Joseph Nye: Intellectual giant who saved US-Japan alliance

TOKYO — If forced to name just one of Joseph Nye’s many accomplishments, one would typically choose the concept of « soft power » — that countries can pursue diplomacy through ideas and values and not just through military strength.

But from the perspective of the Asia-Pacific, Nye, a former dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who died Tuesday, made even more significant contributions.

In the early 1990s, calls to drastically reduce the U.S. troop presence in Asia were gaining traction in Washington. The Cold War was over, and the threat of the Soviet Union had vanished.

As the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Bill Clinton administration, Nye was opposed to this idea. He believed that withdrawing the U.S. military would increase the risk of conflict in the region. Working together with then-Defense Secretary William Perry, he redefined the U.S.-Japan alliance as essential to stability in Asia and pushed to maintain the 100,000 U.S. troops deployed in East Asia.

This policy came to be known as the Nye Initiative. Without his work, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-South Korea alliances could have been greatly weakened, and the Korean peninsula and the seas in Asia made much more dangerous. In this sense, Nye was an intellectual giant who saved the U.S.-Japan alliance.

One of Nye’s most striking qualities was his ability to listen. During interviews, he would listen carefully to the question and ensure that he understood what the interviewer wanted to know. When answering, he would get straight to the essence of the matter in a calm, measured tone. His spoken statements conveyed a sharp logic, as though they were beautifully crafted writing.

As the assistant secretary of defense, Nye also worked to engage with the Chinese military. At the time, I was stationed in Beijing, and I distinctly recall Nye repeatedly emphasizing the importance of military dialogue between the U.S. and China at a press conference during a visit there. In more recent years, he would express his concern that such military-to-military talks were disappearing.

Nye also worked together with the late Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of defense, to publish six reports aimed at strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance. A leading figure in the liberal theory of international relations, Nye was not originally an expert on Japan.

Nye was driven to champion the U.S.-Japan alliance out of his deep insight into and reflection on history. He knew that if the U.S. turned to isolationism, global instability would follow. He shared this concern during the first Donald Trump administration.

In his view, the U.S. has an instinct to turn inward. Before both the first and second World Wars, the U.S. initially turned inward, recoiling from involvement in Europe and elsewhere. It was only when no other option remained that the U.S. finally took action.

When I met Nye in Tokyo in November last year, I asked him if he thought that America could resist the lure of isolationism. He answered vaguely that the U.S. was at a watershed moment. He too was uncertain of the degree to which Trump 2.0 would damage U.S. foreign policy.

In his later years, Nye warned against underestimating China’s power. In Washington and elsewhere, some observes argue that China had peaked, and that it would enter a period of decline because of a shrinking population and other factors.

Nye believed otherwise. China may be plateauing, he said, but it was premature to say that it would decline. It was the analysis of a great scholar who was deeply versed in the rise and fall of great powers.

So, could it be that U.S. leadership as a superpower is merely plateauing, and the country could soon experience a revival? I would have liked to hear his thoughts on the matter one more time.