Our True Power is Soft

Current events are providing some vital learning moments about how power really works in the world and how it does not.  Scholars in political science, economics, and game theory will have a lot to work with in the coming years based upon what is happening now.  Most of us are not scholars in any of those fields, so cannot claim to provide explanations which resolve into coherent theories.  This should not prevent any of us from expressing our understanding to the best of our abilities because we and our descendants are all stakeholders.  So here is what I’m seeing:

The Pax Americana is coming to an end.  I think if there is still history being written in a couple of centuries, the period between 1940 and 2040 will be summarized as the American century, referring to the overwhelming global influence of the United States.  The events of the 2020’s will be described as the beginning of the end of that era.  We can see in recent decisions by Russia, Israel, Iran, and China, that deference to the United States matters far less than it did even a decade ago.  By 2040, I predict that the world’s nations will no longer even refer to the views of the United States for their political or economic decisions.

Coming from a citizen of the U.S. and being read mostly by other ones, this may seem like a lament.  In some ways, the world should regret the passing of the U.S. as the determinative superpower.  The ideals of our Declaration of Independence focus upon the equal rights of all people. Our democratic aspirations for ourselves and the world have been designed to maximize human rights, at least the political ones, as codified in our Bill of Rights.  Much of our work over the last century has been to attempt to globalize those ideals and rights. 

At the same time, our concerns about our own status and our competition against other views, particularly statist communism and then fundamentalist Islam, have caused us to behave hypocritically on the world stage far too often.  We facilitated brutal dictatorships all over the world, so that while we lived in the comfort of our political rights at home, we were guaranteeing vile oppression for millions of people elsewhere.  Hand-in-hand with this, our greed to dominate the world’s resources also made us turn a blind eye to political and economic oppression.  In short, we have been a better empire than the world has ever seen in our ideals, yet one of the worst in terms of our effects.  Like the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana has been a mixed blessing. 

In the movie, The Life of Brian, Monty Python did their usual magnificent work at encapsulating truth in humor.  In a meeting of a resistance group to Roman occupation, the leader of the Judean People’s Front asks rhetorically, “And what have the Romans ever given us?”  After just the right pause, someone in the group offers, “the aqueduct?”  The leader acknowledges this, but this brings a list of other benefits brought by Roman rule, all of which are true.  Living under the Romans was indeed suffering under the whim of a capricious empire, but it also provided a marvelous improvement in most people’s standard of living, their safety and prosperity.  Unlike other ancient empires, which left local conditions mostly as they were in their far-flung possessions, the Romans imposed their view of governance and economics across their empire.  In modern history, the British Empire was a synthesis between these two approaches. They were Roman enough in their approach that people living under their sway encountered the same conundrum as the fictional Judean People’s Front.  The British could be brutal imperial masters, but there were also so many benefits to the version of civilization which they promoted that few wanted to exchange it for what came before.  The solution in most of their former possessions has been to acknowledge what they have gotten from British influence and strive to synthesize it in their own way independently.  It is better to be self-determined and not languish under an empire, but also better to keep what was learned from that empire.

I believe something like that will be the legacy of the United States.  If we wish for that to be the case, we need to work with other countries.  We can still help the world’s people gain from our ideals, but in a way that assists rather than dominates.  We will not control their outcomes, but of course, we never really did.

Our power is soft, and really always has been.  When World War I was over, Europe was devastated and could not feed itself for several years.  In the three decades before our military and economic might began the American century, we started the first ever systematic application of soft power in the world by feeding Europe, essentially for free.  Herbert Hoover, whose light was dimmed by his later association with failing to act in the face of the Great Depression, engineered and managed the specifics of providing vast amounts of food and other material support to Europe after the Great War.  At the time, we saw the benefit as providing economic and political stability to what was still the center of world affairs. However, an unforeseen benefit emerged as well, which was that Europe steered far more attention and respect to the U.S. than ever before.  Whether our opponents or allies in the war, we were their benefactors.  They did not forget or neglect that fact.  In the following war, neither Germany nor Italy was happy to lose our favor and alliance, and not just because of our hard power, but also because we had effectively cultivated their friendship and gratitude for two decades. Actions in the last two years before the war did some damage to those relationships as we became isolationist and turned away from our friendly behaviors (Get wonky: Read about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, a real lesson for today’s economic actions).  We lost some of our influence when we could really have used it.  But there was no systematic theory of soft power at the time.  Our understanding of how deep our influence could be through peaceful and beneficent actions was not codified until the 1990’s when Joseph Nye coined the term soft power.  At that point, we had been exerting it in various ways around the world for fifty years in the aftermath of the Second World War. 

