I disagree here: our soft power has been blown up by George W. Bush's and Donald Trump's liking to come off as cartoon villains on the international stage. A large stock of social capital built up by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHWB, Clinton, and Obama has been trashed. Now we are just another normal nation. We need to figure out how to deal with this. Nye hopes that our attractive civil society will win through. But in the age of Trump our civil society is no longer attractive: Joseph Nye: American Soft Power in the Age of Trump: "Skeptics argue that such cycles show that soft power does not matter much; countries cooperate out of self-interest. But this argument misses a crucial point: cooperation is a matter of degree, and the degree is affected by attraction or repulsion. Fortunately, a country’s soft power depends not only on its official policies, but also on the attractiveness of its civil society. When protesters overseas were marching against the Vietnam War, they often sang 'We Shall Overcome', an anthem of the US civil rights movement. Given past experience, there is every reason to hope that the US will recover its soft power after Trump, though a greater investment in public diplomacy would certainly help...
#noted
