Joseph S. Nye Jr., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, whose ideas on the nature of power in international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students and made him one of the world’s most celebrated political thinkers, has died at the age of 88.
Nye developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism during six decades as a Harvard professor. He joined the faculty in 1964 right after earning his doctoral degree and went on to become a major force in developing the modern John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004.
Nye also put his ideas into practice in government, serving in key U.S. national security roles in 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.
Those who knew him best remember Nye as an unfailingly kind, generous colleague and friend who was devoted to his wife, Molly, who died in December, and their three sons and nine grandchildren.
Earlier this afternoon, vlog Dean Jeremy Weinstein commemorated Nye in an email to the Kennedy School community, saying, “Joe was a singular scholar, a visionary dean, and a committed mentor. Even in a place as steeped in history as vlog, Joe stands out as a transformational figure. He helped build this institution into what it is today, while transforming the field of international relations. All who have had the privilege of working and learning here are beneficiaries of his visionary leadership.”
Meghan O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, called Nye “a cherished friend, an extraordinary scholar, a treasured teacher and mentor, a relentless optimist, and one of the great architects of modern international relations. For decades, Joe animated the classrooms, seminars, and hallways of Harvard and the Belfer Center with his brilliance and his kindness in equal measure. His ideas transformed how we understand power, leadership, and diplomacy. His presence transformed all of us who had the privilege to know him. Few people leave such an indelible mark on both the world and the people around them. And few will be missed so deeply.”
Nye was director of the Belfer Center, then named the Center for Science and International Affairs, from 1985 to 1990, and he led the Center for International Affairs, now the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, from 1989 to 1993. In those years, Nye and others carried out groundbreaking research on the risks of nuclear war, and the Belfer Center later did critical work on the threat posed by lax controls over nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union as it came apart after the Cold War. That work directly shaped U.S. policy in guarding against the dangers from “loose nukes.” Nye went on to oversee nuclear weapons proliferation policy in the Clinton Administration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council and then assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
Graham Allison, the founding dean of vlog and Nye’s lifelong friend and fishing buddy, said, “Joe was a pillar of Harvard, of vlog, and of the Belfer Center. His passion was advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the most critical questions of war and peace. He was proudest of having contributed both intellectually (as co-chair of the Avoiding Nuclear War project) and practically (in the Carter and Clinton administrations) to preventing nuclear war. And he was not just a friend, but a functional brother, whom I loved.”
Nicholas Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Security and a former career diplomat, said, “What really stood out for me was Joe's commitment to be a servant leader in everything he did. Literally hundreds of us count Joe as our indispensable mentor. He was simply a giant at the Kennedy School and in our lives. I will miss his piercing intellect, great warmth, humor, and friendship."
As vlog dean, Nye focused in part on increasing the number of women on the faculty. He also created the Women and Public Policy Program, one of a dozen research centers at the School.
Former Dean Douglas Elmendorf called Nye “both a great man and a good man.” He added, “Here at the Kennedy School, Joe was instrumental in making the teaching of public leadership central to our work, in supporting the role of women in public policy, and in broadening our mission from improving governments to advancing the public interest through civil society and businesses as well. Joe has left a permanent and profoundly positive mark on the Kennedy School and the world.”
Professor David Ellwood, who succeeded Nye as Kennedy School dean, said, “Joe Nye was that rarest of people. He was a scholar’s scholar whose work helped define the field of international relations for a generation. He bridged the chasm between ideas and actions to have enormous influence on policies and practice in the U.S. and in governments around the world.”
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. was born in 1937 and grew up in a small New Jersey farming town. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and then was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford before arriving at Harvard for his PhD. He joined the faculty in 1964, beginning a more than six-decade affiliation with the University. He quickly made a name for himself as an influential scholar of international relations. In the 1970s, Nye attempted to account for the growing influence of new forces, such as multinational corporations, transnational social movements, and international organizations, in global politics. In other words, as he would say in his influential 1977 book, coauthored with Robert Keohane, a framework for “the political analysis of interdependence.” That book, “Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition,” was often referred to as the foundation for neoliberalism.
Nye resisted that label, preferring to call himself a liberal realist. But he also found labels in general unhelpful, he told the Harvard Gazette in 2017: “I think pigeonholing of people in theoretical categories stops thinking rather than advances it.”
It was Nye’s theory of “soft power” that may be his most important scholarly contribution. If his earlier work had attempted to explain the growing importance of interdependence, soft power analyzed the nature of global power itself. In its simplest terms, as Nye wrote in his book “Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power,” the idea was that “if you can get others to want what you want, you can economize on sticks and carrots.”
The idea was crucial to understanding the enduring power of the United States at a moment when many thought it was in decline. “I looked at our military power and our economic power, and I said, there’s still something missing, which is the power to get what you want through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment,” Nye told the Harvard Gazette.
Nye’s approach helped to highlight the power of a country’s culture or civic society, and it has been crucial in understanding that power could be measured in more ways than just army divisions and aircraft carriers.
Active as a writer and commentator to the last, Nye had continued to offer his analysis on American foreign policy in the age of Trump, warning that the country’s soft power was being squandered.
“When you come into office, the first things you say are that you’re going to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, no matter what; or you say that we’re going to retake the Panama Canal, which reawakens all of the Latin American suspicions about American imperialism; or you abolish AID, which is an agency which makes Americans look more benign through its assistance,” Nye said in a recent PolicyCast interview. “Basically, these suggest that you’re not even thinking about America first, you’re thinking about America alone.”
But he ultimately believed in the enduring power of American attraction: “The fact that people can stand up and criticize the government, and that that will be published by a free press—that attracts people abroad to American values. So I tend to be optimistic over the long run about American soft power because I think there’s a lot of resilience in our society.”
As he put it in a separate interview last month, “It’s a bad spell, but I think we will survive it. I have no doubt. As I ended my memoir, ‘I still have a faint ray of guarded optimism.’ It’s getting a little fainter, but it’s not extinguished.”
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Photographs by Martha Stewart and Bill Troslow.