Notwithstanding that the Trump administration tried to demolish it, fired most of the staff and tore down its website, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is still kicking, just. In today’s Washington it is one of the few institutions left standing that represents what was previously a distinctive and effective feature of American foreign policy: soft power.
For more than two years I worked in Washington, DC, as a Senior Adviser at USIP, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization established by the US Congress in the 1980s to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict. I helped the institute set up programs in the Pacific Islands, a region neglected historically by the United States but one to which both the Biden and the first Trump administration showed a renewed interest. I loved my time there and was still working for USIP in Australia after moving back from the United States late last year.
The institute was doing good work. It published papers and analyses that improved understanding of conflict afflicted places, convened groups and convocations aimed at moving the needle on conflict and conducted unshowy yet impactful work behind the scenes in places from Colombia to Iraq to the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. It represented a positive vision of the United States as peacemaker to the world. This was no radical organization but a comfortable part of the Washington political and diplomatic scene. As late as mid-January, the institute’s president, storied former US diplomat George Moose, hosted an event where outgoing National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and his successor, Mike Waltz, chatted respectfully about the challenges facing the world.
All this was smashed up within months. In late February 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order abolishing institutions including the United States Institute of Peace, something that, USIP contended, he has no power to do because the institute itself is not a part of the executive branch. Matters escalated with the arrival of a team from tech mogul Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in mid-March. The administration fired Moose and police slung him from the institute’s showpiece building, which is adjacent to the National Mall. One of the first acts the DOGE staffers took when taking over the building was to tear down the Institute’s badge, a dove and an olive branch.
Like so many of the decisions taken in Trump’s Washington, the matter ended up in court. In May, a federal judge ruled that the actions of the Trump administration were illegal. Moose and others were fired unlawfully, the judge found and should be restored to their positions. When Moose and colleagues returned to the building, they found a rodent infestation as well as a musky smell. Toilets had not been cleaned for months and the indoor plants had wilted, metaphors each redolent of Ozymandias for the quick death of American soft power. Other institutions haven’t been as “lucky” as USIP.
Clear Ideological Intent
There was clear ideological intent behind the administration’s moves. USIP was small, legally distinct from the executive branch, but significant part in a wider US foreign policy corpus of “soft power,” which included everything from USAID to Voice of America to the Peace Corps to how it engaged through multilateral institutions. All are deemed not to fit in with its firmly “America first, America alone” view of the world.
Soft power—a term coined by the late Harvard scholar Joseph Nye—describes the strategy of a state seeking to make itself dominant through attraction, charm, and the persuasive allures of its values rather than coercion. In crude monetary terms, the relative cost of exercising power was always slight. USIP’s budget for staff and programs was $65 million, representing just 0.0000004 percent of the US defense budget.
During the early months of the second Trump administration, these organizations which embodied soft power have either been abolished or pulled to pieces so drastically that many exist in all but name. One of the initial acts of the Trump administration was to pause all foreign assistance; ultimately it would eliminate more than 90 percent of the aid program and abolish USAID.
There have been substantial cuts at the US Agency for Global Media—the institution that manages Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. Voice of America journalists are on administrative leave and the US government plans to use in their stead content from a right-wing, pro-Trump supporting news network that perpetuated the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. A judge has blocked for now a Trump attempt to close Radio Free Europe.
The Peace Corps is being reduced in size and the National Endowment for Democracy, which promoted democracy abroad, is also cut. While these “soft power” institutions have been targeted, less effort has been expended on finding efficiencies in other, long renowned sources of boondoggling such as defense contracts.
Prioritizing Brute Power
Nye was an academic rather than an advocate. He did not proselytize for “soft power” but rather saw it as an important tool in the state’s repertoire, potent especially when layered in with other forms of power. “It’s not just a question of whose army wins but of whose story wins,’’ he wrote in 2004. The American story that the Trump administration is writing is one of a dark and fearful world, one where brute hard power is prioritized.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—whose body is tattooed with all manner of Christian crosses and militaria—is the incarnation of the administration’s fervor for strongarming and brute force. Hegseth makes observations about how he is bringing back “lethality” to an organization that was scarcely renowned for being peaceable to begin with.
The Pentagon is one of the few US government organizations to receive a budget boost rather than a swinging cut. Trump has announced a defense budget of $1 trillion, which represents a 13-percent rise. In Pacific Island nations where aid programming has been either eliminated or pared to the bone, the US Department of Defense is investing billions in building runways for military planes and tendering contracts for fuel bunkering facilities, which would extend the US military’s potential reach and range.
“Do you think Pacific Island nations relish being pawns in a wider tussle with China,” I asked a US defense official early in the new administration’s lifespan. They looked perplexed by the question; I had posed an angle on the issue that they had never thought about before. Rather, President Trump and his officials are speaking of taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, by military force if necessary.
The US’ soft-power retreat will be felt acutely across the multilateral system. The US was a defender of what might hazily be described as “Western values” and rule of law, albeit an imperfect one when their own actions ran counter to those norms. This is no longer so certain. This is a country that has sided with Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in UN Security Council resolutions on Ukraine this year while its diplomats attack like terriers any language or policy deemed to have the whiff of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
Can a multilateral system work as it did with a United States having such a posture? Washington carries a financial cudgel that could cripple: The US funds more than 20 percent of the United Nations budget and presently owes the organization $2.8 billion.
No Longer Alluring
“Diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another. Either alone would fail” said John F. Kennedy, the president who founded the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in 1961. Yet, the current administration seems uninterested in the soft powers of persuasive diplomatic words. Its rhetorical tone is fierce, shorn of any diplomatic niceties or pretense. Europe, and particularly Germany has born its brunt, tongue-lashed by Vice President JD Vance in Munich and berated over X by Secretary of State Marco Rubio for enforcing its own laws on domestic terrorism.
An important component within Nye’s definition was “cultural attraction,” the idea that a place like the United States could augment its power simply by being attractive to others. This is something I can very much relate to. Although I speak with an Irish accent and carry a passport of that country and Australia, I’ve always held as great and sometimes greater an affection for the United States than any country I’m formally connected to. I was intensely proud to work for a US institute. Yet after just a few months the country no longer seems alluring. In May, Rubio announced a pause on student visa applications.
For USIP, it is, for now, a good news story. The old leadership have the keys to the building; one of their first acts was to put the logo back on the wall. Yet it is still a distant prospect that the thrumming place of yore will return quickly. Its field presence across the world is diminished. “There’s a glimmer of hope now and we owe it to those who built this place to keep the banner of peace flying, even if the wind is against us,” said Colin O’Brien, the institute’s chief of security.
O’Brien is clear-eyed that the road ahead is strewn with obstacles. The administration may decide to appeal, and finances are a concern. The institute depends upon a Congress controlled by Republicans for funding. Few Republicans offered any peep of complaint about any of the administration’s actions.
At the same time as Moose and O’Brien were getting the keys back to the institute, Republicans in the House of Representatives were passing the budget bill with the record-breaking allotment to defense. The institute and its ethos are an outlier preaching peace in a government city worshipful of brute power and disdainful of any alternatives.
Gordon Peake is an author, academic, and currently a campus visitor at the Development Policy Centre, Australian National University. From December 2022 to March 2025, he worked as a senior advisor at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC.
