantly in terms of the importance placed on time and power. Obviously, time and power matter to both, but they carry different premiums.
For example, in academia, if I’m writing an article for a refereed journal that I want to stand the test of time and be cited for decades, then I want to focus on getting it exactly right. Whether it’s published next month or next year is less important and at times, getting it to a level of quality that would meet the standard of the referee journal may even take several years. However, in government, timing is absolutely crucial. If I’m writing a memo for the President in preparation for a foreign minister’s visit at four o’clock, and I’m still working on it because I want to turn a B-plus memo into an A-plus, but don’t deliver it until five minutes after four, that’s an F—total failure. In government, timeliness is everything. So that's the difference in terms of the premium on time.
The other big difference is power. In academia, as you're developing ideas in academia you have to be alert to aspects of power. All human relationships have power aspects, but the quality of the ideas can't just be determined by power. If you try to just develop ideas that are acceptable or fashionable among the people around you, who may control your fate, you probably won't develop very good ideas. On the other hand, in government, you have to be alert to these changes in power. If you develop a brilliant policy idea, but you can't sell it to anybody, you can't persuade anybody about it, then it's not much value. It's not going anywhere. It's going to be put on the shelf. So that alertness to how do I form a coalition which can promote this idea and get it accepted and translated into action that's central to government. In academia it's not irrelevant, but it's not central. You need to have ideas that will stand the test of time.
In both time and power, the differences between academia and government are stark. What’s interesting, as you mentioned, is moving back and forth between the two and having to adjust your behavior and skillset to suit the demands of these different environments.
Q11. When reentering academia as a dean for eight and a half years, you joked that after the Pentagon your vision for the Kennedy School was “a fleet of five helicopters” (p. 138). As dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, you balanced a wide range of responsibilities and to name a few: (1) you contributed towards increasing the “female proportion of the student body, faculty, and staff” because women perceived the school as “an old boys’ club” and ensured “political balance” while increasing the number of foreign students (p. 140); (2) you encouraged your staff to implement “a set of rules within the Kennedy School regarding how one should treat romantic relationships between two consenting adults” when “one person had a direct position of power over another” (p. 150); (3) and you helped create Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, inspired by your work with the Kennedy School, and then did the same in Singapore, Berlin, and Dubai (p. 180). Can you share some general lessons learned and views on successfully managing HKS?
Answer: The first important rule is to listen. The reason I made that joke about wanting five helicopters when people asked for my vision for the Kennedy School—right when I was starting the job—was to say something so absurd and silly that it would make them laugh and allow me to avoid giving a serious answer too soon. I wanted to wait until I had met with people and actually listened to them before offering any serious ideas.
As I met with students, faculty, staff, colleagues from other schools, and so on, I began to develop a clearer picture of what the Kennedy School needed. And, I basically picked up the key points that that you mentioned. But had you asked me about those points when I first started—while transitioning from the Defense Department to the Kennedy School—I might have said things that were irrelevant, or I might have missed the truly important insights that came from talking to people.
So, the first piece of advice is to listen. The second is to put together the right people who can implement ideas. Something I learned is that nobody can run anything large by themselves, and trying to do so can often lead to massive problems. In government, when I initially thought I could solve problems by staying up later, reading more, and writing my own responses, I quickly realized it couldn’t be done. And the same is true, albeit on a smaller scale, in academic administration. Success relies on having a good executive dean, a good dean of students, and a solid development officer. As some people put it, "Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are," and listen to them. Getting the right team in place to implement things is crucial.
The third point is the ability to persuade others and bring them along in the vision that you have and to get them to share common goals. Academics, like anyone else, have their own private interests. Most of the time, they'd prefer to be left alone to do their own research and maybe teach some of it to students. But when you try to persuade them about the common enterprise, that's where the persuasion comes in. And so, I decided to I organize off-site retreats and faculty projects focused on themes like trust and government or visions for government in the 21st century to encourage people to step out of their silos and think collectively.
So, I think the three major lessons I learned as dean of the Kennedy School are: first, listen; second, surround yourself with capable people; and third, persuade others to share in a common vision.
Q12. You have taught at prestigious institutions around the world, including Harvard, Oxford, and Tsinghua University. In 1968, you also became the Carnegie Endowment International Peace Scholar in Geneva and conducted research and taught at the Graduate Institute of Higher International Studies (p. 30-32), where I also obtained my PhD in 2019, and attended your 2017 lecture on “Are we seeing the end of the American liberal order?” Can you share some of your reflections on how that experience compared/contrasted with your other teaching experiences? And what do you believe is the continued importance and role of Geneva in the future development of international cooperation?
