William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and Joseph S. Nye of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University spoke on "America in the World: Hard vs. Soft Power," in a free public lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room at Converse Hall at Amherst College. The Victor S. Johnson Lecture Fund and the Office of the President at Amherst sponsored this lecture, which was moderated by Amherst College President Anthony W. Marx.

audio Audio Clips
  1. "History is full of surprises, and the idea that the future is going to resemble the past is often misleading." MP3 709 K
  2. "This is an attitude that we were so big and so strong, we should no longer act like Gulliver tied down by Liliputians; we should do what we wanted, and others had no choice but to follow." MP3 736 K
  3. "We became one-dimensional thinkers in a three-dimensional world." MP3 840 K
  4. "We're now in a new political era, and what it means to be in the new era…is things change a lot." MP3 753 K
  5. "The answers aren't obvious; the government is full of people who haven't thought that much about these problems and who have old positions that haven't been adjusted to new realities." MP3 941 K
  6. "We are the ones with the power…to promote democracy and freedom." MP3 776 K
  7. "The United States won the Cold War by being a smart power; a smart power is one that learns to combine hard and soft…in last three or four years, I don't think we've been a smart power." MP3 641 K
  8. "If we can get to elections in late January, I'm moderately optimistic." MP3 534 K
  9. "We shouldn't kid ourselves about the nature of the world and assume that somehow once we get rid of Bush, we can just go back to enjoying comfortable peace." MP3 564 K
  10. "I don't buy the argument that we're so insular." MP3 511 K
  11. "There was much more sharing of information and technology among rogue states than we realized." MP3 806 K
  12. "I think this going to the…greatest challenge to American policy over the next ten or twenty years." MP3 665 K
  13. "We haven't done enough to reorganize the government…to deal with this new world we're living in." MP3 505 K
  14. "It seems to me that the power of this society has been ably demonstrated tonight by our ability to have an informed and engaged debate…the future of the republic and beyond the republic rests on our capacity to do that." MP3 930 K
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