Joseph S. Nye, Jr. served as director of the Weatherhead Center, then named the Center for International Affairs, from 1989–1993. From his theories of complex interdependence to soft power (and beyond), his legacy is vast and he has influenced many institutions, leaders, and political scholarship at large. We hope to touch on these myriad contributions in our Forum event.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: I now turn the event over to Professor Erez Manela, acting director of the Weatherhead Center.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Kristin. So welcome, everyone, to Harvard's Center for International Affairs, and to our Weatherhead forum, which is our platform to address pressing topics of the day. As Kristin said, my name is Erez Manela, and I am the acting director of the center this year. And our forum topic today is the legacy of our longtime colleague Joseph S. Nye Jr., who passed away last May at the age of 88.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., universally known as Joe, was Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. His ideas on the nature of power and international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students, and made them one of the world's most celebrated thinkers on international affairs. He served as the director of the Weatherhead Center, then named the Center for International Affairs from 1989 to 1993.
During his six decades as a Harvard professor, Joe Nye developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism, among other achievements. He joined the faculty in 1964, right after earning his doctoral degree, and went on to become a major force in developing what is now the Harvard Kennedy School, where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004.
Nye also put his ideas into practice in government, serving in key US national security roles in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and leading a host of transnational policy organizations such as the Aspen Strategy Group, which he helped found. That combination of academic rigor, engagement, and hands-on government service informed and enriched his research and teaching. And I should add that those who knew him remember Joe Nye as an unfailingly kind and generous colleague and friend.
The breadth of Joe's influence and reach is reflected, not least in the truly incredible panel that we have assembled here today. So I will now introduce the panelists. And then each of them will speak about a different aspect of Joe Nye's legacy. Depending on where we are on time, I may then pause them some questions, and then we will take questions from the audience using the Q&A feature on Zoom. Please type your questions there, and I will try to get to as many as I can before we wrap up the forum at 1:15.
So we are truly honored to be joined today by our esteemed panelists. Our first panelist is Graham Allison. He is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught for five decades. Graham is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision making. He was the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. And until 2017, he served as director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which is ranked the number-one university-affiliated think tank in the world.
As assistant secretary of defense in the first Clinton administration, he received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service.
Our second panelist is Carla Dirlikov Canales. She's an opera singer who's been praised by opera magazine for possessing a voice that I quote here "Grabs the heartstrings with its dramatic force and musicality."
Most recently, Carla served the Biden administration in a newly-created position at the National Endowment for the Arts, and later in the president's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as senior advisor and envoy for cultural exchange. Through this role, she created and spearheaded the Artists for Understanding initiative, which aims to promote the arts and humanities and bridge divides through their capacity to foster dialogue, connection, empathy, and change making in communities.
Carla currently serves as a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School. And I can also tell you that she is currently joining us from Beijing, China, where it is now a bit after midnight. So thank you, Carla, for joining us this late hour.
Our third panelist is Christina Davis. She is the Edwin O Reischauer professor of Japanese politics in the Department of Government here at Harvard, and director of the program on US-Japan relations. Her research interests include the politics and foreign policy of Japan, East Asia, and the study of international organizations, with a focus on trade policy. She is the author of prize-winning books, and is currently working on several projects concerned with the evolving order of international trade, and economic sanctions.
Final panelist is Jake Sullivan. He is the Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was the 28th assistant to the president for national security affairs, also known as national security advisor, from January 2021 to January 2025. In the Obama administration, he served as a national security advisor to then Vice President Biden, as well as director of the policy planning staff at the US State Department, and as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
He's also been senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has held teaching posts at the University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, and Yale Law School. So thank you, all of you panelists, and all of you audience, for joining us. And Graham, would you please start us off?
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: No, thank you very much. And it's an honor to be part of a remembrance of Joe. He was a man of many parts, multiple dimensions. Many of them were actually reflected, I think, [INAUDIBLE] the celebration of his life just 10 days ago in Memorial Church, particularly by his three sons and his remarkable grandchildren.
But I'll take my 10 minutes to first say a comment about my relationship with Joe. And then secondly, to focus on one arena in which he impacted and has had a long standing, or will have a continuing impact on ideas about nuclear danger.
So the first personal comment. The godmother of the UN declaration on human rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, predicted presciently, that the idea and ideals that document affirms would advance, as she said, like a curious grapevine with stops and starts, twists and turns, but nonetheless relentlessly transforming inhabitants of planet Earth's understanding of their obligations to each other.
Her metaphor captures the relationship in which a special relationship, a deep partnership, developed over the past six decades in which I had the good fortune to know Joe after he first invited me to go fishing with him on a trip to Maine, pursuing land-locked salmon on the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers, where his father had introduced him to fly fishing when he was just 12 years old.
SARAH BANSE: Graham, can I interrupt you for one minute? Oh, your paper is blocking your face.
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: Sorry, excuse me.
SARAH BANSE: That's good.
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: This probably looks better.
SARAH BANSE: No.
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: That was the beginning of a relationship in which our grapevines became almost inseparable. We were sometimes called, co's, co-fishers, co-authors, co-project directors, co-institutional builders, co-fortunates in having found lifetime spouses who took care of us. So entangled that we could often finish each other's sentences and find ourselves at a loss to identify where one's thinking left off and the other begins.
So we're all still Morning Joe, and we'll remember him every day. But for those on the webinar who didn't get a chance to interact with him or engage with him personally, fortunately, he's left a great corpus of writing that you can engage with every day, and find illumination whenever you turn to it. So I'm going to try to highlight three items in particular about what Joe regarded as the most important challenge in the world, namely avoiding nuclear war.
