How network power explains American foreign policy.
One thing I've always felt missing in a lot of the think pieces on the Obama administration's grand strategy (or lack thereof) is any attention to Anne Marie Slaughter - the former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and now Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Specifically, how Slaughter's view of America's "network power" relates to the administration's policies. Joseph Nye's Project Syndicate piece today does a good job at explaining what it's about:
'Much of the work of global governance will rely on formal and informal networks. Network organizations (such as the G-20) are used for setting agendas, building consensus, coordinating policy, exchanging knowledge, and establishing norms. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department, argues, â??the power that flows from this type of connectivity is not the power to impose outcomes. Networks are not directed and controlled as much as they are managed and orchestrated. Multiple players are integrated into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.â?ÂIn other words, the network provides power to achieve preferred outcomes with other players rather than over them.
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Slaughter herself detailed the idea more fully in a piece for Foreign Affairs (sadly behind a subscriber wall).
It's hard to tell in the day-to-day scrum of policymaking if this is in fact what the Obama administration is actually working towards. On some issues, like the peace process, the administration isn't harnessing any networks but is shouldering the burden alone. But I think you could make the case that "network power" is a decent explanatory framework for the administration's response to the international financial crisis (expanding the G-7 to the G-20) and some of its moves in Asia. And it's certainly a significant, if unstated, theme running through many of Secretary Clinton's major speeches on American foreign policy.