Hard power is the use of military and economic means to influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies. This form of political power is often aggressive, and is most effective when imposed by one political body upon another of lesser military and/or economic power. Hard power contrasts with soft power, which comes from diplomacy, culture and history.
According to Joseph Nye, the term is “the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will.” Here, “carrots” are inducements such as the reduction of trade barriers, the offer of an alliance or the promise of military protection. On the other hand, “sticks” are threats including the use of coercive diplomacy, the threat of military intervention, or the implementation of economic sanctions. Ernest Wilson describes it as the capacity to coerce “another to act in ways in which that entity would not have acted otherwise.”
Read more about Hard Power: History, Examples, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words hard and/or power:
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)