To talk about US soft power less than a year after American political scientist Joseph Nye’s death is both a tribute and a lament. Nye coined the term and the concept of soft power, which has become a standard part of the foreign policy and national security lexicon. Hard power is the power of coercion and payments, the sticks and carrots available to one nation to make another nation do what it wants. Soft power is the power of attraction, the ability to get others to do what you want because they want it too.
For most attendees at the Munich Security Conference, the decline of American soft power will be self-evident. US Vice President JD Vance’s speech last year was heard as a direct assault on the values that European and US governments have shared throughout the 20th century and for most of the 21st. A year later, American soft power has drained away.
Nye emphasized that soft power is not the same as influence or persuasion. Rather, it “rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others,” to get them to want what you want. It flows from three principal sources: a state’s “culture” (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority.) Yet how exactly do these factors translate into outcomes desired by the nation exercising its soft power? Robert Keohane, Nye’s close friend and collaborator, recently recounted one mechanism: that states “viewed positively” by foreign publics would be more likely to be able to persuade foreign governments that their motives were sincere and “therefore be more able to build coalitions for objectives that they pursued.” Nye himself argued that a country “may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries—admiring its values, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness—want to follow it.”
For Americans who travel, the decline in American attractiveness is apparent everywhere. Taxi drivers tell us that our country has lost its way. Friends in Canada, Europe, and Japan say they are grieving for the United States they knew but no longer recognize. Newspaper columnists and podcasters marvel at our “own goals,” our seemingly willful destruction of our soft power. More systematically, Nye and Keohane themselves catalogued the various ways that Trump is undermining US soft power, in a Foreign Affairs article published in June 2025, just after Nye’s death. They pointed to a long list of concerns: an overreliance on coercion and hard power, which crowds out soft power; statements and policies that undermine trust among allies; withdrawal from international institutions that confer legitimacy; diminishing US moral authority by the rejection of democracy and human rights as foreign policy objectives; attacks on commercial interdependence as a liability (trade deficits are bad); and cuts to scientific research funding and closing US borders to almost everyone. Many of these factors, they argued, are creating openings for China.
Keohane and Nye were careful to word their analysis in the conditional, warning about the continued consequences of Trump’s current policies, but without concluding that American soft power is permanently damaged or even substantially eroded. Yet their predictions appear to be coming to pass. The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the Oxford “Europe in a Changing World” project headlined the results of an extensive poll conducted in late 2025 as “How Trump Is Making China Great Again.” Trump has radically alienated traditional American allies and convinced leading middle powers around the world—Brazil, South Africa, India, Turkey—that they are free to sign up with both China and the US.
Down in Europe, Steady Around the World
Digging into the poll data, what is most striking is the way in which Nye’s account of the sources of soft power is validated. He cites political values and foreign policy, but only when a country lives up to those values and when its foreign policies are seen as legitimate and having moral authority. In Western Europe, among countries that have long shared a values-based foreign policy with the US, including a conception of a liberal global order under international law, the decline in soft power is dramatic. Among the 10 European countries polled, an average of only 16 percent of citizens see the US as an ally, with 20 percent seeing the US as a rival or even an enemy. Trump has rejected the values of democracy, freedom, equality, and justice—or radically reinterpreted them—in favor of traditional great power nationalism and transactionalism. The publics whom the US previously attracted, who wanted to be part of a US-led coalition and fight side-by-side, are now repelled.
Yet the middle powers around the world are far less affected. Their publics absolutely see China as rising and are increasingly attracted by it, but they are not as turned off by the United States. The authors of the ECFR report surmise that these countries see more room to advance their own interests in a multipolar order anchored by two equally transactional superpowers. It is just as likely that the publics of these states never thought the US was actually living up to its values in the first place, nor that is foreign policies were legitimate or moral. After all, these were all countries that were members of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, refusing to choose between the US and the Soviet Union. The US power of attraction was never that strong.
Does the decline in US soft power actually matter? What are the practical consequences? A key question here is to what extent the change in public opinion is actually due to a decline in soft power—perception of values and the legitimacy and morality of policies—rather than hard power. Trump is imposing tariffs on allies and threatening the use of military force to take their territory. That is the essence of hard power.
Further, the measure of soft power is the ability of a nation to get what it wants more easily and/or cheaply. The dramatic decline in US soft power among erstwhile US allies will make it significantly harder to unite with them on building effective diplomatic and military coalitions against Russia and China, voting with the US in international institutions, and taking a coordinated approach to support democracy and human rights in Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern countries. Those are things all recent US presidents wanted; they are not what Trump wants. According to his National Security Strategy, the US has five “core, vital national interests” (emphasis in the original), set forth in a part of the strategy entitled, “What Do We Want In and From the World?” They are, in a paraphrased and abbreviated version:
First, a stable Western Hemisphere well-governed enough to reduce massive flows of people, drugs, and criminals to the US and favorable enough to the US to keep other great powers out and American companies in. Second, an American economy free from damage done by China and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific sufficient to secure US supply chains and access to critical resources. Third, a free, secure, and self-confident Europe of sovereign, nationalist countries determined to preserve their “Western” (white, Christian) identity, to be achieved by the strengthening of “patriotic European parties,” America’s “political allies in Europe.” Fourth, a Middle East that is not dominated by an “adversarial power” that would block US access to “oil and gas assets” and navigational chokepoints. Fifth, unassailable US dominance in the technologies of the future (AI, biotech, and quantum computing) and the standards that shape them.
The strategy lists “unmatched ‘soft power’ and cultural influence” as one of America’s means to achieve these objectives. But the values and policies underlying this soft power are completely different from the ones Nye pushed for all his life.
Universal Truths
The power of attraction is in the eye of those attracted. Building soft power as a means of reducing the costs of coalition-building depends on what a government wants to use those coalitions for. Values can be reinterpreted and distorted. As a liberal universalist, I believe that the basic values of the Declaration of Independence—equality, life, liberty, justice, security, and the consent of the governed—have a core of universal truth. All human beings want them, and all human beings know when they are being grossly distorted and denied. They have great moral force. For now, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued at Davos, the torch of liberty and law has passed from New York harbor to Ottawa, Brussels, and those middle powers who want to join in building a new rules-based order.
Anne-Marie Slaugther is CEO of the New America think tank.
