Soft Power in an Era of Nationalism

KEVIN MALONEY: Today on the podcast, I'm welcoming Hendrik Ohnesorge. He's a senior lecturer at the University of Bonn and an expert on soft power and the trans-Atlantic relationship between the U.S. and European allies post-World War II. Together, we dig into the aspects of soft power that make it such an influential part of geopolitics, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Hendrik, welcome to Carnegie Council.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Thank you very much for having me. It is always a pleasure to be here.

KEVIN MALONEY: To be back. You were first here about six or seven months ago when we had a conversation on this post-liberal world and the transitioning around soft power. I know we are going to get to that in the conversation, but I thought it would be good for our listeners who have not been introduced to you to hear a little bit about your professional background and then, as we do on the Values & Interests podcast, dig into your values formation. Let’s start with the bio, and then we will get into the personal side before pivoting to a geopolitical discussion today.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I am happy to do that. It is good to be back, and as you said we had a conversation on soft power not too long ago. This is also one of the main things I am working on.

My background is international relations (IR). I have been with the University of Bonn in Germany for a number of years now. I did my Ph.D. on soft power and now have started working on post-liberal versions of soft power and trans-Atlantic relations as a geographical focus on U.S. foreign policy. These are the topics that currently keep me up at night but are also I think of considerable interest right now. It is good to have this conversation with you.

I am going back and forth between New York and Bonn several times a year. I am lucky to be a non-resident fellow at New York University, and that is why I always enjoy coming here and having these conversations on both sides of the Atlantic and exchanging perspectives. That is always a great way to do that.

KEVIN MALONEY: You are literally living the trans-Atlantic relationship that we need more of today.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Exactly.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thank you for your service in that regard.

As we do on the Values & Interests podcast, let’s discuss your values framework, which goes to the heart of what we do at Carnegie Council. You cannot bifurcate the values side from the political side or professional side. We heard a bit of your professional bio, but let’s get your values CV. I would love to hear a little about your formative years and how you think about your own moral framework.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I would love to talk about that. First of all, I have always been interested in the classics and classical antiquity. This began in high school. I studied Latin, and we read some of the classics there. They still influence me a lot in many ways, professionally and personally, publicly and privately, if you will.

We studied different versions, of course, of classical philosophy, morals, and ethics, and one system, if you want to call it that—and they certainly tried to be systematic—was Stoa, the Stoic philosophy. This is something I think which connects the many different worlds that we live in quite well, the professional, public, political, and also the very private one.

The Stoics had three different components to their overall system: logic, physics, and ethics. We have this famous image or metaphor of a garden, where these three elements meet. Physics, the natural world, is the soil in which everything is built; logic is the fence in this garden image; and ethics, the thing you maybe want to get to, is the fruit on the tree in the garden. This is a very famous image that has been around for centuries.

I think this model of thinking about the world as one whole system, a very holistic thing, and also the idea of living in harmony with all of these aspects is something that still influences me and that I think also has influenced many other thinkers and traditions. It has its roots in antiquity, in Stoa and the Stoic philosophers, going back to Zeno and then to Seneca and later to Marcus Aurelius, but it also of course heavily influenced Christianity and the Christian Church Fathers.

This being Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, I think especially the third component might be of particular interest here, the ethics part, and this is where I think the search for the highest good comes in. We talked about that a lot, and I remember the conversations we had in high school and later also in university: What is the highest good? What do you want to attain personally and privately?

I think the Stoics had a convincing answer, that the highest good, the thing that you really strive for, is a life well-lived through virtue. Virtus is the Latin word for virtue. You can then divide this into cardinal virtues, which also leads into the Christian idea, but they were all there, of course, dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and later the Stoa, these four basic virtues: Courage, which we all seek and sometimes can muster; then there is prudence and wisdom. Of course, with me teaching at a university, this is something very close to my heart as well, the striving for knowledge and prudence in your private decisions and private life but also in public and the things you study.

Then there is justice and moderation or temperance, which are sometimes used synonymously. These are the four cardinal virtues that I think make up this ethical side, the fruit of the tree in the garden of the Stoics. I think this is something that still influences me both privately and professionally.

KEVIN MALONEY: Whenever I get professors or moral philosophers in the chair, it is an interesting dynamic in that you have thought deeply about this, but oftentimes they can be siloed between your professional and personal life. Obviously, there is going to be osmosis between these two things.

