The power diplomacy of the United States has sensed in the past year that the country's diplomatic drive is losing steam to mostly unintended practice leaks and a few intentional
policy picks.
The power -- hard, soft, or smart -- was stretched too thin by concurrent maneuvers in Baghdad, Beijing, Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva,
Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kabul, Moscow, New York, Pyongyang and Tehran, to list just a few hotspots where Americans had been busy mending rather than making diplomacy.
"(George W.) Bush's (hard power) foreign policy left the United States weaker. The new administration must work more closely with allies, friends, and multilateral institutions than Bush did in dealing with the problems,"
Joseph Nye, who coined the term "soft power" in 1990, asserted.
To the Harvard scholar, soft power is the ability to get what one wants through attraction, whereas hard power is to get it through coercion.
Neither seemed to make do in 2009 for the Obama administration, whose main goal is to revive the country's economy domestically and recast its image globally.
Some critics and political opponents have already blamed Obama's new foreign policy for contributing nothing meaningful to his country, though his vice president and secretary of state both expounded early on the U.S.
shift to a "smart power" diplomacy.
But smart power is not a simple combination of hard- and soft-power instruments on hand.
A sincerity to listen, to engage, to consult (as promised by Joseph Biden), and to even reach out to adversaries (as promised by Hillary Rodham
Clinton) is smarter than the hitherto uncompromisable American ego which only renders its motif suspicious enough by choices of convenience and/or interest.
While the final approval of the Lisbon Treaty could strengthen the European Union to challenge the U.S. leadership in the international political system, Obama, who considers himself the first U.S. "Pacific
President," is facing a combined challenge from the so-called BRIC countries plus Japan to its driver's and navigator's seat in the international economic system.
Scattered in between and along the trans-Atlantic and cross-Pacific relations, the United States was worried about such security threats as the nuclear programs in the DPRK and Iran as well as regional conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Obama's Afghanistan policy was deemed to be not hard on al-Qaeda, Taliban and their supporters, nor soft on NATO allies and families and friends of newly-added troops.
This was because the administration announced a military surge with a definite pullout date only to make the maneuver hard on the friend and soft on the foe.
What the administration wanted to get from the surge seemed to be only to get the troops out of Afghanistan after having sent them there.
Pundits have criticized the move as compromising a diplomatic goal with an additional show of force.
But it was during the past year that the U.S. shift from hard- to soft-power diplomacy was reflected in the country's more multilateral
approach toward such regional and international issues as WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), financial and economic crises, and climate change.
The secretary of state admitted: "It does not make sense to adapt a 19th-century or a 20th-century balance of power strategies. We cannot go back to Cold War containment or to unilateralism." So the new administration
has kicked off an era of engagement supposedly to be based on common interests, shared values and mutual respect.
While critics argued away, Nye believes, "If you look at the various speeches President Obama has made in Prague, in Cairo, in Accra, the
administration has set a new tone for the U.S. foreign policy.
"I think its action in cherishing the development of G20 as a new multilateralism and in improving bilateral relations with Europe, Russia, China and Japan are all important steps."
For the Obama administration, 2009 was the first of its four tenure years of running the country and dealing with the world. It still has three more years to demonstrate to the American people and the international community how it works with its smart-power diplomacy.
So it is still too early to judge whether Obama is, like some are already alleging, an idealist in a pragmatic diplomacy or a pragmatist in an idealistic diplomacy.