''The Paradox of American Power'' is a book written by

political scientist Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and la ...

Joseph Nye Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. (born January 19, 1937) is an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book ''Power and Interdependence''. Togethe ...

and published in 2002. According to Nye, a

nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective Identity (social science), identity of a group of people unde ...

has never had as much cultural, economic, and military power as currently wields the

United States of America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...

. Yet, at the same time, a nation has never been so interdependent with the rest of the world. Nye describes "hard" and "soft" power and asserts that maintaining and maximizing soft power is fundamental to keeping the U.S. in a privileged position, due to soft power being an effective and inexpensive tool of influence in the international arena. Nye asserts that China, Japan,

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, Russia, and the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

have the pre-conditions necessary to be superpowers, although none can match the combination of soft power and hard power that the United States projects. As a result, Nye makes the case that America should preserve and expand its multilateral engagements, as opposed to conducting a tactless unilteral foreign policy, which according to Nye will reduce global goodwill towards the United States and undermine the policy goals that rely on the engagement of foreign partners for their achievement.

References

Non-fiction books about diplomacy {{int-book-stub