George Hahn

In 1990, just after the end of the Cold War, political scientist Joseph Nye popularized the term soft power to describe how state actors achieve their goals without using force, making threats, or paying bribes.

According to Nye, a nation's soft power resides in its culture and political values.

plus its foreign policy to the extent that its peers see it as legitimate and having moral authority.

A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness, want to follow it, Nye wrote.

This soft power, getting others to want the outcomes that you want, co-opts people rather than coerces them.

Nye's concept explains the pincer move the U.S.

successfully deployed against the Soviets during the Cold War.

Our hard power included a nuclear arsenal with a rapid response capability measured in minutes, a military that peaked at 3.5 million people in uniform, and the willingness to engage in bloody proxy wars in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Our soft power included foreign aid, Hollywood movies, rock and roll, Levi's jeans, and middle-class prosperity.

See Nixon's kitchen debate with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

As Nye said in 2019, the Berlin Wall collapsed not under an artillery barrage, but from hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been affected by ideas that had penetrated the Iron Curtain over the preceding decades.

Our willingness and capacity to deliver violence against our enemies anywhere in the world is a significant asset.

But American magnanimity is what makes the country unique among history's greatest powers.

During World War II, the U.S.

sustained 400,000 dead and another 670,000 wounded.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the country provided emergency aid to its former enemies in Austria, Germany, and Japan.

Then, in 1948, Congress passed legislation to fund the Marshall Plan, a $13.3 billion aid package, $180 billion adjusted for inflation, to rebuild 17 European nations, including West Germany.

Separate from the Marshall Plan, the U.S.

spent an estimated $2 billion, $25 billion adjusted for inflation, between 1946 and 1951 to rebuild Japan.

We offered similar support to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, but were rebuffed.