INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY. IS OBAMA'S TEAM SET TO EMBRACE 'SMART POWER'?
. Gideon Rachman: "Shifting horizons", Financial Times

From the always readable Gideon Rachman, writing about President Obama's foreign policy team:

[The] rethinking of the war on terror reflects a broader reassesment, both of American power and of US national security. Rather than putting military power at the centre of US foreign policy, the Obama team wants to rehabilitate America's "soft power" - diplomacy, persuasion, cultural influence, development aid and the power of example. Indeed, the man who coined the phrase 'soft power' Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor is tipped to be US ambassador to Japan or China ... In a recent interview, Anne-Marie Slaughter [expected to be appointed at State] suggests that the US "need not see itselft as locked in a global struggle with other great powers; rather it should view itself as a central player in an integrated world". In her view, American power is as much to do with with a dense web of cultural and economic connections with the rest of the world as it is to do with the number of aircraft carriers possessed by the navy ... Kurt Campbell, expected to become assistant secretary of state for Asia, argues that "unchecked climate change will come to represent perhaps the single greatest risk to our national security". Susan Rice, the new ambassador to the UN, thinks extreme poverty leads to state failure and, therefore: "We ignore or obscure the implications of global poverty for global security at our peril".