Certainly, in that time, we had become the predominant hard power broker in the world, both militarily and economically.  However, alongside that, we provided vast amounts of food, material goods, and logistical support in hundreds of places around the world.  Sometimes we did it to foil the ambitions of political rivals, and it always had the benefit to us of stabilizing our surplus economy, particularly of agricultural goods. However, we also did it from generosity and to stop human suffering.  Whether or not it was strategically pursued, it had the effect of making much of the world love us despite other things we were doing which had the opposite effect.  How much better off would we be today if, instead of using intelligence and military assets to assist Chiang Kai-Shek, the Shah of Iran, Fulgencia Batista, Agosto Pinochet, etc. etc, we had applied our soft power to those hot spots to the extent that their people chose to emulate our example of representative democracy?  Surely there are universes in the multiverse where we might see how that played out.  Not here, though.

Since the Trump administration began mere months ago, we have stopped applying soft power and the result has already been catastrophic for our influence. With the mere thought that we might be capricious about our own ideals and generosity, leaders in the world who want to do things at odds with our interest feel liberated to do so.  Putin will not leave Ukraine, Israel will not stop killing Palestinians and attacked Iran when we told them we did not approve.  China surely sees all this unfolding, so Taiwan faces a bleak future. 

Our hard power avails us nothing in any of this.  Unless we see direct threat to our economic future or our literal safety, we will not use our military might. Unlike traditional empires, our people do not support military action to secure our economic or political goals.  Iraq, a conflict which was really about keeping world oil priced in dollars, had to be packaged to us as a matter of WMDs, and most Americans never did believe we should have invaded anyway.  Nor can we use war to force nations into our way of being, as two decades in Vietnam and another two in Afghanistan proved. We won’t risk larger conflicts in order to defend democracy in places like Ukraine or Taiwan.  The reason is that the threat of nuclear war is so terrifying that it paralyzes our application of conventional war against other nuclear powers. Our outrageous expenditures on military power end in a big parade on the President’s birthday and no useful application to what we want in the world.  

Our loss of soft power has also gone hand-in-hand with undercutting our economic influence.  As we abandon the world economically, they do the same back to us.  The dollar has become unstable on the world stage for the first time in almost a century and our world economic bargaining positioning diminishes weekly. 

The current administration has no capacity to understand the nuanced nature of soft power.  They see the world as bullies always do, as a simplistic pattern of winners and suckers.  In their understanding of how things work, kindness, compassion, empathy, generosity, and cooperation are for the suckers, the losers.  The only place for cooperative action is in temporary venues of negotiation for competitive advantage.  Every game, in the end, is zero-sum. 

Of course, they don’t really care if there is a genocide in Palestine or if the Russians re-create the Soviet Empire or the Chinese absorb Taiwan.  It seems to them to make no difference to our bottom line because they don’t understand what America’s bottom line really is and what it depends upon.  They think it is always merely about immediate economic gain.  But it’s so much bigger than they understand.  Our long-term prospects depend upon the actualization of our democratic ideals across the world.  The benefit of every individual’s political rights, supported by the assurance of their economic rights as well, is what brings us all prosperity in the long run.  Every place where our ideals are being crushed by fascism, whether here at home or in these theaters of conflict in the world, are sites where we lose our voice, our influence, and our hope to bring a better future for ourselves and everyone else.

Our hope for our future influence resides in soft power.  We benefit wherever we provide our expertise, share our resources, and help reform the world’s educational, political, and economic infrastructures.  This doesn’t mean a greedy version of globalism, but a peaceful, hard-working commitment to international democracy and mutual prosperity.