IS ‘SOFT POWER’ THE NEW ‘HARD POWER’? HOW DO COUNTRIES SAFELY NAVIGATE THE STORMY SEAS OF THE 21ST CENTURY?

Twentieth-century history textbooks are dominated by one topic: war. Through- out this age, global society has been blighted by continuous conflict, from which it has enjoyed little respite. In consequence, the ‘good’ memories which induce fond nostalgia: Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic, Babe Ruth’s astounding ‘homers’, or thecharm of a Kennedy Presidency, are made warmer by its peacetime associations. The new ‘n’ easy lifestyle brought about by advanced industrialisation and the booming labour market became more accessible. As a nervous world edged its way cautiously through its ‘eyeball to eyeball’ Cold War dramas, it realised that the only way to cling to that prosperity was peace.

Thus, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the turn of the 21st century, the world has had 20 years to readjust and recalibrate its mission: to pacify and possibly unify its warring factions toward a progressive peace. This road is not clearly mapped, and countries still scramble for the remaining influence and control. Global leaders and diplomats must devise new ways to do so. Instead of tanks, they look to talk. Instead of bombs, they to look to bridge. In short and for the moment, they have prioritised soft power, leaving hard power on the backburner. It is important that we recognise soft power: what it is, how it works, and its consequences.

“The more we learn from history, the less we learn from history”, as Hegel once said, in order to really comprehend anything about something current in our world today, we must commit to not only studying, but crucially learning from the past and implementing the lessons learned, lest we are doomed to repeat those same errors.

The idea of soft power has always existed, but it only gained modern political traction and democratic institutionalisation post-WWII. There are few better examples of this than the Cold War, a 40-year conflict created an environment which demanded the adoption and promotion of soft power. Consequently, every US president during the latter half of the 20th century had to channel the ‘soft power’ mindset: how to dance around the idea of conflict, and instead offer more effective responses and geopolitical strategies.

Perhaps the only reason the world still exists as it does, is due to Kennedy and his administration’s expert manoeuvring to steer the world away from a thermonuclear war tipping-point in Cuba. Even Nixon, for all his later sins, managed to guide the US through a relative period of détente with the USSR. Reagan championed open effort of diplomacy with the USSR, famously walking with Gorbachev in Moscow’s Red Square. Perhaps best of all was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All of the aforementioned geopolitical events share one common theme: they were forged in the crucible of soft power. Why did the Wall come down? Was it battered by tanks and men with AK-47s? No, it was thousands of emotional and exhilarated East and West Germans applying their hammers, chisels and bare hands. No longer were ‘hard’ weapons needed. Unity had proven much more effective.

Similar to the contagious feel-good factors of love and laughter, the display of potential togetherness in Berlin began to affect everyone across the political world. Everyone from the ‘Average Joe’ to egghead academics began to abandon their dour cynicism and joined the party. The millennium turned with the promise of change in the air. The Stanford academic Francis Fukuyama even wrote an article entitled “The End of History”. Most IR and politics students have had their fair share of potshots against this article, and it’s worth giving Fukuyama a bit of context. We might all be thinking ‘what is this extremely intelligent person talking about, and if that’s the true standard of Stanford work, how might I go about applying?’ However, Fukuyama was expressing the momentous wave of optimism that swept through and defined the 1990s. It seemed like the human race had finally found the geopolitical ‘golden ticket’ – an answer to “how to end a war” that didn’t require confrontation. Real proof that ideology was more powerful than guns.

For all of us millennials/gen-z, we might now self-examine, with our smartphones in to be young in the 90s”. And you could be forgiven for thinking that. Almost echoing our hands and our Air Pods in, and conclude “Actually, forget TikTok and PS5, I want

the Roaring 20s, people became lost in the ecstasy of the moment, oblivious to the cliff-

edge they were hurtling towards. In short, governments became naïve and complacent,

and on September 11, 2001 the world, caught off guard, received a very sharp wake-up

call. This wake-up call wasn’t the gentle reminder that you had to refocus – it was the

frantic, shaky, lurching anxiety that you were now confronted with a situation that

required immediate action, zealous action that you were unprepared to take at short

notice. Almost haphazardly, the US abandoned its new moral directive, and threw itself

vengefully into Iraq and Afghanistan. The results were disastrous.

Why was it so disastrous? Any observer looking at the military and economic might of

the US would predict a short conflict with crushing military success. As with all things

political, optics are very different to reality, where the reality is that there are symbiotic

causes of America’s failure: asymmetric warfare, an uncooperative citizenry, a divided

home front, and a lack of intelligence which caused the whole operation to never really its soft power – the power which had, in turn, made the country the world’s only reach maximum force. Chief amongst these causes, however, is that the US forgot about

superpower. The once clear and relatively serene political landscape was now ablaze

with missiles, mines, and villages in flames.

Back to the present. We no longer live in that unipolar world of the 90s, a world where

the end of history was within our grasp. The tidal flow of positivity which cleansed the

world has ebbed. The new million-dollar question is: “where can I find a lifeboat?” The

only thing we know for certain is that nothing is certain. Capricious countries switch

alliances, pandemics lock the planet down, markets crash, the US can elect an

autocratic populist egomaniac. With the US bleeding influence, and Multinational

Corporations that fly no flag of allegiance wielding seismic power, countries are

suddenly feeling uncertain: we aren’t prepared for a world like this. So how do we best

stabilise ourselves?

The answer lies in the past. No, we shouldn’t take up arms and recede into clan warfare, but neither should we all rejoice and sing kumbaya. What we need is a combination of the two that allows us to hark back to the Cold War without creating a new one with China. To quote my favourite TV show House of Cards, diplomacy should be carried out as so: “shake with your right hand, hold a rock in your left”. This is not to say we should default to intimidation tactics and ignorant bullying diplomacy. Wherever possible, countries should always intend to reach agreement in a cordial manner.

In today’s world, words really are more powerful than guns. Nevertheless, behind friendly gestures, diplomats must wield real, hard and influential power – the rock that reminds your negotiating partner of the potential damage inflicted if they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.

What does this look like in real life? How do we implement this new form of diplomacy? Firstly, countries need to define what their interests are and let everyone else know about them in clear and unambiguous terms. For the Biden administration

and the UK, it seems as though Climate Change could be the answer, with the Cop26 summit in Glasgow next year. There also needs to be recognition and appreciation of compromise. For the US and China, it is clear that they have very different national interests. But there is one thing they both seek: economic prosperity. They need to achieve this goal together, through joint ventures, through mutually beneficial financial programmes.

Unfortunately, a golden rule of politics is that it’s all easier said than done. It’s one thing for me to sit here in my student flat sounding off that the US and China need to cooperate more, or that North Korea should abandon its nuclear ambitions and engage in cultural diplomacy with the West. For now, the world is too quirky, too ‘non-polar’ to allow such amelioration. Instead, time and patience are the catalysts required. We have not yet lost sight of the path to universal peace, embarked upon that day at Potsdam which Truman, Churchill, Attlee and yes, even Stalin, initially helped to pave. We may have strayed from this path once or twice; however, we always seem to find our way back to it. If we continue to progress along it, guided by the ideologies of soft power and mutual cooperation, we will begin to expect, and not just strive for, peace.