He thought the supreme responsibility for all of us in government and in the academy was to avoid nuclear war because as he quipped, paraphrasing JFK, this is the single challenge that we must meet if we're going to have the opportunity to address any other issues in the world.
And while nuclear has fallen off the agenda, or did for a while, as we look at the world today, it's clearly a elevator going up in which the challenges come in a new form, but will be ever more difficult. And taking account of what Joe thought about these challenges earlier, I think, should be both inspirational and instructive for those who are trying to think about these going forward.
Let me highlight quickly three areas of his writing. First, avoiding nuclear war, second, a book called Fateful Visions, and third, nuclear ethics. So for the celebration of Joe's life, my secretary went through some of the files, and we found 1983, March 22, a proposal to David Hamburg, who is the new president of the Carnegie Corporation, to create a project called, Avoiding Nuclear War.
As this proposal says, "The objective of this efforts are to first, to define an agenda of actions that could be taken to reduce the likelihood of a major nuclear war. And two, to engage the policymaking community in serious deliberation about this agenda."
This proposal led to a project that went on for most of a decade. It produced three books, the first of which was called "Hawks, Doves, and Owls", and co-authored by Joe, Al Carnesale, and myself. In this book, as it says, thinking about nuclear war quickly leads to the question of what's to be done. In the policy debate of the last decade, answers to this question cluster around two dominant caricatures, the hawk and the dove. But in this book, we explain why there's a need for a third caricature, or concept, or framework, which we describe as owls.
Beyond the frame of reference shared by hawks and doves lies a rather different set of concerns, one focused primarily on the uncontrollables, loss of control, non-rational factors, impulses that would arise not from careful calculation, but from organizational routines, malfunctions of machines and minds, misperceptions, misunderstandings, and mistakes. Those who see the problem in this way, we call owls.
The most provocative part of this book was the conclusion, in which we define and propose an agenda for actions for reducing the risk of nuclear war. We have 10 principles. And under each, we have very specific do's and don'ts.
So for example, the first says, maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. Do modernize the strategic triad. That was a debated issue at the time. Don't adopt a no-first-use policy, which was also a much-debated issue. The 10th of these principles says, reduce reliance on nuclear deterrence over the long term. And the two do's and don'ts that they're highlighting are, don't assume that nuclear deterrence will last forever. Do intensify the search for alternatives to deterrence.
So that's Hawks, Doves, and Owls. That gave rise to a second book, which Joe was most attached to, called Fateful Visions. And Fateful Visions, tries to take seriously thinking beyond deterrence, beyond the deterrence of the Cold War. As it concludes, any comprehensive vision of a world beyond mutual assured destruction must involve the political evolution of US-Soviet relationship to a point of significant superpower cooperation.
Both Britain and France have nuclear arsenals that could destroy many American cities. Yet few Americans lose sleep over that prospect. Germany or Japan could have nuclear weapons if they chose to. But these bitterest enemies are now US allies. So it asks the question, could the US-Soviet relationship change over the next quarter century, as significantly as the US-Chinese relationship had changed in the last 15 years? That was 1989. We were thinking about a quarter century. Two years later, the Soviet Union disappeared.
Finally, nuclear ethics. Joe came back from Washington after serving in the Clinton administration to become dean, but also to think about nuclear ethics. As he writes in his A Life in the American Century, "I wanted to think and write more broadly about nuclear weapons and deeper values." And as he says about nuclear ethics, here, I try to explore moral philosophy as it impacts, or clarifies, or illuminates war and apply them to nuclear weapons, including the abolition of nuclear weapons, which is a worthy goal, but not practical for the foreseeable future.
Nonetheless, quote, "Among my various books over the years, it remains one of my favorite because it allowed me to dig deeply into my values." Close quote. So to summarize, conclude, as we think about Joe and his contributions, one particular arena is nuclear danger, an issue that is alive today and will become livelier in the days ahead, he offers many insights and clues for those of us who want to wrestle with those issues going forward. And we miss them.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much-- sorry. Thank you very much, Graham. Carla, please.
SARAH BANSE: Oh, you need to unmute.
CARLA DIRLIKOV CANALES: Hi.
SARAH BANSE: Yeah, there we go.
CARLA DIRLIKOV CANALES: Thank you for your patience here. Good morning. Good evening, everybody. Really honored to share a few thoughts and personal reflections on someone who I admired so greatly. Of course, when people hear the name Joe Nye, they often think of foreign policy, strategy of diplomacy, and of course, of his groundbreaking concept of soft power.
But today, I thought I'd speak of something less often recognized, which was his legacy in the arts. I first met Joe years ago, when I was a full-time opera singer performing at the Aspen Ideas Festival. There were many impressive thought leaders there, but there was no one I wanted to meet more than Joe Nye.
I had read his books, used them as a guide for my own work with the US State Department as an arts envoy. In the arts community, he was seen as a giant, someone who spoke our language even though he came from a different world. So when I finally met him, I was thrilled. What I never could have imagined in that moment was that he would later become not only a mentor, but a model for how intellect and empathy can coexist. What struck me most about Joe was his openness, his willingness to listen, to engage, and to treat even the most junior among us as colleagues.
In a world that often prizes status, Joe practiced something different, I think. And that was really intellectual curiosity and generosity. He didn't just tolerate new ideas, he sought them out. He loved conversation, and believed in dialogue, and the exchange of perspectives in the idea that wisdom grows through listening. That quality of humility wasn't just something he taught in the classroom or wrote about in books. It was something I saw him live.
