Me? I'm All for Dumb Power

Chris Brose is bristling at Hillary Clinton’s invocation of “smart power” in her testimony the other day:

Now, America needs many things right now, but another contribution to the foreign policy lexicon is not one of them. The whole hard power/soft power thing always seemed too much like a Cialis commercial to me. And smart power isn’t much of an improvement. . . .

Yes, every secretary of state needs to put her own unique rhetorical brand on the foreign policy she will be practicing. I get that. Heck, I’ve even been complicit in it (and not just once). But smart power? Come on. The thing that bothers me about it is that it’s a description of means, process. It has nothing to say about what the purposes of our foreign policy should be. I’m all for phrases and brands. But they should offer more than just a vague recipe for how we mix together our various kinds of power — hard, soft, happy, grumpy, sneezy, whatever.

A couple of my colleagues the other day also mentioned that Hillary’s use of a foreign policymaker term of art demonstrated somewhat of a tin ear as far as the public is concerned. A whole host of press reports cited her use of the term yesterday. But only a fraction of them even bothered to offer a thin definition of the term, so in effect the only message received by all but a rarefied fraction of the country is that America should use diplomacy and stuff, and not be, you know, stupid.