Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (born 1937) is the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane, of the international relations theory neoliberalism developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the new Obama Administration in 2009.
Nye is currently University Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and previously served as dean there. He also serves as a Guiding Coalition member for the Project on National Security Reform.

The 2008 TRIP survey of 1700 international relations scholars ranked him as the sixth most influential scholar of the past twenty years, and the most influential on American foreign policy.

Life and career

Nye graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and, after studying PPE as a Rhodes Scholar at Exeter College at Oxford University, obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He attended Morristown Prep (now the Morristown-Beard School) in Morristown, NJ and graduated in 1954.

Nye originally joined the Harvard faculty in 1964, serving as Director of the Center for International Affairs and as Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. From 1977-1979, Nye was Deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

In 1993 and 1994 he was chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the President. Nye also served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Clinton Administration, and was considered by many to be the preferred choice for National Security Advisor in the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost liberal thinkers on foreign policy, and is seen by some as the counter to renowned Harvard conservative Samuel P. Huntington.

In 2005, Nye was voted one of the ten most influential scholars of international relations in the USA.

He is on the Advisory board of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy as well as on the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, the editorial board of Foreign Policy, the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Guiding Coalition of the Project on National Security Reform, the Advisory Board of Carolina for Kibera, and the Board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize by Princeton University and the Humphrey Prize by the American Political Science Association. In 2005 he was awarded the Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society of Trinity College Dublin and in 2007 he was awarded an honorary degree by King's College London. President Obama reportedly passed over Nye for the post of Ambassador to Japan - against the urging of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - in favor of a campaign fundraiser.

Nye has published many works in recent years, the most recent being Understanding International Conflicts, 7th ed (2009), The Power Game: A Washington Novel (2004), Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), and The Paradox of American Power (2002). Nye coined the term soft power in the late 1980s and it first came into widespread usage following a piece he wrote in Foreign Policy in the early 1990s. Nye is currently known for writing debate cards.

Nye and his wife, Molly Harding Nye, have three adult sons.