For me and for so many others, his mentorship, his ideas, and his example were a real gift. And especially in that he showed us that strategy can have soul. That intellect and an empathy can strengthen each other, and that culture remains one of the greatest forces for good in this world. Joe Nye helped elevate the arts, giving them recognition, dignity, and legitimacy in ways that very few people, if anyone ever did, outside of the arts, achieved.
So I just want to share a few ways in which I believe Joe Nye transformed how we think about the arts, and in doing so, has left a lasting imprint on all of us who care about culture.
First, Joe was an advocate for recognizing the power of culture, and therefore, the power of the arts. And through his career, he examined the many dimensions of power, of course military, economic, political, moral, and social. And yet, within that vast spectrum, he was one of the first to articulate clearly that cultural influence and the ability to attract and inspire, rather than to coerce, is a form of power, just as consequential as any army or alliance.
By giving us that framework through which non-arts professionals could understand the impact of culture, he opened the door for governments, institutions, and leaders to take the arts seriously. And for those of us working in culture, that insight changed everything. It gave our work legitimacy.
Since we can see the results of his influence all around us, and I just want to point to a very significant example. Since 2021, the G20 has started to hold an annual cultural ministerial meeting. This is actually a track where the world's most influence and powerful governments gather not only to discuss defense and finance or trade, but also culture. They now recognize, thanks to Joe, that cultural policy belongs alongside economic and security policy, that the creative life of a nation is part of its strength, its identity, and its global influence.
That shift in perspective and recognition would not have been possible without Joe Nye. His work allowed the arts to be understood as essential, as strategic, and not superficial. In doing so, he has forever changed the way the world talks about culture.
Second, Joe understood that our nation's civic life, its arts, its humanities, its culture, is far more powerful in shaping global appeal than anything orchestrated by government. He believed in the power of people, in the ability of individuals to influence the world through the authenticity of their ideas and creativity. And he reminded us that while governments may project messages, it's the imagination of free people, artists, thinkers, storytellers, who truly carry a nation's voice beyond its borders. He knew that culture is most powerful when it's free.
Lastly, in his writings and in his teaching, Joe often returned to this theme of moral leadership, moral philosophy, as Professor Allison put it, the idea that the most enduring influence comes not from dominance but from example. He extended that idea beyond nations to people. Each of us, he believed, carries a kind of soft power, the ability to shape our world through the force of our ideas and the authenticity of our example. He validated what so many of us instinctively felt, that our work, our music, our art, and our stories matter on the world stage.
He gave us permission to believe that creativity is not peripheral to power, but central to it, and taught us that leadership is not about commanding attention, but about earning trust. True power, the kind that lasts, comes from the ability to touch minds and hearts alike. So we will remember Joe, not only for the ideas he gave us, but for the doors he opened for artists, the dreamers, and the diplomats, and of course, the students who carry his vision forward.
He showed us that language, the language of strategy specifically, and the language of art as well, are not so different. Both seek to understand human motivation, both require empathy, imagination, and the courage to see the world not only as it is, but most importantly, as it could be.
So in a time when the world can seem divided, when it's hard power that dominates the headlines, Joe reminded us that soft power still shapes the soul of our societies. And he taught us that culture itself is power. So we remember him today, and I hope we will carry forward this belief that ideas matter, that creativity matters, and that kindness and curiosity matter, because that too was his legacy. Thank you.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Carla. Thank you. Christina.
CHRISTINA L. DAVIS: Thank you very much for letting me have this opportunity to speak about the legacy of Joseph Nye. Among his many accomplishments, Joseph Nye served as the CFIA director from 1989 to 1993. And so it's wonderful to have this CFIA forum in his honor. He was a towering figure in academia. As a scholar, he had set an agenda for research on nuclear ethics, interdependence, nature of power. He was also a popular teacher in the college.
During those years from 1989 to 1993, I was actually a undergraduate at Harvard, and heard often about his amazing class. And that was when I first met him, because he agreed to meet with me, a senior, asking if I can talk to him about my senior thesis on Japanese foreign policy in the United Nations. And that just shows that as great a scholar and diplomat, he always did care about students, and take time for his teaching, and meeting with undergraduates as well.
His work continues to inspire my research on economic interdependence and the multilateral order. It was a great honor to host a discussion with Joe about his biography, A Life in the American Century, which was an event here at the CFIA hosted by the program on US-Japan relations. I encourage you all to look at his book and read it. It is a wonderful. Tribute to all that he has done, and how he grew to be such an amazing person.
Joe Nye was always the smartest person in the room. He constantly continued to study and expand his areas of knowledge. So once when he was asked how he chose what to study, he said, I figured the most important thing was to follow your curiosity, which is good advice to all of us. And it was that attitude that supported him choosing very broad training when he was young to major in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton, to go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar studying philosophy, politics, and economics, coming here to Harvard for his PhD in the government department.
Relentless curiosity also drove him to learn more from the world, where he would travel. And he viewed problems from different perspectives. He wasn't just visiting. He wanted to understand the problems and hopes of those who lived in the different countries he was visiting. As a graduate student in the 1960s, his research was about Africa, where he wrote about east African common market. Later, he focused on east Asia, which would become a focus of his intellectual and policy legacy that I wish to talk about briefly here today.
His first experience in Japan came when he was serving in the Carter administration on nuclear non-proliferation issues. He visited Japan for meetings about nuclear reprocessing in Japan, and to guide their policy decisions, coordinating with the United States.
He went on to become a leader for US foreign policy towards east Asia in the 1990s, when he was serving in the Clinton administration. This is a critical moment, where he led a two-pronged strategy to reinforce US alliances, at the same time welcoming China in multilateral and bilateral cooperation.
