to stick to practical truth of things, rather to fancies. Many men have imagined republics and principalities

that never existed at all, yet, the way men live is far removed from the way they ought to live.

That anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.

While Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in "The Prince" an extensive observation of power, here at BYU today we're

very pleased to welcome a preeminent scholar of power, Professor Joseph Nye.

As I mentioned, he is the University Distinguished Service Professor, former Dean of the Kennedy School of

Government at Harvard University, in 2008, a pole of international relations scholars ranked Professor Nye

as the most influential scholar in the field on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine

named him one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. He has extensive government service, including

serving as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, during which he was

awarded two distinguished service medals, as Deputy to the Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance,

Science, and Technology, as chair of the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear

Weapons, and as chair of the National Intelligence Council. Originally joining the Harvard faculty in 1964,

he served as director for the Center of International Affairs or Harvard's Kennedy Center, as it were.

His most recent books are the soon to be released "Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the

American Era," "The Future of Power," "The Powers to Lead," for which he offered an undergraduate seminar

earlier today, "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics," and "The Power Game: A Washington Novel."

He is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

an honorary member of the British Academy, and North American Chairman of the Trilateral Commission.

Professor Nye received a B.A. summa cumme laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work

as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and recieved a PhD in political science from Harvard University.

Tonight, we invite you to join us as he explores his ideas about the future of American power.

Ladies and gentlemen, Joseph Nye.

Thank you very much, Cory. It is

a pleasure to be back at Brigham Young University. I had a very nice visit here about four or

five years ago. It's not just your mountains and scenery and so

forth, but what I really enjoyed today was not just the colleagues but the students I

met. It is really pleasant to see so many people with open and inquiring minds. Let

me say that tonight I would like to think about the condition of American power, where

have we been in the last century, and where are we going this century. [These are] issues

that have preoccupied me for the last twenty years or so. I don't know how many of you

remember that back in the Reagan period in, the 80's, there was a widespread view that the

United States was in decline. The book that was a best seller on the New York Times best

seller list at the time was a book by my friend, Paul Kennedy, a very distinguished Yale historian,

originally British, who said that the United States was finished. Basically, we were going

the way of Edwardian Britain or Philip II of Spain. It was all over, and his rise and fall

of the great powers became a best seller. I wrote a book at the time because I thought

he was wrong and I did not think the United States was in decline. I wrote a book called

"Bound to Lead." I am pleased to say that I think I got the answer right but, he got all

the royalties. There is a long standing tendency in the United States to worry about our decline

and to think we are in decline. As a people, we go through cycles of hubris and declinism;

if you think back to the 1960's in the Cold War, there was a belief that the Soviet Union

was overtaking us. In the 1980's the Japanese were overtaking us. Today, people think

the Chinese are overtaking us. [It] is interesting that the Soviets weren't 10 feet tall, the

Japanese weren't 10 feet tall, and the Chinese aren't 10 feet tall. I think the moral of

the story is that Americans have got to learn to have a clearer view of what the world is

like so that we have a better understanding of American power and our position in the world.

We have not always been as good at that understanding as we need to be. If you look at the situation

of the United States, it is quite remarkable that by the end of the 20th century, the United

States was the preeminent power in the world. We had about half of the world's military

budget, so nobody could form a balance of power against us. We had the world's largest economy,

still do. We had more soft power in the sense of the cultural resources in our universities

and our entertainment industry that attracted others. In that sense, it was quite remarkable

that we didn't have a global balance in power. You had American primacy, which has

sometimes been called the American Era. I have been interested in trying to explore

where that came from, where it is going, how the Americans got to be the prime power in

the world, and what is going to happen in the future. These are questions that have

been on my mind for a couple of decades since I wrote that book answering Paul Kennedy.

What I would like to do tonight is talk a about the next book that I am doing or the

one that is coming out in May on presidential leadership and the creation of the American

Era, because it may help us to answer the question of whether what our leaders say matters.

Putting in another way: Do leaders matter? If you look at the 2012 campaign,

both Governor Romney and President Obama promised that they would resist decline and

that they would maintain American primacy. The questions we ought to ask is [whether]

it is in their power to do anything about it, [whether] it matter[s] who is president,

and, thinking about it in another way, [whether] it is all in the cards that are dealt.

If you have a continent the size of ours, two oceans, and an economy that grows as well

as ours, are you just bound to become the primary leading country of the 20th century

anyway? Academics look at two sets of theories that go into this. The international relations

people tend to say it is in the structure of the situation; human leadership is secondary

or not all that important. The people who study leadership say it is leaders who matter. It

makes all the difference what kind of leaders you have.

I have been puzzling in this new book of how you would sort that out. I am interested that

Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, when he was teaching at Harvard, where I studied

under him, that he thought it was all structural, that it was all just the way the cards were

dealt by geography and history and so forth. After he got to the White House, he decided

leadership mattered. I guess where you stand on this issue depends on where you sit. I

have tried to sort this out in a different way. I [ask], “Well, what would

happen if you looked at this president by president over the course of the 20th century

and you imagined that you had a different leader, a different president than the one

who was elected? Imagine that the next most likely person had been president. Would it

all have turned out the same or not?” Think back historically, if William McKinley hadn't

have been assassinated, there never would have been a Teddy Roosevelt. If Teddy Roosevelt

hadn't run as a third party candidate in 1912, there never would have been a Woodrow

