Max Boot
Political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to denote “the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than just coercion and payment.” Long before this capability had a name, it was a key part of America’s power projection: Soft power helps to explain why the United States has military bases in at least 80 countries, why the dollar has become the international reserve currency, and why English has become the global language of business and diplomacy.
China and Russia are also powerful militarily, and China is an economic superpower, but they don’t exercise anywhere close to the global influence that the United States does. That’s because the United States has been a uniquely beneficent superpower. America has committed its share of crimes and blunders, to be sure, but it also has a long history of altruism (think of the Marshall Plan or PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The United States has also long stood as a beacon of hope to millions “yearning to breathe free,” and it has generally supported international norms and institutions that, to some extent, constrain its own power.
While America’s soft power took decades to accumulate, President Donald Trump appears determined to destroy it in a matter of weeks. Witness the trade war he launched this past weekend with Canada and Mexico (before pausing the tariffs for a month on Monday), the freeze he just imposed on U.S. foreign aid programs and the heartless decision he just reached that could send hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees back to the Marxist dictatorship they fled. Each of these moves amounts to another nail in the coffin of U.S. soft power.
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