If we think back to that era, in the 1980s, some thought Japan would surpass the United States saw the US power is declining. And this is when Joe wrote his book about American leadership, and started to work on soft power. The book written in 1990 is where he discussed how US power was rooted in more than economy and military. It was also clear that the US needed to combine different forms of influence. And he went to work in east Asia to try and preserve US alliances, when some thought they were becoming obsolete, that with the end of the Cold War, there was no need for such structures.
It was also a time when the US-led mission in Iraq, supported by the United Nations to defend the sovereignty of Kuwait against invasion from Iraq in 1991, led to controversy. Japan said it had a pacifist constitution, couldn't send troops. Many thought, why do we need alliances? But this is a time when you could have seen the US retreat from east Asia, ending those alliances, removing troops, and reducing economic ties that were blamed for harming US industries.
Joseph Nye is one reason that did not happen. In an article for The Harvard Gazette in 2017, he commented that in that period, there was even a book written about the coming war with Japan, and I thought this was nonsense. And Joe said that at that time, he worked with scholars, Ezra Vogel, Susan Pharr, leading a faculty study group about, how should we think about Japan and the future of east Asia? And he said, he got the intellectual capital for thinking about that here at Harvard.
And then when he went to government, he tried to do something about it. Indeed, one of our visitors here at the program on US-Japan relations, Henry Lawrence and I, were talking at the memorial service on Saturday. And Henry talked about the study group that Joseph Nye led, because Henry was one of the graduate students who took notes. But it's classic Joseph Nye that he saw a problem at a turning point for international order. And he gathered around him all of the smart people at Harvard to study.
And through that partnership, he then went to Washington, DC to try and put it into practice, bringing along with him Ezra Vogel. And in that time, Joseph Nye said, Clinton won the election on the phrase, it's the economy. And when I went into government at that time, he says, everyone is asking, how can we beat up on Japan? But based on what I'd learned at Harvard from all these other professors studying Japan and east Asia, I knew that wasn't the right way to think about Japan. It's not the right way to think about Asia.
Joseph Nye said, the rising country is China. We have to realize that 1992, that might not have been as obvious as it seems now. But he always saw ahead. And he wrote that what we should be doing is reaffirming our alliance with Japan, not thinking of it as a threat, and using this to try and deal with China.
So during his service then as chairman of National Intelligence Council, as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Joseph Nye made a really important impact putting these ideas into policy that culminated in the 1996 US-Japan Joint Declaration of Security, where President Clinton, Prime Minister Hashimoto reaffirmed the importance of the US-Japan alliance as the cornerstone of stability in east Asia.
This work earned him the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese emperor. But his work was not just about making sure the US continued to engage with its allies, Japan and Korea. He also worked to make sure that the future of US foreign policy in east Asia was engaging China, which was also facing a critical moment after Tiananmen massacre left it isolated, facing sanctions caught in an uncertain economic transition towards market policies.
We know as scholars of international relations that the dynamic change in power is the primary challenge for international stability. At this critical moment, Joseph Nye advocated a policy to show China it was being invited to join an international system that was not exclusionary, that multilateral institutions, bilateral diplomacy, were part of working together on common problems where diplomacy, development, and security should be worked on together.
Joseph Nye saw that it was necessary to welcome China rather than treat it as an adversary. Now his role continued well after his time in government. Working together with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, he wrote policy reports, the Armitage-Nye Reports, a series of documents starting in 2000, continuing forward to the most recent report on the US-Japan Alliance in 2024 towards an integrated alliance.
This was the classic way of engaging with, how could US intellectuals, former government officials, work to improving foreign policy at a time of change? In this policy, he urged Japan to do more for leadership, and he urged the US to remain committed to east Asia. Many of their specific recommendations have become policy, calling for Japan to expand its defense role, calling for the US and Japan to coordinate more on industrial policy and economic security.
The ideas from Joseph Nye's seminal book with Robert Keohane, Power and Interdependence, were published in 1977. But those same ideas about complex interdependence, how to navigate vulnerability continue to be apparent in these reports that he wrote with Richard Armitage, which recommend that the US and Japan work together to build resilience, reduce vulnerability, while still embracing open markets, and a rule-based trade order.
These policies also called for continued cooperation for intelligence sharing, trilateral cooperation with allies like the US, Korea, Japan, trilateral coordination. But it's also important for us here as scholars, in that last report, they all urged us that the enduring task of both countries is to cultivate new generations of leaders who recognize the value of partnership and the commitment to sustaining it.
I think that the legacy of Joseph Nye for us as scholars is to continue to be curious, to take on new problems, to explore different regions of the world, and see how they see the threats around them, and reshape the global order in a spirit of generosity and openness to engage ideas, people, and diplomacy. Thank you so much.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Christina. Jake.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Thanks, everybody. And thanks, especially, to my co-panelists for their remarkable, and heartfelt, and insightful comments and celebration of Joe Nye. I feel bad going fourth because so much wisdom has been shared. Everyone has listened so patiently. I know people would like to get the opportunity to go back and forth. So I will be brief.
I want to talk a little bit about Joe Nye's impact on US foreign policy in government on the people who practice it, the strategies, policies, and ideas that underpinned it, and really how his impact is deeply felt across the entire national security enterprise of the US government, and will continue to be for a long time to come.
I'll start just by sharing an anecdote, which is that I actually first met Joe Nye when he was the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't know him. But I certainly knew of him. I was studying international relations at Oxford, pursuing a master's degree. I had done my undergraduate degree at IR. And for me, Joe Nye was a Hall of Famer. And I ended up sitting next to him on an airplane. And imagine that. It's like sitting next to your favorite quarterback, or musician, or whoever it may be. For me, it was Joe Nye.
