英语第十七课作业.docVIP

How ‘Soft Power’ Got ‘Smart’ By ERIC ETHERIDGE In her confirmation hearing yesterday, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “smart power” four times in her opening statement and nine times during her testimony. Cue the headline writers: “Clinton Vows to Lead Using ‘Smart Power’ Strategy”; “Clinton seeks a ‘smart power’ Middle East strategy,” “Hillary Clinton says ‘smart power’ will restore American leadership.” For some in the room, the repetition was a bit much: “I guess the phrase of the week is ‘smart power,’ ” said Sen. Jim Webb. “I’ve been doing this a long time, in and out of government. People come up with different phrases.”For some on the right, the phrase was nothing to go so excited about: “The key soundbite was her endorsement of ‘smart power,’ which is Obamaspeak for soft power,”?wrote Allahpundit at HotA. On the other side, though, there was some excitement over Clinton’s rhetoric and argument, which?Steven Benen at the WashingtonM?saw as improvement over “soft power”: Soft power is, of course, the phrase Joseph Nye coined to describe foreign policy tools that nations can use to “achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion.” Most progressives approve of the concept, but hate the name — “soft power” just sounds so … weak. As Benen points out, Harvard intellectual Joseph Nye Jr. is the creator and a proponent of the idea of “soft power,” a now well-established concept in the discourse (it has its own?Wikipedia page), which he has described as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion and payment.” What Benen didn’t point out is that Nye is also the prime mover behind the idea of “smart power,” a concept has been pushing for several years. In 2006?Nye wrote in an an op-ed?for the Boston Globe: The ability to combine hard and soft power into a winning strategy is smart power . . . The current struggle is not a clash of Islam vs. the West, but a civil war within Islam between a minority of terrorists and a la