Author
Stuart MacDonald
ICR Research
Abstract
In a recent Carnegie Council conversation, Hendrik Ohnesorge argued that soft power was never the property of the liberal 1990s. It is as old as Rome, it belongs to no value system, and it is now being practiced in a nationalist register whose attractions are real. I think he is right, and that his argument has consequences that deserve to be spelled out. If soft power carries no fixed values of its own, then every account of it, including the reassuring ones told by its supporters, expresses a political position rather than a neutral analysis. This article looks at what those positions are: how the major political traditions each understand attraction, how their differences show up in the practice of states today, and how the familiar stories now told about soft power (that the West is losing it, that rivals are filling a vacuum, that the answer is better storytelling) serve the people telling them. Developing my earlier article for Carnegie Council on metaethics and international influence, I suggest that an ethical approach to soft power in this new era begins with a simple discipline: knowing which story you are telling and being willing to say what evidence would prove it wrong.
Ohnesorge’s Argument
This past June, Hendrik Ohnesorge, managing director of University of Bonn’s Center for Global Studies, appeared on the Values & Interests podcast. Two moments in Ohnesorge’s conversation with host Kevin Maloney stay with me. The first is his account of Tacitus on Roman Britain: the governor Agricola introducing the Latin language and the toga, using culture as an instrument of conquest 2,000 years before anyone spoke of winning hearts and minds. The legions left Britain long ago, Ohnesorge observes, but the Roman baths are still standing in Bath. The second is Tom Sawyer’s fence: a boy with no money and no muscle who gets other children to pay him for the privilege of doing his chores, simply by making the work look desirable. Together the two stories carry his central point. Soft power, the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than force or payment, is neither modern, nor liberal, nor necessarily kind. It is a form of power available to any actor for any purpose. It became associated with liberal values because of when the term was coined, in the confident years around the end of the Cold War, not because of anything in the concept itself.
The history supports him. Joseph Nye’s own sources were realists, not idealists: E. H. Carr counted “power over opinion” among the three basic forms of political power in 1939, Bertrand Russell wrote about it in 1938, and Hans Morgenthau added “attractive power” to later editions of Politics Among Nations. The idea was forged in Cold War anxiety about American decline, not in post-Cold War triumph. Seeing this clearly explains something that otherwise looks like a contradiction: an administration hostile to the liberal international order can still talk about soft power, as the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy does, while dismantling the aid agencies, broadcasters, and exchange programs that liberal internationalism built. There is no contradiction if soft power is simply a tool. What Ohnesorge calls post-liberal soft power has changed the message (nationalism, deal-making, us against them) and changed the intended audience (like-minded movements and publics abroad), but the method is the familiar one. And its appeal is genuine: many people, in many countries, find this way of doing politics magnetic.
I want to accept all of this and then ask the question it raises. If the concept has no values of its own, why does everyone who uses it supply values so quickly? The answer, I think, is that soft power works less like a theory than like a container. The word holds whatever assumptions about people, societies, and morality its user brings to it. So, the interesting question is not what soft power is. It is what the rival political traditions put into the container, and what happens in the world as a result.
How the Political Traditions Understand Attraction
The major traditions disagree about three things the concept leaves open: whether attraction is freely given, whether the things that attract are universal or particular to certain cultures, and whether governments can legitimately try to cultivate attraction at all.
The Marxist tradition, especially as developed by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, holds that attraction is manufactured. Dominant groups rule not mainly by force but by shaping what people consent to, through schools, media, and culture. On this reading, what Nye called soft power is Gramsci’s theory of cultural domination with the critical edge removed: the same machinery, described admiringly, as advice to the powerful. Whatever one makes of the theory, it underpins much of the suspicion that Western cultural engagement meets across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Practitioners encounter this argument every week, whether or not they recognize where it comes from.
