The launch in London on 15 January of the UK Soft Power Council by the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, and the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, came at an interesting moment. With Donald Trump in the White House, a narrative has developed in which persuasion and influence have been replaced by command and coercion in world affairs. We have entered, everyone is saying, an age ruled by force.
The reality is more elusive and paradoxical. Hard and soft power are not opposites, wholly separate and distinct. They interact continuously, sometimes in seemingly contradictory ways. Threats of tariffs fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Trump has used them to achieve non-economic objectives such as border control – Panama, Mexico and Canada folded quickly – and in this respect he is proving more of a rational actor than previous American presidents. The US and its auxiliaries expended vast quantities of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan. The predictable outcome was defeat and retreat. Lacking strategic goals and abandoning their allies, the West demonstrated that it could not be trusted. “Wars of choice” were exercises in soft power, but of a negative, self-defeating kind.
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