Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World

Chapter 4. Power and Vulnerability

In the coming decade, the accumulation and exercise of power will rise in strategic importance as a new global order begins to take shape. The U.S. will be obliged to confront and resolve the challenges sparked by its global military supremacy, and it will continue to wrestle with the delicate interplay between “hard” and “soft” power as both are deployed to achieve complex foreign policy objectives. In the shadow of the U.S., many other nations will be required to review their military policies and expenditures; all over the world, nations will have to distinguish more clearly between the metaphoric and literal meanings of the “war on terror.” As they do so, the paradoxical relationship between power and vulnerability ...