How has that evolved over the years for you, in terms of thinking about these questions of philosophy, these questions of geopolitics, but then thinking about maybe the third leg of the stool, which is the application of it or the ethical lived aspect of it that you refer to? How do you think about these things interacting with one another?

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: That is an excellent question, and one I personally struggle with every day and people have struggled with for a long time.

On paper I would say that the Stoics made sure they were not mutually exclusive; quite the contrary. They try to combine what are sometimes called the vita activa and vita contemplativa, the studies of life in the ivory tower of the university, studying something, but also the vita activa, the active life, the contributions to your community, state, city, and country.

The obligation to combine these two is one of the cornerstones of this philosophy, so I think it has a very practical side to it. It is not just ideals and this ivory tower idea, but at the same time from the very start we see how people have struggled with that, including some of the most illustrious names in the gallery of Stoics. Think about Seneca. He wrote all those amazing letters of what you should do and how to reach the highest good, summum bonum, but at the same time he was a minister, if you want to call it that, under Nero, and he became quite rich. He became one of the richest people in Rome during that period.

It is hard in practice to square these two aspects, but I think they are by no means mutually exclusive. If you think of it as a whole, which is the idea of the Stoa, I think, then the life well-lived, this life in harmony, can only be achieved if you have this in both worlds. We wear many hats every day, but only if you reach this ideal in both worlds, then you can call it a well-reasoned or well-lived life, which are some of the terms they often use.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is a very helpful overview in terms of both the philosophers that influence you personally and professionally but also how they have been applied in the real world.

You talk about this tension. Even the great thinkers who came up with these moral frameworks that we now use were striving through a sea of deep imperfection to get there.

I think it is very important for us at Carnegie Council to keep this north star but understand there are going to be rough seas and a “zig and zag” back and forth, as FDR explained. I think it is important for listeners, especially in this time that is geopolitically incredibly stressful domestically and internationally with doomscrolling and turning on the news, that the framework is there for something to strive toward. It is not a prescription for everything to be comfortable every single day.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Absolutely not. I agree. I think it is more like a guideline or something you strive ever closer to reach, but also being well aware that it is not possible to reach it every single day and that you always meet the demands of everyday life, which sometimes are very harsh. It is very easy to talk about virtue and all of that, but what do you do if you are faced with illness, poverty, or other instances which test your philosophy?

I think it is better to acknowledge that than to think you can do it every day. It is better to acknowledge your limitations and strive toward getting ever closer—it is sort of a “more perfect” approach, which of course, this country has a history of.

KEVIN MALONEY: I was about the finish the phrase, “more perfect union.” You took the words out of my mouth.

This is a good pivot into your area of expertise and specialty, which is the soft-power dynamic within geopolitics. I think this goes to what we were just talking about. A lot of times people want to think about power or think about geopolitical relationships through this one-dimensional, militaristic, coercive transactionalism.

There is another dynamic, and it is not just in the last 80 years or post-Soviet Union. There is a deep history in terms of attraction within geopolitics, values as a force within geopolitics. For all of our listeners, who are from multiple countries, it would be great to start with how you view and define soft power, not just from a U.S. or Western lens but from a historical lens, and then we can go down a bit deeper into soft power and its changing conception today in the geopolitics of this moment.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I think it is always a good idea to start with a basic definition. If you talk about certain issues, we first of all need to at least set out a certain definition. Maybe we do not even agree on the definition, but at least that gives us ground to stand upon.

I am almost quoting Joseph Nye here, who was the father of the concept of soft power, who framed it and coined the term in 1990 but didn’t really invent it. It is a bit like mathematics, whether you invent it or discover it. I think Joe Nye more discovered soft power and put it into words. The words that he often uses one way or another are, “Soft power is the ability to get what you want in a social relationship based not on coercion or inducements but on attraction and perhaps also persuasion.”

I think these are the vital components of the soft power definition. If power itself is the ability to get what you want from anybody else, A and B have to have a social relationship and you have to change the behavior of B. If you are powerful, you can do that by different means. One of the means you can do it with or one of the things that you can base this changed behavior on is the means of attraction and persuasion, and this is where soft power comes in.

You can contrast it with other forms of power. You can argue that there is coercion physically and militarily. This is a part of geopolitics as any social relationship. You can also buy others; you can pay them to do something. But you can also attract them. You can also persuade others to do something.

