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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
American soft power is evaporating in the Age of Trump
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let's recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you're a this-or-that and you shout back: 'Takes one to know one!' Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: 'The world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children.' Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put 'U.S.A.I.D. in the wood chipper' by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean 'millions of additional deaths of kids.' To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he'll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that 'children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V.' Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage — not just to their unfortunate victims but to America's sense of global leadership as well. In President Donald Trump's transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it's much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed 'soft power.' As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: 'Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.' He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that 'when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,' that 'might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.' In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid. Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the sixteenth century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain's global turn came in the nineteenth century, its naval dominion over the world's oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948. Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump's sharp cuts to this country's humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing. The Logic of Foreign Aid Foreign aid — giving away money to help other nations develop their economies — remains one of America's greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation. Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. 'It is logical,' he said, 'that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.' Instead of the usual victor's demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity. Buy the Book What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was such a brilliant success that Washington decided to apply the idea on a global scale. Over the next quarter century, as a third of humanity emerged from the immiseration of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, the U.S. launched aid programs designed to develop the fundamentals of nationhood denied to those countries during the imperial age. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to aid Africa's recovery from colonial rule, disparate programs were consolidated into the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) in 1961. At the outset, U.S.A.I.D.'s work was complicated by Washington's Cold War mission. It would sometimes even serve as a cover for CIA operations. Just a few years after the Cold War ended in 1991, however, U.S.A.I.D. was separated from the State Department and its diplomatic aim of advancing U.S. interests. Then refocused on its prime mission of global economic development, U.S.A.I.D. would, in concert with the World Bank and other development agencies, become a pioneering partner in a multifaceted global effort to improve living conditions for the majority of humanity. Between 1950 and 2018, the portion of the world's population living in 'extreme poverty' (on $1.90 per day) dropped dramatically from 53% to just 9%. Simultaneously, U.S.A.I.D. and similar agencies collaborated with the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox and radically reduce polio, ending pandemics that had been the scourge of humanity for centuries. Launched in 1988, the anti-polio campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, spared 20 million children worldwide from serious paralysis. Behind such seemingly simple statistics, however, lay years of work by skilled U.S.A.I.D. specialists in agriculture, nutrition, public health, sanitation, and governance who delivered a multifaceted array of programs with exceptional efficiency. Not only would their work improve or save millions of lives, but they would also be winning loyal allies for America at a time of rising global competition. And Along Comes DOGE Enter Elon Musk, chainsaw in hand. Following President Trump's example of withdrawing from the World Health Organization on inauguration day, Musk started his demolition of the federal government by, as he put it, 'feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.' As his DOGE hirelings prowled the agency's headquarters in the weeks after inauguration, Musk denounced that largely humanitarian organization as 'evil' and a 'viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.' Without a scintilla of evidence, he added, 'USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.' With head-spinning speed, his minions then stripped the U.S.A.I.D. logo from its federal building, shut down its website, purged its 10,000 employees, and started slashing its $40 billion budget for delivering aid to more than 100 nations globally. The White House also quickly transferred what was left of that agency back to the State Department, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent six weeks slashing 83% of its global humanitarian programs, reducing 6,200 of them to about 1,000. As U.S.A.I.D.'s skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children. In Colombia, the agency had spent several billion dollars to settle a decades-long civil war that killed 450,000 people by mapping 3.2 million acres of uncharted lands so that the guerrillas could become farmers. That work, however, was suddenly halted dead in its tracks — project incomplete, money wasted, threat of civil conflict again rising. In Asia, the end of U.S.A.I.D. support forced the World Food Program to cut by half the already stringent food rations being provided to the million Rohingya refugees confined in miserable, muddy camps in Bangladesh — forcing them to survive on just $6.00 a month per person. In Africa, the aid cuts are likely to prove catastrophic. Departing U.S.A.I.D. officials calculated that they would be likely to produce a 30% spike in tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that already kills 1.25 million people annually on this planet and that 200,000 more children would likely be paralyzed by polio within a decade. In the eastern Congo, where a civil war fueled by competition over that region's rare-earth minerals has raged for nearly 30 years, the U.S. was the 'ultra dominant' donor. With U.S.A.I.D. now shut down, 7.8 million Congolese war refugees are likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million children will suffer from malnutrition. In war-torn Sudan, U.S. aid sustained more than 1,000 communal kitchens to feed refugees, all of which have now closed without any replacements. With 25 million of the world's 40 million H.I.V. patients in Africa, cuts to U.S.A.I.D.'s health programs there, which had reduced new infections by half since 2010, now threaten that progress. In South Africa, a half-million AIDS patients are projected to die, and in Congo, an estimated 15,000 people could die within the next month alone. Moreover, ending U.S.A.I.D.'s Malaria Initiative, which has spent $9 billion since President George W. Bush launched it in 2005, essentially ensures that, within a year, there will be 18 million more malaria infections in West Africa and 166,000 more likely deaths. On March 3rd, with such dismal statistics piling up, Elon Musk insisted that 'no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.' Writing from Sudan just 12 days later, however, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Peter Donde, a 10-year-old child infected with AIDS at birth, had just died. A U.S.A.I.D. program launched by President Bush called PEPFAR had long provided drugs that were estimated to have saved 26 million lives from AIDS (Peter's among them) until Musk's cuts closed the humanitarian agency. Kristof reported that the end of U.S. funding for AIDS treatment in Africa means 'an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid.' Why, he asked, should Americans spend even 0.24% of their Gross National Product on programs that keep poor children alive? Answering his own question, he wrote that the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. 'means that the United States loses soft power and China gains.' Indeed, Dr. Diana Putman, U.S.A.I.D.'s former assistant administrator for Africa, argues that the agency's programs have been the chief currency for U.S. ambassadors in negotiations with developing nations. 'Their leverage and ability to make a difference in terms of foreign policy,' she explained, 'is backed up by the money that they bring, and in the Global South that money is primarily the money that U.S.A.I.D. has.' The Loss of Soft Power In short, globally, the sharp cuts to U.S.A.I.D.'s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America's soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity. In back-handed testimonials to U.S.A.I.D.'s success, the world's autocrats celebrated the agency's demise, particularly the end of the $1.6 billion — about 4% of its annual budget — that it devoted to pro-democracy initiatives. 'Smart move,' said former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. On X (formerly Twitter), Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán announced that he 'couldn't be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance, @elonmusk are finally taking down this foreign interference machine.' Expressing his joy, Orbán offered a 'Good riddance!' to U.S.A.I.D. programs that helped 'independent media thrive' and funneled funds to the 'opposition campaign' in Hungary's 2022 parliamentary elections. Similarly, El Salvador's de facto dictator, Nayib Bukele, complained that U.S.A.I.D.'s pro-democracy funds had been 'funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.' Offering even more eloquent testimony to U.S.A.I.D.'s past efficacy, China has moved quickly to take over a number of the abolished agency's humanitarian programs, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Beijing is locked in an intense strategic rivalry with Washington over the South China Sea. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, two public health specialists observed that 'a U.S. retreat on global health, if sustained, will indeed open the door for China to exploit the abrupt, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. programs in… Southeast Asia, and it may do the same in Latin America.' Last February, only a week after Washington cancelled $40 million that had funded U.S.A.I.D. initiatives for child literacy and nutrition in Cambodia, Beijing offered support for strikingly similar programs, and its ambassador to Phnom Penh said, 'Children are the future of the country and the nation.' Making China's diplomatic gains obvious, he added: 'We should care for the healthy growth of children together.' Asked about this apparent setback during congressional hearings, Trump's interim U.S.A.I.D. deputy administrator, Pete Marocco, evidently oblivious to the seriousness of U.S.