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In the post-Cold War era, few concepts have more profoundly shaped discussions of U.S. foreign policy than the idea of "soft power." The term was coined by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead, in which he defined it as "getting others to want what you want." But Nye wasn't just trying to illuminate an element of national power. He was also pushing back against arguments that the United States was facing an impending decline. To the contrary, Nye argued that alongside its military prowess and economic strength, the United States enjoyed a massive advantage over any potential rivals thanks to its abundant soft power, which rested on "intangible resources: culture, ideology, [and] the ability to use international institutions to determine the framework of debate."
The idea of soft power gained traction in the 1990s but was tested in the United States in the years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Following the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq and the steep rise in antiAmerican sentiment in the Middle East and beyond, Nye insisted that soft power was not merely complementary to hard power but indispensable to it. "When we discount the importance of our attractiveness to other countries, we pay the price," he argued in his 2004 book, Soft Power, urging a more deliberate deployment of public diplomacy. Such arguments held little sway in the George W. Bush administration but were later embraced by the Obama administration; in 2013, an article in these pages described Obama's first top diplomat, Hillary Clinton, as "the softpower secretary of state." The soft-power pendulum swung again under the more hawkish and less internationalist administration of President Donald Trump and once again when President Joe Biden took office, pledging to restore the country's moral stature and to "lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example."
Amid these swings in policy over the past two decades, the concept of soft power only grew in prominence, popularized by a legion of pundits who used it as a shorthand for describing the cultural contours of Pax Americana. "America's soft power isn't just pop and schlock; its cultural clout is both high and low," the German commentator Josef Joffe wrote...