Soft power & hard power

It is generally accepted that security, leadership, stability and influence in the 21st century rest primarily on military power or what is commonly described as hard-power capabilities. The contrasting argument is that political outcomes since the end of World War II have been primarily shaped by soft-power ingenuity that has consistently overcome military inferiority to achieve its desired political outcome. The United States was in complete control of land, air and sea throughout the Vietnam War, winning every battle and yet eventually losing the war, killing about 4 million Vietnamese on its way to a failed military campaign.

The US government now enjoys friendly and productive diplomatic and trade relations with a socialist Vietnam. This has made the wartime casualties and devastation even more tragic and pointless from every perspective. US military experts refused to learn from the outcome, treating the defeat as a geopolitical disease, the “Vietnam Syndrome” rather than as a reflection of a historical trend that is supportive of legitimate claims of self-determination despite military vulnerability of such nationalist movements. Although the Vietnam Syndrome was overcome in the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA did not achieve decisive victories in these conflicts.

Military power is of limited utility in conflict situations in the post-colonial world after the 1950s. It is the popular struggles that have shaped numerous outcomes in the last sixty years. These outcomes have trashed the perception that wars can be won only by the strong military side that then gets to shape the peace. The struggle for freedom was won by the militarily weaker side which prevailed in the end despite suffering disproportionate losses along its way to victory. What turned the historical tide against militarism was the rise of national and cultural self-consciousness most spectacularly first in India under the inspired leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. It is in India that coercive non-violent forms of soft power revealed their potency. Now that the world is talking in terms of non-violent geopolitics, the roadmap towards achieving that objective was shown by India. This was India’s unique gift to the world.

The anti-apartheid campaign extended the struggle against the racist regime of South Africa to a symbolic global battlefield where the weapons were coercive non-violent, reliance on boycott, divestment and sanctions. The collapse of apartheid was largely achieved by developments outside the sovereign territory of South Africa. The Palestinian struggle for legitimacy has been relying on an array of soft-power instruments including diplomacy and dialogue, a non-violent coercive boycott, divestment campaign and a variety of civil society initiatives. The communications revolution has helped the struggle. Even though grave uncertainty exists as to the future outcome, the Palestinian struggle seems to resemble the South African model. The Gandhian movement that led to India’s independence, the Mandela-led transformation of apartheid South Africa, people’s power in the Philippines and the soft revolutions of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s are striking illustrations of domestic transformations based on non-violent struggle. It is well documented that the British government could make progress in ending the violence in Northern Ireland only when it stopped thinking of the IRA as a terrorist organization and began treating it as a political actor with real grievances.

Against this background, geopolitics continues to be driven by a belief that the strategy of hard power will dominate the course of history. The US recourse to war in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be costly and misdirected. The wars have not served political ends. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primacy of the United States has resulted inevitably in its geopolitical ascendancy. This position has been premised upon the confidence in the hard-power paradigm producing violent geopolitics in relation to critical unresolved conflicts. In the modern day world, the paradigm is untenable from both pragmatic and principled considerations. It relies on practices that involve massive killing of civilian population and colossal waste of resources. It is reported that even at a time of fiscal deficit, the US military budget is as much as the entire world put together and more than double the next ten leading states. In the USA, the military-industrial complex exerts tremendous influence on government policy.

The UN Charter had crafted a world order that contained most of the elements of non-violent geopolitics. That constitutional framing of world politics had placed an embargo on the use of force in international relations except in self-defence against a prior armed attack. Outlawing war as an instrument of international policy was the cardinal principle. If that was the legalistic vision of world order, it was politically possible to establish a world free of wars. That did not happen. The right of veto for the five permanent members of the Security Council affected decisions that were adverse to the vital interests of any one of these members and this de facto exemption from the commitment to non-violent geopolitics compromised the legal framing of the UN Charter. The United States and the former Soviet Union reaffirmed their reliance on their military capabilities, political alliances and deterrent doctrines to erect their security apparatus on the logic of countervailing hard power. The lack of political will to implement the Charter of non-violent geopolitics stands at the root of the primacy of hard power.

Non-violent geopolitics embedded in the UN Charter never involved a comprehensive embrace of non-violence as a precondition for political life. Within states, violent insurgent politics, various forms of civil strife and an internal war, unless it spilled over boundaries, were not in the UN domain. Thus the acceptance of internal sovereignty as legally absolute and sacrosanct meant that there would be no basis for effectively challenging incidents of genocide or severe crimes against humanity and other catastrophic circumstances confronting a society. In Syria, the Security Council began with a cautious approach not wanting to violate the UN Charter and aid a civil war. Russia and China vetoed several attempts at resolutions to bring an end to the conflict. Ultimately, the Council showed rare unity on Syria by passing Resolution 2118 on 7 September 2013. It required Syria to destroy its current stockpile of chemical weapons.

India and South Africa are struggling to create just societies. They have not been able to address the entire agenda of social and political issues and have left problems of exploitative class relations and social tensions unresolved. But their soft-power victories had overcome oppressive state and society relations without much reliance on violence.

The entire soft-power orientation has taken a giant leap forward as a result of the Arab Spring in which unarmed popular movements have challenged dictatorial and oppressive regimes with success in Egypt and Tunisia but elsewhere at least achieving promises of reforms. A united government for the West Bank and Gaza has been formed after years of negotiations. Although geographical unification still remains elusive, there is little doubt that the interim government is a significant step towards social and cultural integration of the Hamas and the PLO. Israel is not happy with the developments but the interim government has opened the window for durable peace in West Asia.
In the 21st century, the global political landscape has moved towards China, India, Brazil and Russia. Their rise is largely rooted in their economic development, and not associated at all with their military capabilities. A new world order on the basis of soft-power principles is gaining support, shifting the concept of non-violent geopolitics from the domain of utopianism to a genuine political project. Resistance from the hard-power domain will have to be overcome. If that happens, the world will live in peace.