It is poignant yet perhaps fitting to mourn Joseph Nye, the distinguished international relations scholar, just as his life’s work championing U.S. leadership and liberal internationalism has run aground in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” died at the age of 88 on Tuesday. His intellectual leadership, teaching, policy guidance, and diplomatic efforts shaped five decades of U.S. foreign policy. His thinking also molded the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—the collective of scholars, think tankers, officials, and civil society leaders that Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, once derisively labeled “the Blob.”

It is poignant yet perhaps fitting to mourn Joseph Nye, the distinguished international relations scholar, just as his life’s work championing U.S. leadership and liberal internationalism has run aground in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” died at the age of 88 on Tuesday. His intellectual leadership, teaching, policy guidance, and diplomatic efforts shaped five decades of U.S. foreign policy. His thinking also molded the U.S. foreign-policy establishment—the collective of scholars, think tankers, officials, and civil society leaders that Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, once derisively labeled “the Blob.”

Nye and his confederates held fast to the idea that there was little America could not accomplish if it played its cards wisely: rallying ironclad allies, arguing persuasively, upholding the moral high ground, and outflanking adversaries in what Nye sometimes described as a game of “three-dimensional chess.”

Punctuating decades of decline, the early months of Trump’s second administration have closed the chapter on the U.S.-led postwar order that Nye stood for. Nye’s intellectual progeny must now do as he did: cast out tired theories to summon hardheaded yet imaginative understandings of the emerging world order and how to position the United States within it.

Joseph S. Nye Jr. explains a key power resource in this essay from 1990.
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Born in 1937 in a small New Jersey farming town, Nye studied as an undergraduate at Princeton University before receiving a doctorate and faculty post at Harvard University. His 1977 book, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, co-written with political scientist Robert O. Keohane, became an instant classic. A salvo against the dominant realism of the Henry Kissinger era, the volume drew on the U.S. experience in Vietnam and the 1973 oil embargo to argue that global interconnectedness posed a series of challenges that did not submit to raw economic or military might and instead demanded cooperation and........

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