One nice little story I sometimes use for my students but also to illustrate the point to a wider audience is the famous episode in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the painting of the fence. The basic idea is that Tom’s latest misdemeanors have caused his Aunt Polly to set him a new task, which is to whitewash this massive fence, and it is described by Mark Twain in brilliant words. I recommend everyone to read it later tonight or whenever you hear this, so you can get to the source in Mark Twain’s words and writing. Mark Twain has this idea and sets this story of course in a fictional town, but it is all very real if you read about it, and it has influenced generations of not just Americans but schoolkids and people all over the world.

The idea is this: Tom Sawyer has to whitewash a fence, so he has to do something he does not really want to do, and maybe it is even beyond his capacity. It is a substantive task he has to do.

What does he do? He doesn’t want to do it. He wants others’ help. He wants to change the behavior of others, who are coming along and starting to mock him. He has to paint this fence, and others are playing. It is a beautiful weekend day. The others are going swimming or having fun and enjoying themselves while he has to paint this fence.

Then somebody comes by and asks, “What are you doing? That is work,” and Tom Sawyer says, “What do you call work? That is not work. That is sort of a privilege.”

He starts first of all to buy others’ help. He actually tries that. He counts his belongings and says, “Oh, I only have a marble or something like that, not half enough to buy anybody’s help.” So he does not have the economic resources to buy support, to buy others’ help.

He also cannot physically force others. This is not explicitly mentioned perhaps, although Tom Sawyer is certainly not averse to a good beating. This is actually what got him there in the first place, if you read the previous chapter. But that is off the table. He cannot force other kids to help him.

These options being off the table, Tom Sawyer thinks, Well, what else can I do? I can persuade them. I can attract them to help me. I can change their behavior not by paying or forcing them, but by attracting them to the task I am set to do that I do not want to do by myself.

That is how he does it. He pretends to like it. He steps back and watches this fence with the “eye of an artist,” as Mark Twain puts it, and then the other boys who previously mocked him start to think: Well, if he enjoys it that much, why don’t I get a chance to paint a little?

Tom Sawyer says: “No, I can’t let you do that. It is a serious task and there are just a few boys who can do that,” and he ensnares them completely. They start giving him things that they obviously treasure, like half an apple or a dead rat or other things, things treasured in the rural Mississippi River area where this is set.

What happened there? I think it is an interesting case study for the workings of soft power because Tom Sawyer managed to change the preference of the others. He managed even to change their behavior. They don’t want to go swimming anymore or pretend to be a steamboat rolling down the streets of this fictional town of St. Petersburg; they now want to paint the fence. They even pay him to be allowed to paint the fence.

Of course, at the end Tom Sawyer sits back, and it is described again beautifully in Mark Twain’s words: “He sits back with his newfound wealth and lets the others do the work in the sun.” This is I think a brilliant example of how soft power can work, and at the same time it shows you how deceptive soft power can be.

This is something we sometimes tend to forget. On first reflection we think of soft power as something good, something normatively better than other forms of power, but I don’t think this is the case. It can be. There is a famous quote by Churchill supposedly, who said, “It is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war,” it is better to talk and try to persuade others than to force them in the first place.

At the same time soft power can be very deceptive. It can be very manipulative. You can disguise your own wants and fool others. This is also something that is in there, so I think this is a good illustration, not really a geopolitical one, of course, but one I think we can socially, individually, and personally relate to.

KEVIN MALONEY: Let’s push on that a little bit because I think we are seeing a lot of criticism right now of maybe being asleep at the wheel politically and academically from a liberal international order perspective for the past 20 to 30-plus years. I am taking a very critical stance on soft power. It seems like it was a piece that fit very nicely within this conception of liberal international order, reciprocity, and being based on rules, and now there is a huge pushback against that.

I would like to get your take on that framing, and then maybe we can pivot after that into how soft power is shifting in this geopolitical environment. There is a rush to redefine soft power. There is a rush to reimagine. You are hearing “post-liberal” soft power and “illiberal” soft power and soft power “in the age of artificial intelligence.” You cannot open an academic journal without finding it right now. I would like to pivot to that afterward but maybe we can first start talking about whether soft power was maybe a little too fit for purpose for the narrative we wanted to believe during that period.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I understand your argument there, and it is one that we often hear these days, but I think I can make several points to counter that, several conceptual or theoretical and several of them historical or empirical.

