The Limits of Soft Power

Two articles today highlight the limits of running a foreign policy on "soft power", i.e. persuasion as opposed to force. Bill Gertz, in the third excerpt of his book Treachery, shows how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been completely unable to stop the proliferation of nuclear technology.

The United Nations also failed to confront the nuclear threat from Iran, which, like North Korea, used the NPT to acquire equipment and materials to make nuclear bombs.

When Iran's weapons work was discovered, showing that the Iranians knowingly ignored obligations to their treaty partners, the IAEA essentially ignored the violations. The agency sought only an additional "protocol" from Iran as a new safeguard.

"This is a good day for peace, multilateralism and nonproliferation," ElBaradei declared after Iran signed the protocol. "A good day for peace because the [IAEA] board decided to continue to make every effort to use verification and diplomacy to resolve questions about Iran's nuclear program."

Sounds a lot like Chamberlain's "peace in our time".

Amir Taheri, meanwhile, writes about the attempted "soft-power" approach to Syria and its occupation of Lebanon.

ONE of the charges leveled against President Bush on Iraq is that he circumvented the United Nations, ignored allies and acted unilaterally. The theory is that an OK from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and French President Jacques Chirac is the surest guarantee of success for U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.

That theory was put to the test earlier this month — and proved to be not only false but counter-productive, at least for the time being.
[...]
The resolution passed 9-0, with six abstentions, indicating unusual U.N. consensus. French diplomats were in seventh heaven: They had proved they could do through diplomacy what the "Cowboy" Bush insists on doing through force.

But what happened next was less idyllic: Far from bowing to the "collective will of the international community," Syria decided to ignore the Bush-Chirac alliance and reacted by, in effect, abolishing the Lebanese state.

There seem to be two key lessons here: "soft power" does not work without the explicit threat of "hard power", and that trusting rogue regimes to adhere to law or agreements is simply inane. The problem with the first lesson is that Europe does not believe in using "hard power" because it does not have it; and allowing the US to use it would mean acknowledging that the US is the "hyper-power" without which Europe can not survive, not something they are keen to do. And this leads into the second lesson - they have to rely on adherence to agreements because there is nothing else they can do.