-China competition in the South China Sea, simply dismissed its significance out of hand. Although the dollar amount was relatively small, the symbolism of such aid programs for children gave China a sudden edge in a serious geopolitical rivalry. Just two months later, Cambodia's prime minister opened new China-funded facilities at his country's Ream Naval Base, giving Beijing's warships preferential access to a strategic port adjacent to the South China Sea. Although the U.S. has spent a billion dollars courting Cambodia over the past quarter-century, China's soft-power gains are now clearly having very real hard-power consequences. In neighboring Vietnam, U.S.A.I.D. has worked for several decades trying to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War, while courting Hanoi as a strategic partner on the shores of the South China Sea. In building a 'comprehensive strategic partnership,' manifest in today's close trade relations, U.S.A.I.D. played a critical diplomatic role by investing in recovering unexploded American munitions left over from that war, cleaning up sites that had been polluted by the defoliant Agent Orange, and providing some aid to the thousands of Vietnamese who still suffer serious birth defects from such toxic chemicals. 'It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners,' said former Senator Patrick Leahy. 'People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.' A Global Turn Toward Hard Power Although the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and sharp cuts to economic aid will have consequences for the world's poor that can only be called tragic, it's but one part of President Trump's attack on the key components of America's soft power — not only foreign aid, but also reliable information and skilled diplomacy. In March, the president signed an executive order shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including organizations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that had been broadcasting in 50 languages worldwide, reaching an estimated 360 million people in nations often without reliable news and information. A month later, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a 50% cut to the State Department's budget, closing diplomatic missions and completely eliminating funds for international organizations like NATO and the U.N. While the actual implementation of those cuts remains uncertain, the State Department is already dismissing 20% of its domestic workforce, or about 3,400 employees, including a significant number of Foreign Service officers, special envoys, and cyber-security specialists. Add it all up and, after just 100 days in office, President Trump is well on his way to demolishing the three critical elements for America's pursuit of global soft power. Already, the erosion of U.S. influence is manifest in recent criticism of this country, unprecedented in its bitterly acrid tone, even among longstanding allies. 'Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping away,' warned veteran French legislator Claude Malhuret in a March 4th speech, from the floor of France's Senate that soon won a remarkable 40 million views worldwide. 'Washington has become Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.' With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership. And, as Professor Nye reminds us, leadership based solely on coercion is not really leadership at all. Welcome to Planet Trump in the year 2025.
Kyodo News
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Kyodo News
Joseph Nye, prominent Havard int'l relations scholar, dies at 88
KYODO NEWS - 2 hours ago - 09:27 | All, World Joseph Nye, a prominent scholar of international relations who had a significant influence on the U.S.-Japan alliance, has died, Harvard University said Wednesday. He was 88. Nye, who was dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004, after serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under U.S. President Bill Clinton, died on Tuesday, according to the university, which did not disclose the cause of his death. Known for pioneering the theory of "soft power" to shed light on how nonmilitary strengths, such as cultural curiosity, can influence the behavior of other countries, Nye was a leading voice on U.S.-Japan relations. With Richard Armitage, a fellow senior U.S. official who served as deputy secretary of state, Nye brought together a bipartisan group ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2000 to shape a vision to improve the alliance between Washington and Tokyo. Nye and Armitage, who died in mid-April at the age of 79, were in charge of regularly releasing reports containing a set of proposals to bolster the bilateral relationship. The latest report, the sixth of its kind, was issued in April last year. In it, the group called on the two countries to build a "more integrated" partnership amid a challenging security environment, with one key pillar being the transformation of the decades-old alliance's command-and-control architecture. In addition to holding the high-ranking assistant defense secretary post between 1994 and 1995, he served as chair of the National Intelligence Council and deputy undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology. Nye, born in South Orange, New Jersey, first joined Harvard's faculty in 1964 upon earning a doctorate in political science. Prior to that, he studied at Princeton and Oxford universities. He was a prolific writer, publishing more than 10 books including "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics," "The Future of Power" and "Is the American Century Over?" "It is impossible to capture Joe's intellectual contributions in a paragraph or a page," the Harvard school's current dean, Jeremy Weinstein, said in a statement on his death. "In a century of unprecedented change in global politics, he was among the foremost thinkers to shape our understanding of contemporary international relations." Related coverage: Richard Armitage, former U.S. deputy secretary of state, dies at 79
