Scientific Cooperation: The Way Out for the United States Of America in a World of Interdependancy

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the term has become increasingly popular as an alternative to hard power, but also the term has been considered as controversial and inapplicable by many scholars. The aim of this paper is to prove that soft power is an effective mechanism for any state to realize its ends, while hard power will only lead to more tension and hatred among states and nations. Furthermore, it cannot makes a country's goals come true in a world of interdependency. In this regard, this paper will answer two important questions. Firstly, did the U.S. achieve its goals or even change the behavior of certain countries or terrorist groups through the use of hard power? Secondly, did the U.S. achieve its goals through the use of scientific cooperation as a means of soft power when dealing with the former USSR? To answer those two questions, my arguments depend on empirical examples, such as the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the stick and carrot policy against Iran and Sudan. All these sorts of hard power proved to be useless. Although U.S tends to be the only super military power in a unipolar world, in reality the distribution of power resources in the contemporary information age varies greatly across different issues, such as the interstate economic issues, whereby the world has become multipolar. In addition to that, the transitional issues; such as climate change, war against terrorism, and spread of infectious diseases power isn’t dominated by any superpowers; but it is rather widely distributed and chaotically organized among states; so it makes no sense to call this a unipolar world. Therefore, the U.S. is not powerful enough to achieve its goals in the countries mentioned above, if it continues to use hard power. Even worse, the U.S. reputation was damaged as a result of these wars and became abhorrent. In the case of Iran and Sudan, neither economic sanctions nor political hostility helped the U.S. to achieve its aims to topple or change the attitude of those regimes.