Stress-Testing U.S. Soft Power

The father of soft power and smart power has died, just as the United States has been giving those concepts a deathly stress test.

Nye, who died last week at the age of 88, wrote that hard power rested on command, coercion or cash—‘the ability to change what others do.’ Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in 1990, shaped what others wanted through attraction.

Soft power persuades volunteers and believers, while hard power issues orders. Nye stood with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: ‘You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.’

Trump has taken to heart Machiavelli’s advice that it’s better for a leader to be feared than loved. Nye believed it was best for a leader to be both.

Nye always said that good foreign policy needed both soft and hard power, and he combined them in the concept of ‘smart’ power: ‘If a state can set the agenda for others or shape their preferences, it can save a lot on carrots and sticks. But rarely can it totally replace either. Thus, the need for smart strategies that combine the tools of both hard and soft power.’

Trump attacks on all three fronts. In the words of The Economist, the president leads ‘a revolutionary project that aspires to remake the economy, the bureaucracy, culture and foreign policy, even the idea of America itself’.

US alliances are shaken by Trump’s cavalier coercion. He zig-zags on Ukraine, often leaning towards the Russian strongman he admires. US foreign aid is smashed. The nation that set the model for free and independent journalism with its First Amendment now guts its international broadcaster and threatens its own journalists.

Trump’s international view is imperial, seeking to carve the world into spheres of influence. His raw realism has no veneer of manners—the Mafia Don makes demands that others can’t refuse. The US’s tariff campaign is driven by the Don’s demand for a deal that delivers profit.

Wielding US hard power, Trump imposes a huge stress test on US soft power and the values America has long expressed.

With an experiment, you draw conclusions from the results. The early returns from the Trump test are negative. Certainly, he is good at smashing things, but Americans can’t see much being built, as Sam Freedman notes:

Donald Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any President after 100 days. He’s even beating his own woeful first term numbers. His signature tariffs policy has been a disaster, and polls terribly. Confidence in the economy has collapsed. Even on immigration he has negative numbers.

The Trump effect on Australian opinion is similar. Previews of the 2025 Lowy poll show that Australians’ trust in the US to act responsibly has fallen by 20 percentage points, with only one third of Australians having any level of trust in the US—the lowest in the history of the survey. While having no faith in Trump, Australians still cling to the alliance, with 80 percent saying the alliance is ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ important for Australia’s security. Maybe Australians got the memo about the difference between hard and soft power.

Donald Trump’s actions prove he’s no conservative. He has no understanding of how a foreign policy realist sees the mix of forces and interests, capabilities and ambitions, or the way values and morals shape what a nation does in the world. For such thoughts, turn to Nye. A good place to start is The Strategist, which published 100 of Nye’s columns during the last decade. They’re all here.

Start with Nye’s March column, a meditation on how empires and states need both soft and hard power. The state needs legitimacy as well as legions.

The column touches on the fear Nye expressed in the memoir he published last year: that domestic change in the US could endanger the American century. Even if US external power remains dominant, a country can lose its own virtue. As Nye concluded in his column on Trump’s threat to the international system:

If the international order is eroding, the US’s domestic politics are as much of a cause as China’s rise. The question is whether we are entering a totally new period of US decline, or whether the second Trump administration’s attacks on the American century’s institutions and alliances will prove to be another cyclical dip. We may not know until 2029.

Graeme Dobell is an ASPI senior fellow.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).