The Mainichi
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Mainichi
Joseph Nye, prominent Havard int'l relations scholar, dies at 88
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) -- Joseph Nye, a prominent scholar of international relations who had a significant influence on the U.S.-Japan alliance, has died, Harvard University said Wednesday. He was 88. Nye, who was dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004, after serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under U.S. President Bill Clinton, died on Tuesday, according to the university, which did not disclose the cause of his death. Known for pioneering the theory of "soft power" to shed light on how nonmilitary strengths, such as cultural curiosity, can influence the behavior of other countries, Nye was a leading voice on U.S.-Japan relations. With Richard Armitage, a fellow senior U.S. official who served as deputy secretary of state, Nye brought together a bipartisan group ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2000 to shape a vision to improve the alliance between Washington and Tokyo. Nye and Armitage, who died in mid-April at the age of 79, were in charge of regularly releasing reports containing a set of proposals to bolster the bilateral relationship. The latest report, the sixth of its kind, was issued in April last year. In it, the group called on the two countries to build a "more integrated" partnership amid a challenging security environment, with one key pillar being the transformation of the decades-old alliance's command-and-control architecture. In addition to holding the high-ranking assistant defense secretary post between 1994 and 1995, he served as chair of the National Intelligence Council and deputy undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology. Nye, born in South Orange, New Jersey, first joined Harvard's faculty in 1964 upon earning a doctorate in political science. Prior to that, he studied at Princeton and Oxford universities. He was a prolific writer, publishing more than 10 books including "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics," "The Future of Power" and "Is the American Century Over?" "It is impossible to capture Joe's intellectual contributions in a paragraph or a page," the Harvard school's current dean, Jeremy Weinstein, said in a statement on his death. "In a century of unprecedented change in global politics, he was among the foremost thinkers to shape our understanding of contemporary international relations."
Kyodo News
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Kyodo News
Joseph Nye, prominent Havard int'l relations scholar, dies at 88
KYODO NEWS - 18 minutes ago - 09:27 | All, World Joseph Nye, a prominent scholar of international relations who had a significant influence on the U.S.-Japan alliance, has died, Harvard University said Wednesday. He was 88. Nye, who was dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004, after serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under U.S. President Bill Clinton, died on Tuesday, according to the university, which did not disclose the cause of his death. Known for pioneering the theory of "soft power" to shed light on how nonmilitary strengths, such as cultural curiosity, can influence the behavior of other countries, Nye was a leading voice on U.S.-Japan relations. With Richard Armitage, a fellow senior U.S. official who served as deputy secretary of state, Nye brought together a bipartisan group ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2000 to shape a vision to improve the alliance between Washington and Tokyo. Nye and Armitage, who died in mid-April at the age of 79, were in charge of regularly releasing reports containing a set of proposals to bolster the bilateral relationship. The latest report, the sixth of its kind, was issued in April last year. In it, the group called on the two countries to build a "more integrated" partnership amid a challenging security environment, with one key pillar being the transformation of the decades-old alliance's command-and-control architecture. In addition to holding the high-ranking assistant defense secretary post between 1994 and 1995, he served as chair of the National Intelligence Council and deputy undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology. Nye, born in South Orange, New Jersey, first joined Harvard's faculty in 1964 upon earning a doctorate in political science. Prior to that, he studied at Princeton and Oxford universities. He was a prolific writer, publishing more than 10 books including "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics," "The Future of Power" and "Is the American Century Over?" "It is impossible to capture Joe's intellectual contributions in a paragraph or a page," the Harvard school's current dean, Jeremy Weinstein, said in a statement on his death. "In a century of unprecedented change in global politics, he was among the foremost thinkers to shape our understanding of contemporary international relations." Related coverage: Richard Armitage, former U.S. deputy secretary of state, dies at 79
