Politics of Credibility

I recently read 'Power and Interdependence in the Information Age'(Foreign Affairs 77(5): 81-94) by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. The two authors argue that, with the rise of the information technology revolution, geographic states as the dominant actor in international relations will 'continue to structure politics' but state power 'will rely less on material resources and more on their ability to remain credible to a public with increasingly diverse sources of information' (p. 94). Although I agree that the information technology revolution will not deem the nation state irrelevant in IR, there is a fundamental flaw in arguing that credibility brings power, when in fact credibility is a subjective term, perceptions of what is credible can easily be molded by actors holding the most material resources. Their theory illustrates credibility as the independent variable, and power as dependent on credibility, where as, in reality power is the independent variable, on which credibility is dependent. Maybe that sounds too cynical. What can you do, it's February in Estonia.