Joseph Nye Was the Champion of a World That No Longer Exists

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.

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.