ABSTRACT
Just as military force and the threat of force have their place in international conflicts, they are options and should remain options in counterterrorism. Military actions against Al Qaeda's bin Laden in Pakistan and against a FARC leader and fellow-operatives inside Ecuador's borders were examples of effective military actions against terrorist organizations. Before Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, Joseph Nye criticized the Bush Doctrine as "based on a flawed analysis of power in today's world". Nye wrote, "Obama's election itself has done a great deal to restore American soft power, he follows up with policies that combine hard and soft power into a smart strategy of the sort that won the Cold War". The German sociologist Max Weber defines politics as "striving for a share of power or for influence in the distribution of power, whether between states or between groups of people contained within a single state".
