2014 National Convening Skills Presenations National Convening 2014 | Page 5

but the crucial communications are
oral, and they’re often short. To some
extent this is because of the amount of
paper – you can’t possibly keep up with
all of it, so you have to fall back on the
spoken word for the important things.
When I was the dean of the Kennedy
School, I tried to train students to give
an elevator briefing – to say, in the time
it takes an elevator to go from the first
to the seventh floor, the two or three
things your boss needs to know. Succinct,
clear communication is one of the most
effective tools of power.
What’s your elevator pitch to the
44th president of the United States?

I think the first thing is for the new president to make sure he doesn’t become
hostage to George W. Bush’s in-box. Of
course, he’s going to have to fix Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. But if that’s all he

Do you believe that the United
States is in decline as a world
power?

No. People have been making that
claim for decades. In the late 1980s, everybody thought the Americans were
finished – the Cold War was over and
the prevailing belief was that Japan
had displaced the United States, driving it out of the world economy and so
on. I thought this was wrong, and my
book Bound to Lead was an effort to
refute that claim. I started by looking
at American military power and then at
American economic power. I realized
that I was missing something: the ability of Americans to attract others to their
ideals and to their country. That’s what
I called soft power, and it’s why I wrote
then that the United States would be
the dominant power of the twenty-first
century.

To set a new tone for U.S. foreign
policy, the next president must not
become hostage to Bush’s in-box.
does, he misses the opportunity to set a
new tone for U.S. foreign policy. If he’s
to exercise smart power, his mix of soft
and hard must be more forward looking
and offer more hope. He ought to close
Guantanamo and set up a joint commission to look at how we should handle trials for suspected terrorists. He may want
to appoint a bipartisan group to consider
practical and immediate steps for dealing with climate change. He might also
want to take a trip to Asia – starting in
Tokyo and then going to Seoul, Beijing,
and Delhi – to demonstrate that America
is aware of and particularly focused on
the rise of Asia, that it’s not focused just
on the problems of the Middle East. It’s
striking how many of the inherited problems are Middle Eastern ones. Of course,
they’ll continue to be tremendously
pressing, but they shouldn’t dominate
the next presidential agenda.

1592 Nye.indd 59

I’m a long-term optimist about the
United States. There’s been a spate of
books in the aftermath of the invasion
of Iraq that have tried to revive declinism. I don’t believe it myself. The United
States is a society that rewards creativity
more than many other societies. I think
it also has a great deal of soft power derived from its culture and its values, even
though recent policies have undercut
that. But policies can be changed. The
American economy still has impressive
capacity, and I think the American military is not about to be surpassed. This
century will certainly see what Fareed
Zakaria has called “the rise of the rest.”
We’re beginning to see it now. But that’s
different from seeing the eclipse of the
United States.

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February 8–11

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Reprint R0811B
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9/26/08 6:34:50 PM