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.”
Trump ignores and indeed disdains this legacy. At the United Nations, he switched sides from America’s traditional friends, the democratic countries, to America’s adversaries, by voting with countries such as Russia, Belarus and Sudan and against allies in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. In a shocking volte-face, America refused to condemn the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. That follows Trump’s nearly wholesale adoption of the narratives and propaganda peddled by Putin. In effect, the U.S. now stands against the very UN Charter that it co-sponsored in 1945.
Leading by example and ideal — that is, with soft power — is clearly passé in Washington. By contrast, coercing with hard power is all the rage. Witness Trump’s bizarre pattern of threatening small countries and allies instead of adversaries; nations from Canada to Denmark and Panama. Whereas the U.S. used to attract other countries by promising to enhance their safety and freedom, it now repels them.
America’s unprovoked surrender of soft power corresponds, albeit asymmetrically, to a gain in soft power for its main adversary: not so much Russia the country as Putin the autocrat and role model for strongmen everywhere. His nation — which has been called a gas station with nukes — has little to offer the human spirit, which is why young and ambitious Russians have been fleeing in droves, especially since the attack on Ukraine. But Putin as a tyrant has plenty to offer to wannabe emulators.
Remember that Nye defined soft power as getting others to want what you want. Well, lots of people want unfettered power. And during his quarter-century in the Kremlin, Putin has written what amounts to a postmodern manual for wielding authoritarian control. That includes deploying a meta-power — the “one ring to rule them all,” as it were: the ability to manipulate, distort and invert truth with impunity. Putin, with his KGB-trained mind, has modeled how to convince entire populations that “nothing is true and everything is possible.”
By messing with minds so deviously, Putin has exerted soft power not so much over foreign populations or countries as over international copycats such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, who in turn became role models for other strongmen (in Israel, Turkey, Brazil, India and elsewhere). And most notably, for Trump.
Trump seems to want what Putin and other autocrats want: Not a world order based on rules and norms that guarantee the sovereignty and integrity of all nations, even small ones. Not a world governed by international law and mutual prosperity through open trade and exchange. They instead want a distinctly old world order, one in which might makes right and the large conquer the small while carving up spheres of influence among them. They want domination at home and imperialism abroad, and they’re ready to have one another’s back.In that way, soft power is inherently agnostic about good and bad uses, as Nye made clear in his later work. “Hitler, Stalin and Mao all possessed a great deal of soft power in the eyes of their acolytes, but that did not make it good,” he wrote. “It is not necessarily better to twist minds than to twist arms.”
What made the Pax Americana of the past eight decades different and better than the historical norm is that one nation, America, wielded so much soft power so benevolently. What’s new in 2025 is that the U.S. has ceded this soft power. It did so without outside compulsion; except for the pull its new president felt from the seductive but malevolent soft power of a different leader, half a world away.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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