America's rejection of 'soft power' a win for Putin

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

One astonishing phenomenon (of admittedly many) in this second presidency of Donald Trump is his voluntary transfer of America’s greatest asset to his counterpart in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. That asset is soft power.

The concept was developed at the end of the Cold War by the international relations scholar Joseph Nye. It’s subtle and often misunderstood. It doesn’t refer merely to non-military means of conducting foreign policy, such as sending aid to poor places to create goodwill (although Trump is stopping that as well). Soft power is more sweeping. It amounts, as Nye put it, to the ability of one country to get others to “want what it wants”; to seduce or co-opt rather than having to coerce.

There are many ways to do that, and historically the United States has, without even trying very hard, excelled at all of them. It has some of the best universities, so that many leaders of foreign countries learned how to think about the world as students in the U.S. It makes many of the movies that feed the dreams of people in democracies and dictatorships alike. It designs much of the technology they use in daily life. And it has often (though regrettably not always) modeled values, including freedom and fairness, that foreigners would like their own governments to embrace.

All this soft power — alongside the hard kind, including tanks, aircraft carriers and nukes — helped the U.S. lead “the West” to victory in the Cold War and in the unipolar era that followed. It inspired dissidents within hostile autocracies as well as voters in allied democracies, even in small countries that might otherwise have feared the superpower’s awesome might. Soft power helped all American presidents since World War II, Republicans and Democrats, to convoke other countries and develop international law and the United Nations, a relatively open trading and financial system, and in general that thing so awkwardly called the “rules-based international order.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-americas-rejection-of-soft-power-a-win-for-putin/