Answer: I loved my time at the Graduate Institute. It is a fine institution with good students and a very interesting set of faculty.
One of the major differences between the Institute and, say, Harvard, where I had come from, was that there was much less interest in the strict disciplines of political science or economics per se, and more interest on practical applications, particularly to international institutions. That created a different atmosphere and climate. And that reflects on this point that Geneva, as the former seat of the League of Nations, the International Red Cross and so forth, has a tradition of international institutions and attention to it, and that I think remains a crucial asset, something that the Graduate Institute has been able to cherish and nourish. And I think the worry I would have is that whether we're now going through a phase in world politics where the role of international institutions and organizations is being downgraded, if so, that will cause problems, I think, for the Graduate Institute.
Q13. How have your perceptions of retirement and ageism evolved throughout your career, and have individuals acted differently towards you over time?
Answer: It's a very important and timely question. When do you ease off? When do you let go? And how do you let go?
For example, I personally think President Biden should have run for one term and then passed the torch to a younger generation. But this is part of a broader issue we're seeing in many countries—a generation of people in their 70s and 80s holding on, thinking they're indispensable.
I believe it’s important to know when to step back and how to step back so that you don’t obstruct others. Still, if you feel you’re contributing, finding that balance is not easy. As we’re witnessing, many countries are going through leadership transitions where it’s difficult for leaders to strike that balance right.
Q14. You spent three months at All Souls College in Oxford, in 2001, and “wrote a book that summarized my views: The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. It was to become the most widely read work (other than my textbook, which ran to ten editions) – selling more than 100,000 copies and making it onto the Washington Post and The Economist list of ‘best books of the year’” (p. 164). How were you able to write such an impressive book in just three months? And can you briefly share some advice based on your writing process?
Answer: If you can get into a situation like All Souls College, where all your needs are taken care of and there's no teaching, and you've been thinking about a subject intensely—so that you know what you want to say and how you want to say it—then I find I can get up early in the morning, write for six or eight hours, and get a fair amount done in a first draft in a very short time.
I wrote a book in the '80s called Nuclear Ethics when I was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy for four weeks. I wrote the first draft there, but again, it was something I had been teaching and thinking about, so I knew what I wanted to say.
The hardest part of writing is figuring out what you want to say and how you're going to organize it. If that's taken care of in advance, I find the writing process goes quite quickly.
In the case of my memoir, A Life in the American Century, I was fortunate to have 50 years of diaries. For some odd reason, I had kept diaries—just one page per day, which I would write before going to bed at night. When I was trying to recapture the feeling of what it had been like to live through this period, I could refresh my memory quite quickly. It was interesting to see that, very often, your memory plays tricks, and things aren't exactly as they were. That's where the diaries came in. Writing the memoir probably took about six months.
Q15. Based on your professional experience, would you like to share any advice or suggestions with junior-level professionals and academics interested in pursuing a similar career path?
Answer: When I was a young assistant professor of government, academia was a bit easier than it is today. With the increased emphasis on professionalism in the disciplines, there is sometimes a disdain for policy experience. If I were to offer a strategy for a young academic, it would be to first nail down your academic credentials: get published in refereed journals, write a book or two that is reviewed as truly first-rate, and then consider a period of policy experience. When you return, that policy experience can enrich the next phase of your academic life. However, the path between academia and policy is, in some ways, a one-way street. It’s easier to move from academia into a policy position than to transition from a policy role into a first-rate academic institution. So, secure your academic credentials first, and then think about what you want to do in government or policy.
Above all, whether you're in government or academia, maintain your sense of integrity and curiosity. If you pursue things because you find them interesting and accomplish them in a way that allows you to live with yourself, you will be successful, no matter how success is measured, because you have kept your integrity and followed your curiosity.
Q16. Thank you for taking the time to discuss your memoir with me. As we conclude the interview, I’d like to ask: What is the meaning behind the title you’ve chosen for your memoir?
Answer: It's been an interesting interview. I thank you for it, and I think you've understood what I was trying to do in the book, which was to give a description of what it felt like to live through this period. And that's why I called it A Life in the American Century.
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University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
Harvard Kennedy School | U.S.A.
Note: This interview was recorded on July 15, 2024, and has been edited for clarity, ease of readability, and length.
Illustrations: The profile photo shown in this interview is made available on the website of Harvard Kennedy School.
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