Liberalism holds the opposite: attraction is freely given, and that is exactly what makes it legitimate. People choose to admire, study in, or emulate a country, and no one forces them. This is the tradition that built the post-war infrastructure of exchanges, scholarships, and international broadcasting. In its commercial form it also built the nation-brand consultancies and the league tables that now rank countries the way analysts rank companies. Realism, the tradition of power politics, holds that attraction is real but secondary: countries are admired because they are strong, rich, and successful, not the other way around. It follows that the machinery of attraction is decoration and can be cut without much loss. That belief is now being tested in practice, as Washington cuts the machinery while keeping its military and economic strength. Nationalist movements add a further twist: they treat foreign attraction as a threat to the nation and the liberal soft power establishment as an elite project against ordinary people. Yet the nationalist movement itself runs conferences, institutes, and networks of sympathetic intellectuals across borders, a soft power operation by any definition. This supports Ohnesorge’s point: the tool serves any master.
Social democracy holds that a country attracts by being worth copying: build a decent society and its example travels. Its preferred practice is cultural relations, patient exchange based on reciprocity rather than promotion. Civilizational thinkers, whose arguments now shape the external messaging of China, Russia, and India, reject the idea of a single global audience altogether. What the West calls universal values, they argue, are one civilization’s local product, and attraction operates within cultural worlds rather than across a single scale. Finally, a family of newer critiques questions the vocabulary itself. Feminist scholars point out that the word “soft” carries a gendered ranking, which helps explain why cultural budgets are treated as decorative and cut first. Post-colonial scholars ask how much of the West’s appeal rests on prestige built up during empire and never fully dismantled. Environmental thinkers observe that much of what the West has offered the world as a model, a life of high consumption, cannot be extended to 8 billion people, which makes it a weakening asset as an object of aspiration.
Each of these is a complete and internally consistent account. Each fills Ohnesorge’s empty container. And each, in the terms of my earlier article, rests on a different assumption about moral truth. The liberal account assumes values whose appeal is universal and simply awaits recognition. The civilizational account assumes values constructed within particular traditions and valid there. The Gramscian account assumes values that serve interests. We almost never argue about these foundations directly. We argue about budgets instead, and then wonder why the arguments never end.
Four Familiar Stories, and What They Leave Out
This matters in practice because public discussion of soft power now runs through a small set of familiar stories. Each contains truth. Each also serves the person telling it, and each leaves something important out.
The first story says the West is throwing away its soft power. The evidence is real: the dismantling of USAID and Voice of America, and the funding cuts to the British Council, the BBC World Service, and their European counterparts, are matters of record. But the story quietly turns a political defeat into a technical mistake. It implies that standing can be restored by restoring budgets, and it avoids the harder possibility that the deeper loss lies in how these societies now appear to others. The second story says China and Russia are filling the space the West vacates. It treats influence like a liquid: when one power drains away, another flows in. Its practical purpose is to frighten legislatures into funding cultural work, and its cost is that it erases the people on the receiving end, who appear as empty territory to be filled rather than as publics making their own choices. The third story distinguishes our legitimate attraction from their manipulation, usually under the label of “sharp power.” It captures something real about covert interference. It also hands every government in the world a ready-made vocabulary for restricting foreign students, closing institutes, and treating openness itself as a security risk. The fourth story, told by governments of every kind, says we just need to tell our story better. It locates the failure in the telling, so that the conduct being described never has to be examined. As Ohnesorge notes, spectacle and speed sit badly with a form of power that works slowly, by becoming part of how people see the world. Stories persuade when they match experience. No improvement in storytelling can substitute for that, which is why the fourth story fails most consistently of all.
Where Attraction Comes From: The Domestic Foundations
Ohnesorge offers an image I find exactly right: soft power as a cross-section of the ocean. Policies and personalities churn on the surface and change by the week. Values and culture move slowly at depth and can last for centuries. The image points toward a research question: If the durable sources of attraction lie deep, in what a society actually is over time, then that is where analysis and measurement should look.
