POWER EVOLVES

In the sixteenth century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; seventeenth-century Netherlands profited from trade and finance; eighteenth-century France gained from its larger population, while nineteenth-century British power rested on its primacy in the Industrial Revolution and its navy. In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power resources were measured in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, and numbers of men under arms and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe. But the global information age of the twenty-first century is quickly rendering these traditional markers of power obsolete, remapping power relationships.

In The Future of Power, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a longtime analyst of power and a hands-on practitioner in government, delivers a new power narrative that considers the shifts, innovations, bold technologies, and new relationships that will define the twenty-first century. He shows how power resources ar