And I asked him if he had any advice for a young person. And I was sort of pulsating with energy, and ambition, and wanted to leave a mark, and get underway, and serving in US foreign policy. And he said to me something that I've remembered to this day and shared with a lot of people. He said, you have to remember that life is both very short and also that life is long. It's short in that you have to take every moment and make it count because you don't know how many you'll have.
But it's also long because when you're in your 20s, you shouldn't just think, I got to grasp for the next thing. You should take your time to look around, to pause, to reflect, to appreciate. And 10, 20, 30, 40 years later, when you look back on your career, you're never going to say, hey, in my 20s, I wish I had raced a lot faster, and done a lot less fun, interesting, adventurous things. You're going to say the opposite.
And it's advice I now share with a lot of young people whenever I see them. And it leads to my first point with respect to Joe Nye and his impact on the US government. It's that he touched an enormous number of American policymakers in Democratic and Republican administrations directly, got to know people. He was so open and available, not just to students at Harvard who worked with him, but to people who had been his colleagues when he had served in government, to people like me, who just had the opportunity to interact with him.
He was so warm, and generous, and generative, that he was able to personally engage such a wide swath of folks, who got a piece of wisdom, or guidance, or teaching from him that they carried with them into government. So in my time in both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, I encountered an unbelievable number of folks, political appointees, career professionals, intelligence, defense, diplomatic, you name it, who had engaged Joe Nye personally, and had a story like the story that I just told that had an impact on them in their life.
The second major area in which he had an impact, you've heard from Christina, from Graham, and Carla, was his direct impact on so many aspects of US foreign policy from his own service. His impact on nuclear non-proliferation in the Carter era, his unbelievable impact on the US-Japan alliance, which, by the way, if you go to Tokyo, you will not get through a conversation without somebody saying, thank you, bless you, Joe Nye, for having saved, updated, modernized, and reimagined that alliance for a modern era.
But also, the entire architecture of security in Asia that plays such a fundamental role in American strategy today is the result of Joe Nye's work back during the Clinton administration. So we continue to feel, just as Christina was saying, his book on Power and Interdependence with Keohane was written in '77, a lot of his work in government was in the '70s and '90s.
But in 2025, his work in government remains highly relevant, indeed foundational, to strategic competition with China, and managing that competition responsibly, and also to having a multi-spectrum approach to national security and foreign policy, as Carla was saying, that recognizes that power and security are broad-based concepts that encompass culture and people to people, economic, technological, as well as core security and military.
The third way in which, of course, he had a major impact, was his concepts weren't just conceptual breakthroughs, intellectual frameworks that could stand the test of academic scrutiny. They actually could stand the test of policy scrutiny. They were the kinds of things that you could grab onto as a policymaker and say, I can do something with this. Power and Interdependence as a concept about the nature of complex interdependence, kind of putting to rest the simple realist idea of power, and recognizing that relationships with both allies and adversaries have this incredible web of interconnections that need to be contended with, managed, untangled.
That's something that, I think, speaks to policymakers, because it recognizes the realities of what we confront every day. Soft power, the idea that we have to think beyond the traditional historic measures of power to new forms, particularly in an era where information and communication have evolved so rapidly, and ideas like authenticity, who the speaker is, have become so central to ideas of power. Joe Nye's ideas don't just remain relevant today. I think their relevance is increasing year on year.
And I can tell you, having worked for Secretary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, we were preparing for her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her confirmation hearing. And she was looking for a basic frame for her testimony. And it became, essentially, the basic frame for her entire time as Secretary of State, which was the idea of smart power, which was a Joe-Nye idea.
And it was the fusing of hard and soft power, balancing and integrating all aspects of American power in defense, diplomacy, development, the soft power of culture, and information, into a coherent strategy that tried to, at once, advance our strategic position, and also mobilize common action to solve challenges that no one country could solve on their own, from the climate crisis to nuclear proliferation to global pandemics. And we've seen what the challenges are with actually trying to mobilize the world effectively to deal with something like COVID-19.
So these ideas, because they're so practical, because they got out of the kind of simple, mechanistic kind of approaches, of high realism, and into, hey, how does the world actually work, and what is the messy reality of what we have to deal with? And what challenges does that present? And what opportunities does that present? This was, I think, just an absolutely enormous contribution from Joe Nye that we still feel, and contend with, and will as far as we go.
And then just the final point that I would make is, Joe Nye's mode of being, everyone, Graham, Carla, Christina, have all talked about this. His humility, his humanity, his belief in being part of something larger than himself, an enterprise, a team, I think this has had a reverberating effect in the way so many of my friends and colleagues in the government, career professionals, and political appointees alike, have thought about modeling their careers.
And here, I think it just goes way beyond his impact on US foreign policy. I think his mode of being has been leadership by example, that I do think has filtered into the lived experience of so many public servants and government across all branches of government. And I think recognizing that, who he was as a person, almost more than his ideas, or his service, is really going to be the most foundational and formative legacy that Joe Nye leaves for all of us.
And so I'm personally grateful to have the opportunity to be here today to talk. But also, I'm just so grateful that my life was personally touched by everything that he did, and everything that he was. And it's an incredible honor to be here to join my distinguished co-panelists. And I'll turn it back over.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Jake. And thank you to all of the panelists for such incredible presentations, giving us so much to think about, and also leaving plenty of time for us to have a conversation. Graham and Carla, if you can come back online, turn your cameras back on, and we can reconvene as a panel.
