During the late campaign, various excitable conservatives warned that the next Administration, if it turned out to be a Democratic one, would be guided by what one of them referred to as “Marxist tendencies.” We won’t know for sure about that till this week at the earliest. But there are already signs that the dialectic favored by the forthcoming novus ordo seclorum may well display what Sean Hannity would probably not call “Hegelian tendencies.”

Thesis: Hard Power. The kind fetishized by the outgoing Bush crowd, especially Cheney. Guns, bombs, tanks. Humvees, Hueys, M16s. All about blood and guts. Antithesis: Soft Power. The kind preferred by certain thinkers and political scientists, including, most prominently, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard. Movies, books, songs. Ideals, diplomacy, moral authority. All about hearts and minds. Synthesis: Smart Power. The kind favored by—well, here’s Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State-designate, in her opening statement, last Tuesday, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy. This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence declared that “in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.” The same truth binds wise women as well.

Up here in New York, another wise woman was surprised and delighted by the fuss down there in Washington: the coiner of the phrase, Suzanne Nossel. “Smart Power” was the title of an article Nossel had written in a 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, the same magazine in which George Kennan, writing as “X” in 1947, put a name to what became American policy for the next forty years: “containment.” Nossel’s article was altogether more modest, proposing to renew the venerable doctrine of liberal internationalism in a non-stupid way. It was kind of a no-brainer: You can be too hard, you can be too soft, and you can be too clever by half. But you can’t be too smart.

“Smart power” has proved to have legs. Joseph Nye picked up on it, and in 2006 he and Richard Armitage, who had been Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, launched a bipartisan Commission on Smart Power. And now, as Senator Jim Webb, of Virginia, said at the Hillary hearing, “The phrase of the week is ‘smart power.’ ”

Who’s Suzanne Nossel? She’s in her late thirties, she has the strawberry-blond ringlets of a Dickens heroine, and she’s the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch. When she wrote the “Smart Power” article, she was an executive at Bertelsmann, the media company, but she has had a finger in the Democratic foreign-policy pie since forever. In the early nineteen-nineties, she worked in Johannesburg, helping to implement South Africa’s National Peace Accord during the transition to democracy. During the Clinton Administration, she was a deputy under Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at the U.N. In 2005, she founded DemocracyArsenal.org, a progressive foreign-policy blog. She’s married to David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers and a Slate columnist, and they have two kids, Leo, four, and Liza, two.

“Hillary was impressive,” Nossel said a couple of days afterward, in her office, about a third of the way up the Empire State Building. “She didn’t gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She’s saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She’ll make smart power cool.”