Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Westchester

Joseph Nye is a University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  His popular course, "A-12" was typically one of the largest each semester he taught it at Harvard.  He was teaching at Stanford this semester, but he has relocated due to the coronavirus, afffording this unique opportunity for us to engage with him. 

 

Nye received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University,won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. His books include The Power to Lead; The Future of Power; Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era; and Is the American Century Over.

 

He has just published "Do Morals Matter?" which will be a springboard for this talk.  The book assesses the foreign policy of each modern presidency, from FDR to Trump, and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions: 1) their intentions, 2) the means they used, and 3) the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.

 

Nye is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011 Foreign Policy named him one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers."

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NOTE: To join the Webinar, you will need to RSVP below, and a link for the Zoom session will be sent to you 24-48 hours in advance of the talk.  You will not need to set up a Zoom account to join the webinar.