One of the things that's struck me as all of you were speaking, really, is the connection between Joe Nye as a scholar and as a practitioner, and Joe Nye as a human being. There's a certain sense, and I got this from all of your presentations, that Joe embodied soft power in the way that he moved through the world. And in the way, the generosity, and the empathy that he treated, as far as I can tell, and I've ever heard, anybody, everyone that he met.
I would encourage those of you in the audience who are interested in learning more about Joe Nye as a person. There was a memorial service for him held, I think it was last week, in Memorial Church. And it was recorded and is available at the Harvard Kennedy School YouTube channel. And there's a number of speakers there, including Graham Allison, who's with us today, as well as Joe's children and grandchildren, who speak about him. So those of you who are interested in learning more about his life, I recommend that to you. Look it up.
I do want to share, apropos this sense that I have about Joe embodying soft power. I do want to share my one Joe Nye story. I didn't know Joe nearly as well as the other panelists, and many other people at Harvard. But I did have the good fortune one time, years ago, to be seated next to him at a dinner at a Harvard event.
And in that dinner, as was his way, he asked me what I was doing and what my relationship to the Weatherhead Center was, because this was a Weatherhead Center event. And I told him that one of the proudest things I do at the Weatherhead Center is I run the graduate student programs at the Weatherhead Center. And then I started to describe at length the structure of the program, and how good I thought it was, and how terrific it was. And he listened very intently and politely.
And then at the very end, I said to him, I went on for about maybe five or 10 minutes. And I said to him at the very end, do you know anything about this program? Have you heard about it? And he said, yes, I founded it.
And to me, that was really telling. And I still remember this, because he could have told me at the very beginning, that's OK. You don't need to tell me about it. I know all about it. But he didn't say that. He let me do my whole spiel. And only then did he reveal that he was, in fact, the founder of that program back, I think, when he was an assistant professor at Harvard, perhaps in the late '60s or early '70s.
I don't remember the precise date, but it was Graham may know. Sorry, Graham. Did you want to come in on that point? If you could unmute yourself.
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: That's a great story. I believe Joe was a fellow when he was a graduate student at what now is the Weatherhead Center, but eventually became that was at that time the Center for International Affairs. They used to have offices that were the old ROTC offices, and he and I were both as graduate students or assistant professors associated with CFIA. So I think the whole idea that you or another generation of that was very Joe. Yeah.
EREZ MANELA: Yeah, thank you. So the question I actually wanted to bring up to you, and I see now that it also aligns with a number of questions that have been already posted. By the way, the audience members, if you have questions to the panelists about the legacy of Joe Nye, please put them in the Q&A. And I'll try to get them.
I was going to ask a version of this question. But since there's a question already on the Q&A that really reflects what I was thinking about, I'll just read it out. And this is a question from Kenneth A. Oi. He says, I'm one of Joe's many grateful dissertation advisees. And I was an RA working for Joe and Bob Keohane on their projects, on interdependence and international regimes. In the six months since Joe's passing, the Trump administration has destroyed supply chains, deported Korean automotive personnel, and weakened alliances, WTO, the NAFTA, and the USMCA.
My question to the panelists, what would Joe do? Specifically, what advice would you offer to concerned academic geeks and policy wonks in these difficult times? Who wants to pick up on that?
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: I'll say a brief comment. So Joe got to see the beginning of the Trump administration, and was very concerned. And in particular, I think what Jake said about alliances in Japan was something that was at the heart of Joe's conception of complex power.
And the notion that the alliance system with Japan, with South Korea, with NATO, that had been one of the most important pillars of the international order that was created after Word War II, and that was then maintained by successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat, that this was now regarded as unnecessary baggage, he found to just be dumb, I would say, to put it very accurately.
We talked a lot about how if you were attempting to undermine American power, there would hardly be a better way to do it than to undermine the American alliance system. And his quip for this for people who complained that, well, there were too many free riders or free loaders, was that, yes, that's right. And trying to get the other allies to do their share, burden sharing so-called, was very difficult. And we had been much less successful than we liked.
But we should remember the others paid maybe less than they should do. But we were allowed to drive the bus. And I think that when we see a multi-polar order in which we have less influence driving the bus, we'll appreciate that proposition.
JAKE SULLIVAN: I can offer one more Joe Nyeism that I think is relevant here, too. When he was writing his report in the Clinton administration about the value of sustaining alliances in the Asia-Pacific, especially the US-Japan alliance, he had another quip, which was that security and the alliance structure is like oxygen. You tend not to think about it very much until you lose it. But once you start to lose it, you don't think about much else.
And the point he was making was, we can sit here today and say, oh, what's the value of all of this? We don't really need it anymore. It's not serving us. You don't really fully understand until it starts to go away, until you no longer have those allies to be able to rely upon at critical moments exactly what that's going to mean for you. And my concern is that too often, we talk about foreign policy issues in very abstract terms, rather than in the kind of core national interest terms that Graham was just referring to in saying, what do we get out of this?
And Joe and I was very clear eyed about the enlightened self-interest case for the alliance system, and for a lot of the other elements of the order that he fought so hard to uphold and protect.
CHRISTINA L. DAVIS: And I would add, the multilateral institutions were also a part of soft power, where instead of just ordering what should be done, you had an institution that might constrain, but would help others feel they had a stake in following the rules. And so the attacks on the multilateral institutions from the WTO to others go against that.
And so while in his writings, Joe Nye did talk about vulnerability of interdependence, and the need to have some restraint, and to address real concerns about China, he continued to argue that it was better to have open engagement, and also to see value in those institutions like the World Trade Organization or free-trade agreements that constrain but also encourage ongoing commitments.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you. Yes, please, Carla.