Arab News
02-03-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Starmer switches UK's focus from soft to hard power
Diverting funds from aid and soft power to pay for hard military power is alarming for a country like the UK, recently divorced from the EU project. The proponents of Brexit wrongly believed that EU membership was wasting the country's riches by diverting them from its own welfare state to Brussels' bureaucracy and regulations, hampering its ability to provide more for its citizens. Today, however, the winds blowing from the east, the need to protect Europe's flank and the uncertainty of the transatlantic alliance create a moment of history that might upend Keir Starmer's premiership into one that advocates for the rebirth of hard power. Since his election last summer, the UK has been pondering how and when Starmer would find his mojo and morph from a chief prosecutor, or Labour Party convenor and operator, to a leader with a capital 'L.' Some would have liked that to be achieved by the prime minister taking charge of rebuilding the state machinery after 14 years of chaotic Conservative government and its policy of austerity. Or by making Britain's welfare system more reliable, investing in the police and courts or even finding a magic formula for growth, albeit without rejoining the EU's customs union or reversing Brexit. But no, it seems that, rightly or wrongly, advocating for hard power and finding the means to get the UK and Europe to the table to negotiate peace with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is what might make or break Starmer's premiership. Harvard professor Joseph Nye contrasted soft power with hard power in his book 'Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.' According to Nye, hard power refers to the use of force or coercion to achieve one's goals, typically through military intervention or economic pressure. It is the art of compelling others to act in a way that aligns with one's own interests, using tangible means like military force or economic sanctions. I am not one to claim that the UK is turning to hubris here, but Starmer and the country feel they are being pushed into an existential crisis. It is an ally that seems to be exerting maximum pressure, which can only be mediated by opting for hard power pledges, even if this means a U-turn and a return to the old principle of spending more on guns and less on welfare and development, which has been increasingly shunned since the end of the Cold War. Starmer has shifted in an unusual way and seems to have acted impulsively in an effort to buy favor and influence with the resident of the White House. Recognizing that the flow of money must go in another direction, the prime minister last week vowed to raise the UK's defense spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product from 2027, up from the current 2.3 percent, with 3 percent as the eventual target. Initially, this funding increase comes at the expense of the overseas aid budget and, symbolically speaking, reorients the British posture from a soft power base to hard power. The PM could become a victim of abandoning the UK's soft power and losing his country's footing across the world. Mohamed Chebaro It seems that, after his meeting with Trump, Starmer has joined the fray, not only showing a readiness to put weapons procurement ahead of development to gain a seat at the table, but he surprised everyone by also playing the royal card in the hope of boosting his credentials and keeping the US onside. In his speech announcing the increase in defense spending, Starmer explained that, as the world has changed and as threat levels have increased, so too has the need for more up-to-date military capabilities and larger armed forces. Such an assessment, which has become a widely held prediction since Russia invaded Ukraine and put the rules-based world order at stake, might represent the moment that Starmer abandoned parts of his election manifesto. But this could be justifiable in the interests of national defense and the strategic positioning of the UK, as well as through growth as a result of reigniting its military manufacturing industry. Starmer will soon find out if diverting money from aid to the military will yield any benefits, but he will also learn how such a move is likely to define his legacy as prime minister. For Starmer, this could be his 'Falklands moment,' named for the 1982 war that earned Margaret Thatcher her 'Iron Lady' title, as she fought for the UK's reputation and standing in the world and liberated the Falkland Islands by force. Or it could be his Iraq War moment, when Tony Blair felt compelled to stand by US President George W. Bush when he decided to attack Iraq and change its regime. That resulted in Blair's popularity declining at home and abroad, as the evidence on which the invasion was waged proved erroneous to say the least. The question is simply whether Starmer and the UK will be able to transition to a wartime economy and change the direction of travel not only of the Labour Party, but also of state and society. As the global geopolitical situation looks to have been transformed in the six weeks since Trump's inauguration, Starmer looks content to bow to the American president for now, But he could become a victim of abandoning the UK's soft power and losing his country's footing across the world, as many variables might challenge Britain and also EU countries in their bid to rearm and meet Trump's goal of spending 5 percent of GDP on defense.
