Hard power has been used often in the context of national security by a number of states, if the aims have not been achieved it is primarily because of their inability to employ all elements of national power.

This year, the 47th Munich Security Conference included for the first time a special session on cybersecurity. “This may be the first time,” the president of a small European noted to the high-powered assembly, more accustomed to dealing with armies and alliances than with worms and denial-of-service attacks, “but it will not be the last.”

Former minister Shashi Tharoor’s breezy visit to London last week was symbolic in the extreme: as he told British academics of India’s need to project soft power, a desert storm for democracy swirled in the Middle East.

Egypt has revolutionized revolutions. As Harvard University Prof. Joseph Nye wrote in the Huffington Post recently.

Egypt's revolution is momentous. In 18 days, a broad-based, nonviolent social movement overcame an entrenched, autocratic government. However, we are still in the first act of a long play.

Is the United States in decline? Many Americans think so, and they are not alone. A recent Pew poll showed that pluralities in 13 of 25 countries believe that China will replace the U.S. as the world's leading superpower.

In his new book “The Future of Power,” Joseph S. Nye Jr. analyses the changing nature of power in the 21st century as upheavals man-made and environmental alter the global terrain and as both state and non-state entities jostle for dominance

It is not often that an academic concept gains rapid traction in public sphere. After Joseph Nye published a slim volume on “soft power” a few years ago, the idea became the rage in foreign offices and think tanks around the world.