CARLA DIRLIKOV CANALES: Yeah, if I may, just to add to that, and this is part of why I'm in China right now, I'd like to think that Joe would argue that international relations are maybe too important to be left just to government. And I think nothing really illustrates that better than looking at the world's most important bilateral relationship, the history of the United States and China, which really that kicked off, as we all know, with ping pong and an unlikely exchange that happened through that, which really opened the door for where we are today.
And I think for that reason, still today, people-to-people exchanges are sustaining us in a time that the State Department's funding for these types of programs has been dramatically cut through the Trump administration. And obviously, arts and culture programs are cut. We're no longer involved in UNESCO, represented in UNESCO. But there are ways through non-government actors that these kinds of relations and exchanges can continue. And I think that's quite important.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much. I have a question from Lillian Ye. It's defined as a question for Christina Davis. But I think all of the panelists can weigh in. So this is about Joe Nye's focus on interdependence with Japan, and the expansion of Japan taking a stronger role in defense. How would you think that this connects with his idea of smart power?
CHRISTINA L. DAVIS: Yes, he wanted to see a stronger US-Japan alliance. And so it has to evolve with the needs of the time. And that is not just about trying to get Japan to increase its defense spending, which the current government has supported increasing the share of GDP on defense, but also integrating the alliance more. And so his reports with Richard Armitage calling for more integration at the operational level. And also updating, what are the threats faced so that US-Japan cooperation not just be military, but also cybersecurity as a new kind of threat.
And so I do see his view that these policies should evolve with the times. And he was very much seen that as necessary, and part of smart power.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much. Any of the other panelists want to weigh in on that before I introduce our surprise--
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: Let me give you just--
EREZ MANELA: fifth panelist--
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: If I do one paragraph on it. So Joe was a apostle of soft power. But that was on top of, in addition to, a quite realist appreciation of hard power. It wasn't soft power as an alternative to hard power. It was soft power as another dimension of complex reality. And that's then when he decided, OK, well, maybe we'll combine these and call it smart power. He and I, on fishing trips, you could imagine 93 other versions of power that you could use just as adjectives.
So think of an array, and I would think it would be a mistake trying to understand his contributions to emphasize only the softness part. In fishing, if you're a fly fisherman, you present to a fly a furry, soft imitation that you hope will lead it to it to bite the fly. But the fly has in it a very sharp, hard hook, which then pierces the fish's mouth. And Joe rarely saw a fish that he didn't kill.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you. Thank you, Graham. So we have a unplanned surprise panelist here coming in from the audience. This is Professor Robert Keohane, who I don't have the full text for introducing you, but I'll just say that he's a legend in the field of international relations in his own right. And for many decades, a friend, close friend, and collaborator of Joe Nye. And he wanted to join to give his perspective on Joe's legacy. Please.
ROBERT KEOHANE: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be on this, and to hear a statement about Joe. There's another dimension I want to talk about, Joe and power. It was mentioned especially toward the end by Jake. And that is the connection that Joe and I made in the '70s between interdependence and power. We saw asymmetrical interdependence as a form of power. And that was a connection that had not been made before. This was a different literature on economic interdependence from literature on power.
And we brought those two literatures together. I also wanted, though, to talk more personally, just briefly, about Joe's life outside of Harvard, in Washington, which has not been discussed. He and his wife of 62 years, Molly Harding-Nye, who died in November 2024, owned a farm in Sandwich, New Hampshire, to which they went often for relaxation.
And it was not rest and relaxation since Joe was a vigorous hiker, and a dedicated and talented gardener. We haven't talked about his gardening. He was proud of his many blue ribbons won at the Sandwich County Fair. And his guests were treated to displays of its workmanship, showing us the evidence in the snow of an owl's seizure of a rabbit, or the trail to a favorite spot hidden to naive eyes.
So Joe should be remembered as a woodsman and an outdoorsman. He owned over 1,000 acres in New Hampshire, which he gave to a land trust in the year before he died. And that was another part of Joe's legacy, which we should think about. Thank you.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you. Both Professor Keohane as well as Professor Allison spoke at Joe Nye's memorial service that I described earlier that you can see online. And for me, one of the most memorable parts of that service was when his, I think it was nine grandchildren, came up on stage and said that they didn't know him as Professor Nye. They knew him as Joe Fish.
And they thought for a long time, until they became older, that he was primarily a fisherman and farmer. They had no idea that he had this other moonlighting career as a Harvard professor because they saw him primarily in those contexts.
And so I thought that was absolutely fascinating that there was this other life that he lived, and presumably, also informed his scholarly outlook. Let me bring in another question here from Alan Kay Henrikson. He mentions what he calls a kind of sleeper in Joe's body of work, his book Peace in Parts, about integration and regional organization. At the present time-- sorry, I lost that for-- Where did that go?
OK, at the present time, when central or universal organizations, notably the United Nations, particularly the UN Security Council, are less effective than it was originally hoped they could be, the factor of regional association in different parts of the world, which vary in cultural levels of development in other ways, may have significantly greater potential than is now generally understood.
Joe Nye's thinking about this subject merits a new book. So this is a question about the sleeper body of work, as he calls it, about regional organizations. Anybody want to comment on that?
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: I can say just one thing.
EREZ MANELA: Please.
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: Before Joe became interested in grander issues of geopolitics, he was initially studying Africa, and security in Africa. He and Molly spent a year in Africa when he was a graduate student. And that was his original work. His first book was this Peace in Parts. And I haven't looked back at it lately, but I take Professor Henrikson, who's a great diplomatic historian at one of our colleagues at Fletcher's question, as a challenge.
