In the first Trump administration, then director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney said “There’s no question this is a hard-power budget. It is not a soft-power budget. . . [We want] to send a message to our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration. So you have seen money move from soft-power programs, from foreign aid, into more hard-power programs.”
This shift in America’s approach to the world is continuing in the second Trump administration. But Americans would be well served with a better construct of the soft power-hard power debate, and a more realistic assessment of what it loses when soft power is deliberately diminished.
Soft, Hard, and Smart Power
Joseph Nye defines power as the ability to get what you want from others, which countries do through coercion or payment (hard power), or attraction and persuasion (soft power). He later added “smart power” to the mix, suggesting that a blend of the two would be most effective.
American foreign policy has generally reflected this blend. In a speech outlining policy toward Central America and the Caribbean, President Reagan listed security assistance, economic aid, land reform, political reform, and human rights as critical to the achievement of the overall US objective of supporting these countries against communist totalitarian rule. Nye reminds us that the Berlin Wall fell not primarily because of US hard power, though US military deployment throughout the Cold War was essential, but because of the natural attraction to the West of Eastern European societies.
A Better Model
It would enrich the debate and help with strategic planning to move away from a binary choice where hard power is always kinetic and military, and soft power is everything else. Instead one can divide soft and hard power into four categories: 1) true hard power, 2) the soft side of hard power, 3) governmentally-generated soft power, and 4) societally-generated soft power.
As a young army lieutenant and later as a diplomat I was involved in America’s military operations in Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. In every operation, I thought “only America could have done this” (whether we should have done it is another question). Our hard power doesn’t come cheap, and in an era of rapidly advancing technologies, it will continue to require commitment and funding to stay abreast of new threats and opportunities.
But much of US hard power has a soft aspect. Admiral McRaven in a recent op-ed, describes the diplomatic side of military operations – the coordination and solicitation of support and building of good will by ambassadors and their embassy teams in places like Colombia, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Philippines. He couches this as soft power wielded alongside and in support of hard power. He warns against cuts to the architecture in the State Department and decries the dismantling of USAID as ultimately weakening our hard power by reducing America’s capacity to manage the vital relations upon which many successful kinetic military operations depend.
In this category one could also include security assistance, with which America builds capacity and interoperability among host country security forces that are in many cases more effective than our own force, with its weak cultural and linguistic and geographic understanding of a local conflict. Military education and exchange programs also fit here, in which foreign uniformed officers spend time in American training, enhancing their technical skills and professionalism, and being exposed to American values.
This leads us to the third category where the US government generates and channels soft power to achieve specific objectives. Some of this is done by the military. For example, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq only 15 percent of Indonesia’s citizens had a positive image of the US. But the number rose to 40 percent after extensive humanitarian assistance was supplied by the US military following a tsunami.
Much of the work of USAID also falls in this category as do many of the programs of the States Department. One example is the International Visitors Leadership Program, which brings young leaders from around the world to the US to experience in detail three American cities – their history, culture, and people. Thousands of alumni of this program have gone on to be leaders in business, parliaments, governments, non-governmental organizations, and academia, with a handful becoming heads of state (e.g., Anwar Sadat). The program comes from a place of national self-confidence — to know us is to love us – and while it doesn’t always work as intended, there are many success stories.
I witnessed a dramatic success story in 2012, when the international media publicized a Florida pastor’s annual “burn a Koran day.” I was consul general in Northern Afghanistan at the time. In an effort to get ahead of the issue, I met with the Sunni and Shi’ite clerics and asked their help in tamping down any possible rage. The Sunni leader enthusiastically agreed to deliver a message at Friday prayers in which he would explain that this was an isolated example and not illustrative of the American people. He said he could do that from a position of strength because he had been on an International Visitors Leadership Program in Kentucky, where he saw the deep community respect Muslims enjoyed there.
One can’t fake this sort of thing. It depends on the reality that American communities are for the most part places where multicultural respect abides and where friendliness and community are genuine.
Which leads us to the fourth category, American society’s soft power, the baseline for all expressions of soft power. It encompasses the transmission of American culture, thought, values, products and achievements to the rest of the world through the private sector, where strong linkages with foreign societies are formed. The transmission of American culture is not always positive – some American trends are not well received in many places. But as a US diplomat there were few times when I didn’t feel empowered by the US brand I represented.
The War on Soft Power
The second Trump administration is going well beyond a simple shift in resources and emphasis away from America’s soft power. It has eliminated USAID as an independent agency and re-absorbed it into the State Department, at the same time reducing many of the people-to-people programs in the State Department. Much of this is difficult to understand, given that societally-generated soft power is cost free, coming without a budget, without programs, without personnel to manage it.
The shredding of the government institutions that channel America’s natural soft power, even as that soft power is deliberately reduced, will leave America less secure, less prosperous, and less powerful.
