…as a basic plan for how to direct American foreign policy is Joseph Nye. Here he is in a 2005  conversation with us about how “Hard Power” (i.e. military force) often backfires and undermines American foreign policy intentions. As a man in and out of government and for some years the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he did not exert much influence during the years of the George W. Bush presidency. Some argue now that he foresaw the mess-to-come in Iraq. When to use soft power and when the hard kind remains a pertinent issue for the two remaining Obama years and well beyond.