That is where my own current work has gone, in a framework called FAIOD. The letters stand for the five layers of the model: Foundations, Assets, Infrastructure, Outcomes, and Dividends. Foundations are the condition of the society itself: the fairness of its institutions and laws, the quality of its education, and perhaps above all the level and character of trust between its people. Assets are the things a country can draw on and show the world: universities, language, broadcasters, creative industries, sport, heritage. Infrastructure is how all this is organized: the people, coordination, and data that turn assets into results. Outcomes are how the country is actually seen and treated abroad. Dividends are the payback at home: inward investment, students, visitors, research partnerships, and renewed national confidence. The model’s core claim is that the process starts and ends at home. A country’s appeal abroad grows out of the condition of its own society, and the benefits return to that society, in a loop that can run in either direction: healthy foundations feed appeal, which feeds the foundations; decaying foundations drain appeal, which drains them further.
The model’s sharpest prediction concerns the present moment. A country can hold the world’s largest stock of soft power assets, as the United States still does, while its attraction falls, because the damage is happening at the foundations, where no messaging campaign reaches. Early evidence points that way, from Pew’s 2025 surveys of allied publics to the steepest single-year fall in reputation recorded in the 2026 Brand Finance index, though these figures are recent and should be treated with care. This approach also speaks to the measurement problem with which my earlier article began. One reason we cannot measure soft power reliably is that we have been measuring at the wrong end of the process: counting assets and polling opinions abroad, when the conditions that create attraction sit at home and the returns arrive at home. Measuring further upstream will not make the concept precise. But it makes it testable, and it gives policymakers a useful diagnostic question when standing falls: Is the problem the assets, which money can rebuild, or the society, which it cannot?
The framework also bears on Ohnesorge’s doubts about nationalist soft power. He questions whether an international nationalism can hold together, since a world of everyone-first offers no common ground, and he suspects this new soft power of having feet of clay: fast, spectacular, and unlikely to outlast its personalities. The foundations element of FAIOD suggests his instinct is right and adds a reason. Appeal built on narrow solidarity, on defining the nation by who does not belong to it, rests on a kind of trust that does not travel well beyond the group that shares it. What crosses borders durably is the appeal of societies that are open, fair, and confident enough not to need enemies. That is a claim, not a certainty. It could turn out to be wrong, and the coming years will produce the evidence, as one great power tests whether attraction survives the dismantling of its instruments, and another tests whether roads, ports, and investment can substitute for openness.
What This Asks of Us
What does ethics ask of us here? Readers of Carnegie Council will recognize the standing temptation in this debate: to treat our own attraction as virtue and our rivals’ as manipulation, our stories as analysis and theirs as propaganda. The point from my earlier article applies in full. Whether we treat values as universal truths, as products of particular cultures, or as instruments of interest is usually decided in advance and never examined. Every tradition described above has settled that question silently. In a world where no single moral framework can be assumed, the silence is no longer affordable.
Three habits seem to me to follow. The first is candor. Every institution engaged in this work is running one of the accounts described above, and honesty begins with knowing which one, and saying so. The alternative to having a politics of attraction is not neutrality; it is having one without knowing it. The second is a willingness to be proven wrong. Everyone in this debate, including me, should be able to say in advance what evidence would count against their preferred story, whether that story is liberal restoration, realist retrenchment, or the domestic foundations account I have offered here, and should treat that willingness as a duty of honesty rather than an academic nicety. The third is the habit Ohnesorge reaches for at the end of his conversation, in the old language of the virtues: moderation, prudence, and what the Declaration of Independence calls “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Attraction is, in the end, other people’s verdict on us. It cannot be commanded, bought, or faked for long, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling something. What a society can do is behave in ways worth admiring, pay honest attention to how it is seen, and treat the opinions of mankind as information rather than insult. At a moment when some governments have begun to treat a bad reputation as a badge of strength, that may be the most contrarian soft power strategy available.
Stuart MacDonald is founder and director of ICR Research.
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an independent and nonpartisan nonprofit. The views expressed within this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Carnegie Council.
