Joseph Nye, a former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, is a political scientist and author of “A Life in the American Century.”
Trump is liquidating America’s reserves of soft power
The United States can’t beat China with hard power alone.
March 25, 2025 The Washington Post
By Joseph Nye
Skeptics say: “So what?” International politics is hardball. Trump’s coercive and transactional approach is already producing concessions with the promise of more to come. And as Machiavelli once noted, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved.
Perhaps. But it is better yet if the two are combined.
Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. That can be accomplished by coercion (“sticks”), payment (“carrots”) and attraction (“honey”). The first two are hard power; attraction is soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power. But over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin is said to have once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But the papacy continues today, while Stalin’s Soviet Union is long gone.
Even in the short run, soft power matters. If you are attractive to others, you can economize on carrots and sticks. If an ally sees you as benign and trustworthy, they are more persuadable and likely to follow your lead. If they see you as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet and reduce their interdependence when they can.
A Norwegian analyst once described Cold War Europe as divided into Soviet and American empires. The difference was that the American side was “an empire by invitation.” That became clear when the Soviets had to send troops into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. In contrast, NATO not only survived but had former Warsaw Pact countries clamoring to join.
Trump has set up China as the United States’ major challenger, and Beijing has indeed been increasing its hard power by building up its military and investing abroad. But in 2007, President Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power. Its government has spent tens of billions of dollars to that end — admittedly with mixed results because of two major obstacles. First, it faces territorial disputes with several of its neighbors. Second, its insistence on tight party control over all organizations and opinions in its civil society leads to visible repression across society.
China’s obstacles are confirmed by recent public opinion polls. Pew Research Center surveyed 24 countries in 2023 and reported that majorities in most countries found the U.S. more attractive than China, with Africa the only continent where the results were even close. More recently, Gallup found that the U.S. enjoyed an advantage in 81 out of 133 countries it surveyed, while China had an advantage in 52. One wonders what these numbers will be in future years if Trump keeps undercutting U.S. soft power.
Over the years, U.S. soft power has had its ups and downs. The United States was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But soft power derives from a nation’s society and culture as well as its government actions. Even during the Vietnam War, when crowds marched through streets around the world to protest U.S. policies, they did not sing the communist “Internationale” but instead chanted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “We Shall Overcome.”
After its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia lost most of what soft power it had, but China is striving to fill any gaps that Trump creates. China sees itself as the leader of the so-called Global South, of what used to be called “nonaligned” countries. It uses its U.N. votes and staffing and its claims to have a more successful egalitarian development model. Its Belt and Road Initiative development program is designed to attract countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
If Trump thinks he will easily beat China by completely forgoing soft power, he is likely to be disappointed. And so will we.