The Clinical Death of American Soft Power

In May 2025, Joseph Nye, the American political scientist and Harvard professor who coined the term ‘soft power’, died. For more than three decades, his concept shaped how governments, journalists, scholars, and diplomats thought about influence. Nye insisted that countries could get what they wanted not only through coercion or payment, but through attraction, in culture, political ideals and policies seen as legitimate by others.

A year after Nye’s death, against the backdrop of Washington’s military campaign against Iran, it became clear that American soft power had entered a state of clinical death. It outlived the creator of the concept by only a short time.

Nye always insisted that soft power was a scientific concept, but, in reality, it was never especially precise. Its definition shifted across his work, and the term itself was elastic enough to be used by almost anyone for almost any purpose. Yet that vagueness helped make it popular as governments across the world seized on the idea that national image and values could become instruments of foreign policy. The EU embraced it, while China studied it and Russia debated it extensively. Books, articles and conferences appeared everywhere, often urging national governments to learn from the American example.

In the US, soft power reached its peak under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These Democratic administrations believed in a values-based foreign policy and in extending American economic and political leadership across the world and they needed tools that could shape the desires of other countries rather than merely force their compliance.

The concept fit the post-Cold War moment perfectly as America presented itself not only as the victor of a geopolitical struggle, but as the natural model for the rest of humanity. Democracy, human rights, and the free market were promoted as universal standards. The American interpretation was treated as the global benchmark.

Under Clinton, democracy promotion became a central aim of US diplomacy. Under Obama, the appeal of American values was declared to be the foundation of American leadership. Hillary Clinton’s ‘smart power’ was an attempt to combine Nye’s soft power with the more traditional instruments of military and economic pressure, but in practice the combination never truly matured. The rhetoric was sophisticated, yet the policy remained dominated by coercive tools.

The decline began before Donald Trump. Sanctions had already become a routine mechanism of US policy and Russia experienced this directly under the Biden administration. But Trump stripped away the old language as he made it clear that he is interested in hard power, war, blackmail, tariffs, sanctions, and pressure. Values-based diplomacy was replaced by ‘America First’ and the image of the US no longer rested on attraction, but on force.

This didn’t create the crisis of American soft power by itself; it exposed it.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has moved from being an ideological leader for much of the world to a country increasingly associated with threats to sovereignty and identity. The aggressive policies of Western neoliberal elites over the past three decades produced a growing refusal, even among some allies, to accept the imposed global standard without question.

In other words, the three pillars of American soft power have all eroded.

The first is culture. American mass culture remains powerful as Hollywood, music, digital platforms, and consumer brands still have enormous reach, but Americanization has reached its limits. In many countries, the loss of cultural roots in favor of Western mass culture has come to be seen as a threat to civilizational identity, and governments have responded by protecting local traditions or encouraging national alternatives. The age when American culture could simply sweep everything before it has passed.

The second pillar is values. For decades, Washington presented markets and human rights as a single attractive package, but these values have changed in ways many traditional societies find unacceptable. The promotion of the LGBTQ agenda, radical gender ideology, and other new norms has alienated countries that don’t wish to view their own societies through American eyes. What was once presented as freedom is now often perceived as cultural pressure.

The third and most serious problem is the legitimacy of US foreign policy. Nye’s theory assumed that American policies had to be accepted as legitimate by others and that was largely true in Western Europe after 1945. It was also true in the 1990s, when NATO and the EU accepted US leadership in building a new order based on Western rules.

However, that consensus has broken down and Washington no longer appears concerned with whether its policies are legitimate even in the eyes of allies, let alone rivals. The war against Iran, the tariff wars, pressure on NATO partners, the inconsistent approach to Ukraine, and the attempt to build a separate line with Moscow have all deepened Western European uncertainty. American leadership has turned into what Zbigniew Brzezinski once warned against, arrogant dominance.

The reaction outside the West is even clearer. China, Russia, Iran, and many other states now openly challenge Pax Americana while others do so more quietly, but with growing confidence. The absence of an alternative to American leadership is no longer taken for granted.

This is why interest in soft power itself has declined. China, once one of Nye’s most attentive readers, has moved towards the language of ‘discursive power’ and ‘decolonization of the mind’, and Chinese experts increasingly describe US foreign policy as an attempt to colonize consciousness by implanting American values and ideological narratives into other civilizations. The aim, in this view, is to weaken local foundations and establish ideological dominance.

Russia has undergone a similar reassessment. In the 2000s and early 2010s, soft power was widely discussed in Russian academic and political circles and the term entered official discourse. Yet too few understood that by using the concept uncritically, Russian experts were importing American political language into their own analysis. Thus, after the start of the military operation in Ukraine, the need to distance Russian thinking from Western theories became unavoidable.

The decline of soft power, however, doesn’t mean the US will abandon its global humanitarian influence. America’s public diplomacy apparatus existed long before Joseph Nye gave it a fashionable name. It is a vast network of state bodies, private foundations, media platforms, educational programs, and non-governmental organizations that promote US political and ideological leadership abroad.

Even if Trump cuts funding for USAID, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the National Endowment for Democracy and similar structures, the system won’t disappear because it’s rooted in America’s global interests. It may shrink or change language, but it will continue to operate because Washington doesn’t need the theory of soft power as long as it retains the machinery of public diplomacy.

This is an important lesson for Russia and the collapse of American soft power as a concept shouldn’t create complacency. The West’s values-based appeal has weakened, but its institutional instruments remain and Russian public diplomacy must therefore move beyond borrowed Western terminology and develop its own conceptual foundation.

The period of adaptation to the new international realities has largely ended and the task now is to define new goals and new methods. Many of the weaknesses of Russian public diplomacy identified before 2022 remain unresolved and the current crisis has only made them more visible. At the same time, it has forced a necessary reassessment of old approaches and opened the way to new forms of engagement with friendly countries and foreign audiences.

Russia can no longer rely on Western concepts to explain its place in the world. Continuing to speak of soft power as the key to national image is counterproductive and the Russian sociopolitical sphere must stop thinking in foreign categories, however familiar they may be.

Stepping out of the soft domestic comfort zone into the harsh reality of international competition is the only way to build a genuinely Russian framework for humanitarian policy. That framework is badly needed and in many regions of the world it is also awaited.