I have to go back and look at the book again, because I think in particular, as we're seeing the complexity of the Middle East today, it would probably provide some clues and insights.
ROBERT KEOHANE: Can I say, Joe paid a lot of attention to the Central American common market. One of his early studies was of the Central American common market. And Peace in Parts draws on that work.
CHRISTINA L. DAVIS: I would also say, I think his attention to the US-Japan alliance was in part recognition that there were so many difficulties in the east Asia region that were not going to be solved by an east Asia regional organization. That increased the importance for the US-Japan alliance, both to help Japan to be secure in its neighborhood, and also to work at other diplomatic channels that could support cooperation. And so I think that was one part of his creativity, and how he built a different kind of architecture for stability in east Asia that does not follow the path we saw in Europe.
JAKE SULLIVAN: And I would just say from my experience the last few years, the combination of the paralysis of the UN Security Council and a lot of the other global security institutions because of the dynamics among the major powers.
That, and then US-China competition in various parts of the developing world, in Africa, and Latin America, southeast Asia, elsewhere, I think those are combining in a way to have countries think about solutions in part from a more localized or regional perspective, and think about how regional organizations, whether it's ASEAN, or some of the subregional organizations in Africa, like the Southern African Development Community or ECOWAS.
Or for that matter, burgeoning set of institutions in the Americas as well, that those will become a larger feature in geopolitics as we go forward, as countries kind of play the US and China off against one another in both a practical and slightly cynical way, and as they look to the UN and see, it's hard to get universal solutions at this moment, this geopolitical moment.
So I'm going to go back and look at Peace in Parts as well, because my guess is that so everything old is new again in some ways. And there's probably some relevant observations there that could apply to the world that we face in 2025.
EREZ MANELA: There's a question that that's been bubbling up in my mind as we're having this conversation related to some of the themes we've already discussed. And I'll try to present it quickly in two brief parts. We've already established, I think, that there is a broad sense that many of us have here in the panel, and some of those who asked the questions, that the current administration in the White House is not following a Joe-Nye framework for foreign policy.
And in that connection, I'm wondering, since the four of you have a very broad view of Nye's legacy, whether there's anything in the foreign policy of the current administration that you do think, any element or component, that you do think that overlaps or draws upon anything that Joe stood for as a scholar. So that's the first part of the question. I mean, you can say no if that's what you think, but I'm curious about that.
And the other part of it is, to what extent do you think that the Nye framework, as I think J described it, is dependent on an assumption of a continuing US, let's say, I don't know if we want to use the term hegemony, but continuing position of the US as the preeminent power in world affairs.
And if we are moving away from an era of US preeminence, which we may or may not be. I'm not saying that we are. But if we are, does that-- what parts of the Nye legacy do you think remain most relevant under such conditions?
GRAHAM T. ALLISON: Well, I'll try two points, in a sense, you're trying to get us to be controversial, or more controversial. First on nuclear, go back to that, so again, to say what I said before, Joe believed that the supreme threat, and the supreme duty, or responsibility, was to avoid a nuclear war. That's a proposition that has basically lost the salience in most conversation of most of the foreign policy community today.
If you want to see a vivid example of it, go back and watch the tape of the debate between Trump and Kamala during the campaign. The moderators asked about global warming. And Trump takes it as a cue to riff on what he calls, nuclear warming. And it says, the great danger is nothing to do with climate. It's to do with nuclear war, World War III. There's a great risk of World War III.
So I would say, he's one of the only two recent presidents who feels nuclear threat and danger, as for real. The other being Joe Biden. OK, but in the current foreign policy world, this is almost outside people's intuitions, or their experience. And if you look and see what Trump has said about nuclear, he's very concerned about nuclear war. He says he knows about nuclear war, he actually talks to people about it. So I would say that's for me, good. OK, I'll give you a second one.
With respect to China, Trump is not a China hawk. Trump keeps saying he believes that the US and China can have a much more cooperative, productive relationship. Actually, if he talked about complex interdependence, he might even, or if he read about it, neither of which I think he does. He might have positive things to say about it.
So again, in that arena, I would say there's some promise. Now the gap between his ambitions, or aspirations, or instincts, and a sustainable strategy and policy to achieve things is another story altogether. And I would say for most of the rest of the agenda, but especially as regards alliances, and especially as regards the American posture in dealing with other parties, he would give it low marks if he were grading a paper.
EREZ MANELA: Anybody else want to weigh in on this question?
ROBERT KEOHANE: I have one comment. It's a quote from a paper that was Joe's last paper, I think, which he wrote with me. And it responds To this question. It says, "To channel and reshape globalization for the common good, states will have to coordinate. For such coordination to be effective, leaders will have to construct and maintain networks of connection, norms, and institutions. Those networks will in turn benefit their central node of the United States, providing Washington with soft power.
Unfortunately, the myopic focus of the second Trump administration, which is obsessed with coercive hard power linked to trade asymmetries and sanctions, is likely to erode, rather than strengthen, the US led international order."
EREZ MANELA: And this is published where? In Foreign Affairs?
ROBERT KEOHANE: Foreign Affairs, July-August issue.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much. Well, Graham, Christina, Carla, Jake, and Bob, thank you. Our surprise panelist. Thank you all for joining us for this really special Weatherhead forum on the legacy of our dear colleague, Joseph S. Nye. And thank you, all of you, who have joined us in the audience, and all of the staff members who made this possible. I'll see you at the next Weatherhead forum.