Wilson. You can go on and on like that through the century [with] counterfactual history

of [whether] the leaders matter[ed]. Now when you look at leaders, there is a strong tendency

to look at leaders in terms of whether they are transformational or transactional. Ever

since James McGregor Burns wrote his book on leadership in 1978, the general preference

has been for transformational leaders, leaders who really shake things up, who make a big

change. Transactional leaders or managerial leaders are discounted, and so, in addition

to the question of [whether] leaders matter, I am interested in [if] it matter[s] what

kind of leaders you have in terms of whether America wouldn't become the power that it

dimensionally becomes. I think the general argument for why leaders probably play a role

and that it's not purely structural forces is partly answered by the fact

that the growth of American power in the 20th century wasn't smooth. If you just trace

the growth of the American economy, if you look at our structural strength, then American

power should have risen proportionately. We should have just kept getting stronger and

stronger and more influential in the world. What is interesting is, that is not the way

the history of the century turned out.

After the period 1900-1920, we had the next 20 years, a period where we were less influential,

where we turned inward and didn't play much of a role, yet our economy continued to grow.

Our share of the world economy continued to grow, yet our influence to the world diminished.

So if it were just structural, then you would say there is something wrong. These charts

don't fit together as well as they should. If you look over the century, the United States

was about a quarter of the world's economy at the start of the 20th century and about

22%, or almost a quarter of the world's economy, at the end of the 20th century rising

up to about 45% during WWII when everybody else was prostate because of the effects of

the war, which made us artificially large to others. By and large, we didn't suffer any

decline in our strength from the beginning to the end of the century. We did have this

odd pattern so that if you look at the periods which led to American power becoming preeminent,

you would say that either you have 1900-1920 and then 1920-1940 as sort of [an] inward

period, and then 1947-1970, a period in which we are turning outward again, but basically

with Vietnam and the aftermath of the Vietnam war up until 1980 I would argue our power

diminishes. In the 80's, it begins to increase again until with the collapse of the Soviet Union,

American primacy is clear. So, those are the periods in which you can divide the growth

of American power or which you can see American power which is 1900-1920, 1941 basically until

about 1970 and then 1980 until the end of the century. So, let's look at the presidents

who were in charge in those key periods and let's see whether they mattered, playing

this little counterfactual game that I suggested.

Well, 1900-1920, the two key presidents were Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Teddy

Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were both transformational leaders in the sense that they wanted to make

big changes. They didn't want the status quo. They were going to change the world.

They both were quite charismatic in their style. They had similarities. They both

were ivy league presidents, they both were writers and wrote a number of books, they

both won Nobel prizes for their work in foreign affairs while they were in office, but they

were very different otherwise. Indeed, they had quite opposite views of the world. Teddy

Roosevelt, who starts the century, built the American Navy, took the Panama Canal which

meant we could move the navy back and forth without having to go around The Cape, he mediated

in the Russo-Japanese war (that is what he got his Nobel prize for) and he mediated in the conflict

between Germany and France in Morocco. If you think about it, these were really quite

different positions than were traditional American positions. American traditional positions

in foreign policy really were the Monroe Doctrine, telling the Europeans to stay out of our hemisphere.

This idea of meddling in Asia or Europe, that ran against George Washington's and John

Quincy Adams' advice, which is to mind our own hemisphere. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt

made a difference. Henry Kissinger makes an interesting point in his book on diplomacy

comparing Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt didn't leave much of a legacy because he

didn't educate the American people. His intervention in the global balance of power

for example, in Morocco was something he kept pretty much to himself. He didn't explain

it much to people and his congress. It ran against the tradition, and he didn't want

to get in trouble for doing this. While Roosevelt did some interesting and important things,

some of this might have happened anywhere. There would have been a Panama Canal within

another 10 years or so. It might have been a Nicaragua Canal, but the navy would have

been built, the canal would have been built, you might not have had the meddling in Europe

and Asia, but that part didn't really last anyway. As much as Teddy Roosevelt is a

personal hero of mine, particularly for what he did on the domestic front, I don't think

that he had a lasting effect as great as people think. The structural forces probably would

have produced the same outcome within another decade or so anyway. Now you go to Woodrow

Wilson, who as I mentioned, ironically would not have been president if Teddy Roosevelt

hadn't tried to become president again,

running as a Bull Moose candidate in 1912. Taft would have been reelected and Wilson

would have never made it. Wilson was interesting in the sense that he came into office not

wanting to be bothered with foreign affairs. The last thing he wanted was to get involved

in WWI. Getting involved in WWI really was against American tradition. The idea that

you would send two million American troops into a battle in Europe was just against everything

George Washington and his successors had told us was the right way to run a foreign policy,

yet Wilson did it. When he did it, Teddy Roosevelt had been urging him to do it well before that.

When he did it, Wilson did something very different from what Roosevelt would have done.

He wrapped it up in American morals. He had his fourteen points in which he was going

to change the world. He was going to abolish the balance of power, which he regarded as

a corrupt way of doing international politics, since it was the great countries, big powers

treat[ing] the little powers like cheeses to be cut up for the sake of the big powers. He promised

that we were going to get rid of all the iniquitous ways of European balance of power. We were

going to replace it by a League of Nations in which you didn't balance power by forming

alliances with others; you had a system where you had all the good guys against the bad

guy. Everybody teamed up against the aggressor. That theory of collective security, which

was embodied in the League of Nations, was Wilson's effort to transform the world,

to change the way politics had been done. The interesting thing about this is it was