In My View

Soft Head, but a Hard Heart

Not so long ago (only it seems a world away!), a young colleague at my previous employment with the CNBC-TV 18 had told me about ‘speaking softly but carrying a big stick.’ While at that time I had nodded my head sagely towards her, I could now safely confess I did not know then who she was quoting. A little research later, I was edified with the knowledge that it was a motto prescribed by one of the USA’s most underrated presidents, Theodore Roosevelt – the 26^th in line and Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot.

A few years after my colleague brought my attention to the comment, Joseph S. Nye, an American strategic thinker based a whole theory of political power upon it. Soft power, as Nye envisioned, is based on popular legitimacy that is earned through a process of cultural, social and ideational interaction, as opposed to the brute force of military and economic might.

My current experiences in Hawai’i at the East West Centre (EWC) and the University of Hawai’i, Manoa (UHM) fall in the category of Nye’s rubric. This is where the Yankee Uncle Sam is your avuncular Uncle Joe playing a benign guardian to a region of the Pacific. This is a place where a recalcitrant island acquisition is sought to be integrated with unconcealed humility, overt respect and boundless compassion. This is where mainland, white America is in the minority and wishes to win hearts and minds. And not in the way it was won in South Vietnam, a few decades ago; or in Iraq now.

In Hawai’i one witnesses a self-assured imperial power that is aware of its station in life. It does not suffer from the driving need to underscore its power all the time. So the Mcdonalds, Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) – symbols of the US’s neo-imperial, commercial hegemony - seem submerged in the happy diversity of Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Korean eateries. Mainstream WASPish (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant) America seems quite at peace with the cultural smorgasbord that is not a victim of internecine battles, which mark the unhappy assimilations of the US mainland.

Of course, at a rather sublime level there is Pearl Harbour at the edge of Honolulu, the capital city of Hawai’i in the island of Oahu. As much as it symbolises the history of the first time the American homeland was attacked, it also holds the truth of its current primacy in military might, embodied in the headquarters of the US Pacific Command, located there.

But the sights, smells, sounds and breeze of Hawai’i tends to make you forget that you are living on the lands of a nation that believes in “killing people” to uphold its beliefs and its self-interest. No she was not talking about Stalinist Russia. But this rather pithy statement was made by a senior colleague at the East West Centre the other day on a social occasion. Yet, ask a Hawai’ian – quite in contrast to the American Indians – whether they had to lay down their lives alongwith their sovereignty when the island was annexed, almost universally they would reply in the negative. In fact, if the fortnight long ‘orientation’ that all EWC and the UHM students and fellows have to go through, is any indication, an immersion in the Hawai’ian history and culture is full and complete.

Indeed, it is made out to be a rite of passage. Integral to the exercise is the attempt to build a regional community that shares common goals and aspirations. Considering that East West Centre is principally funded by the US Congress and the American Department of State is the pivotal agency looking after it; and presumably keeping in mind that its Public Diplomacy desk under Karen Hughes has oversight, the approach in Hawai’i seems an experiment in laboratory humanism. Hughes, many would recall, was an early convert to neo-conservatism and less famous (than Karl Rove or Donald Rumsfeld) exponent of George W. Bush presidency.

But then these are also days when Indian people are being confronted with the Hobson’s choice of being a ‘strategic partner’ of the USA. This is a choice not couched by the desire of the country to secure its operational autonomy – as was the case with the Russian strategic partnership of the 1970s – but it is fraught with the country’s sense of threat of economic and political isolation (as a recent newspaper column by a renowned journalist held out) in the case of refusal.

So it may be a good time to remember its own man who “spoke softly and carried a big stick.” This old man did speak so softly that millions would strain to hear what he said; and he carried a big stick so naturally that it seemed like an extention of his hand, never raised in anger, but always raised in persuasion. This was the man, bent with the weight of Indian civilization on his shoulders, showed us when you need to take long strides, the big stick helps to put your feet firmly on the ground. We need to remember him again, in the context of the quote.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in . He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme of the Centre.