Jospeh Nye's Soft Power & The Syrian Conflict

Briefly:

Joseph Nye introduced the concept of Soft Power in his famous book “Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power” in 1990. It’s really shocking me, when I see after nearly 4/5 years and spending billions of dollars Obama administration and the western countries have not been able to organize a coherent, reliable and united group of Syrian people, who would try to promote democracy and liberal values in Syria. This is really strange and shocking, when we see that nearly 4-5 million Syrian refugees, which have left Syria, are living in the camps located in some countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey, which all of them are the close allies of the western countries. In other words, the western countries do not have any barrier or limitation at all, if they want to promote democracy and liberal values among those Syrian refugees. The last effort of Obama administration was spending $500 million dollars and training of a group of nearly 60 Syrian rebels, which in the beginning of their operation, most of them were killed or captured by ISIS and Al-Nusra-Front. So is the devastating case of Afghanistan and Iraq after all these years war. Let be honest with ourselves: Isn’t something really wrong with these genius politicians and decision makers?  Do these people really have enough education, qualification and experience for the job they are doing? Or maybe these people have landed on the Earth from another Galaxy and have absolutely no idea about everything in our planet including the simple concept of Soft Power developed by J. Nye. In a very optimistic scenario, some of your advisers are like tape recorders. They might have the highest educational degrees from best universities with A+ grade in all the subjects; but they have absolutely no idea how to use different theoretical concepts as tool in order to solve a problem. 

Note: With less than $50 million dollars, during one or two years course, i could educate and train nearly 40 to 50,000 Syrian refugees in a way that they would have returned back into Syria and completely dismantled Assad's Regime by the effort and power of themselves without my direct intervention in Syria.   


M. Sirani                    09.09.2015