What about 'I can't believe it's not power'

Come on Dan....philosophers use "weak" and "strong" to denote the number of entailments two otherwise similar theories have. Either we get over the connotation of soft or we stop trying to modify the word 'power' altogether because the only way to modify power and mean something other than force is with 'soft.'

That being said, how about "Manipulation Capacity?"

In the spirit of the new administration, "Power you can believe in" or "the Power of Hope."

Or, why not just call it bacon? Most people like bacon.

Bacon we can believe in.... mmmmm.....

Samantha Power is "certainly an attractor"? C'mon Dan...Salma is an attractor! Samantha Power is not (I was going to use her description of Hillary).

I second WPH's suggestions, and would add:

weak power
imaginary power
illusionary power
wishful power
anti-power
jiu-jitsu power

And why stop with bacon power? Why not a full BLT -- with mayo on sourdough -- power?

How about getting rid of the word "power" ? I mean, really, do you know what it is, how it works (precise causal mechanism please), and how to know it when you see it?

Really?

Really?

Cap Slap

Potent Potentates

Or, as a wise philosopher once demonstrated, we're exporting IMAGINATION.
http://fc16.deviantart.com/fs30/f/2008/125/9/c/Spongebob__Imagination_by_kssael.png

Peer pressure power
Passive power
Osmosis power
Diffuse power

How about "direct power" vs. "indirect power"?

It may have been in jest, but "butter" is kinda perfect. Can't you picture that in a Mafia movie?

The obvious tougher term for “soft power” is “Gramscian Hegemony”;) See, e.g., the following from the Wikipedia article on the 20th Century Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci:

“Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the ‘common sense’ values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.”

Just substitute “United States” for “bourgeoisie” and “everybody in the world” for “working-class” and isn’t this what we would really like to achieve by “soft power” if we could? And, weren’t we surprisingly far along toward achieving it if we could have just had enough self-discipline to resist the temptation to torture people.

How about executive illuminati change machine?

The trend of adding "2.0" to the end of everything would work well here.

Power2.0

Shiny.

Who are you going to use the new language with? Americans or foreigners?

Americans like to think we're powerful. Anybody doesn't do what we want, we stomp right over them and there's nothing left of them but a greasy smear.

Foreigners of course don't like to think of us as being that powerful. But we don't mind, they can resent us all they want provided they always do what we want.

I see two different things when people talk about "soft power". One of them is weak power. Instead of threatening to destroy somebody utterly, you threaten to slap him up side the head and not share your ice cream cone with him. Weak threats don't work as well as strong threats unless the other guy understands that you really mean the strong threats but you're politely not saying them out loud. I'm not much interested in that kind of soft power.

The other part of soft power is that when the other guy agrees with you, you don't have to force him. He does what he thinks is right without needing threats. This is a lot less wear-and-tear all round, but there's always the chance that at some critical moment he'll decide not to follow orders. It's much simpler to have allies who do whatever you say because you're the boss, than to have allies who just happen to be aligned with you. But that's also considerably more expensive.

When you use this second kind of soft power, and you're talking to americans, you want it to sound like we're the boss. That's what we like. But when when foreigners can hear you want them to hear something more like "The americans are cooperating with us". Imagine it on a more personal level. Say your college fraternity has persuaded a sorority to have a big orgy with you. And afterward they hear you talking among yourselves. "Oh man, we sure dominated those b*tches! They had to do everything we said! How long should we wait before we make them do it again?" Does not make them feel cooperative.

So if you want a word for it that foreigners can hear, it ought to be something that stresses mutual resolve, shared goals, mutual agreement, joining forces, etc. I'd suggest the word "mutualism" from ecology, which is kind of like symbiosis, it means organisms living together to their mutual benefit.

But if you're talking to americans, they don't want to hear about namby-pamby agreements, they want to hear that we're kicking ass all over the planet, that everybody does what we say because we say it with no discussion needed. Better to have a word with suggestions of covert control, hidden dominance, overwhelming manipulation. "Moral force" won't do, that sounds as if morality is involved that might somehow constrain us. Far too sunday-school. We need a word with implications. Like, "You don't have to worry about what the europeans will do. Our X will force them to do precisely what we want and they won't even know that we're totally in control, they'll think they want to fight for us." The obvious perfect word is "mind control".

But things we publish for our own use will be read by europeans too, and vice versa to some small extent. So it isn't enough to have two different words. We need one word that sounds like "mutualism" to europeans and sounds like "mind control" to americans. I don't know what that word would be, but at least I've set up the constraints so I might know it when I see it.

Following Stephen Colbert, how about....

Poweriness

Well, "civil power" or "civilian power" is a favourite in Europe, especially Germany (as in Zivilmacht) - however, it carries a whiff of civilizationism and culturalism with it, e.g. we are civilized and have civil power - and you are not...

Of course, I remember a French scholar once at a conference speaking of "nigh power" - or so most English-speakers thought... in the manuscript later on you could read that it was in fact "Nye power"... :-)

Here's a suggestion cribbed from an adaptation of a tabletop game: power and influence. Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do things (or suffer the consequences); influence is the ability to get people to do things on their own (to gain the benefits). NATO has lots of power (and a good bit of influence), while the EU has an enormous amount of influence, but less power. Point-haired bosses use their power; good businesspeople use their influence. The United States, of course, has enormous amounts of both.

So: power and influence.

How about the plain, old fashioned "moral authority"?

How about dropping the back-end power term. And calling it like "hard influence". No, that wouldn't work. I like smart power.

Or what about "Broad Power"? But, people might get confused and think that it means "Girl Power."

Joseph Nye wrote a long book about it, but I recall seeing a concise defninition of "soft power" in an obscure CIA report back in the early 1990s -- which, come to think of it, was around the time that Nye was Director of the National Intelligence Council, the interagency (yeah, right) body that produces NIEs and happens to be housed in the Original Headquarters Building at Langley. Anyway, according to this report America's soft power had three main components: popular culture, information technology, and the English language. (Gee, I hope that isn't still classified!)

[...] Renaming ’soft power’Funniest IR post in a while. [...]

I like richard armitage;s paper at csis on soft power. it basically means moeny corruotuon of "civl society" by NGOs that look neutral. which is probabkly why hes at international crisis group now. along with the former head of saudi intelligence. wow small world again danny boy.

anyway, did u ever read the marine expedition unit special operation capable MEU-SOC doctine on seaborne direct action raids? pretty sophisticated stuff for a bunch of paki. villagers to implement dont u think? some intresting stuff leaking over there on the captured guys spill of the beans.

summarized at: Mumbai: Was it Indeed an Islamic Terror Attack? Were Muslims even Involved?

anyway is dick nye still getting funding from investcorp over there at the k school.and dean allision, is he still at the us azerbaijan chamber of commerce?

gotta love the company u keep. :)

[...] Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Dan Drezner all have recent posts on retiring the term “soft power”.  They have a point - after [...]

in honor of batman, how bout kaPOWer (requires exclamations)

OK my stab a it:

"Mojo"

I dunno what it really means, but I don't know what "soft power" means either, so I guess that makes it work.

[...] that U.S. cultural popularity may afford policy-makers). Dan Drezner’s almost tongue-in-cheek “social power” suggestion acknowledges – like I do – that the notion of soft power is “vague” enough to [...]