Let’s start with the conceptual side of things. I think soft power is just another form of power that has always been around. You can find many examples, and we will come to that in a moment. The background of this argument is that in a way you can say Joe Nye got lucky. He published this in 1990 as a book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, which was the origin, and then he had two articles, one I think in Foreign Affairs and one in Foreign Policy, to set out the idea of soft power. Interestingly, the book does not have an index entry for “soft power,” but the term grew afterward. This is what I think happened. He sort of got lucky because as we all know it takes a long time to set your ideas to paper, to publish an article, and especially to publish a book.

For me, the idea of soft power and the idea of attraction and persuasion certainly was a good fit for the 1990s and the idea of “the end of history” and a “unipolar moment,” but Joe Nye’s thinking was deeply rooted not in the liberalism of the 1990s, but the Cold War confrontation especially of the 1980s, the second Cold War with Reagan in office but also economically with West Germany at the time and Japan threatening to overtake the United States economically.

That was his thinking: What is special about the United States? What other source of power do we have that perhaps is something that is also uniquely American? This is where criticism comes in, which we can talk about in a moment, but in this sense I think it is helpful to think about the background as the Cold War era and not the 1990s. This is where it mushroomed and where it gathered pace, where you can see it appearing in The New York Times. I have studied some of the Times archives, for example, and you can see how the number of mentions of the term skyrockets through the 1990s and in other papers as well.

The idea itself is much older, and if you read again Joe Nye’s work on this you can see some references, sometimes explicitly and sometimes between the lines, to other thinkers, very realist thinkers and not liberal idealist thinkers, but “realist” in the IR sense of the world. If you go back to some of those people, like E. H. Carr, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Nicolson, they all wrote very influential pieces in the late 1930s. There is E. H. Carr in 1939 with The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, Bertrand Russell with Power: A New Social Analysis in 1938, and Harold Nicolson’s "The Meaning of Prestige" in 1937. In those years you have some of the classical thinkers of power who later influenced international realist thought profoundly speaking of “power over opinion,” for example, as Russell puts it.

You also have Morgenthau writing in 1948 Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, and interestingly in the second edition in 1956 he adds the term “attractive power.” He also argues that the power of a state rests upon its military opponents’ economy but also on its diplomacy, on its attraction, and on the political system.

It is all there in those traditional realist thinkers, and that is why I think we can make an argument to strip the soft-power discourse much more than the original concept of its liberal mantle and really get to the bottom of it. I think most of these arguments stem from the misconception even of latter-day interpreters, but if you back to the origins, if you go back to Nye’s original writings, you see a much more realist approach to that.

This brings me to my second line of arguments here, the empirical or historical. We can find many, many examples of soft power sometimes explicitly or strategically used. Sometimes also you can detect it if you read between the lines of ancient historians, again going back to the classics. If you read some of the classical historians of ancient Greece and especially Rome, you can find examples that today you would call soft power. It is exactly the same thing.

If you read Tacitus, for example, who wrote about the conquest of Britannia, modern-day Britain, in the 1st century AD, he specifically mentioned several initiatives taken by some smart or able governors there, who introduced the Latin language and the toga. There is one famous quote where he sees the toga as “everywhere seen today.” It is not just the military conquest or economic coercion you can see there, but also the Roman Empire 2000 years ago applied soft power strategically. They knew about the power of culture, not out of altruism necessarily, but to conquer and subdue others.

These are some of the arguments I mention when we say that soft power is something from the liberal 1990s and has outlived its value. I think it is much older than this and has always been around, maybe not under that term, but it has always been a thing in international relations.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think you hit the nail on the head there in terms of bifurcating soft power from liberal values both theoretically and in practice. The example of the Roman conquest of Britain is a great example. They clearly did not have the same value system as the United States of America in 1985, but they knew their legions only were not going to get the job done, but they would get it to a point.

I think that is a good point to pivot: Are our legions only going to get the job done today? The other day Pete Hegseth at the podium said, “We negotiate with bombs.” If we look at the myriad of things being said from the top levels—and I know there is a difference between soft power and rhetoric, but these things do live in very similar universes and cross over with each other.

I would be interested to get your take on shifting soft power, different dynamics of the power equation being prioritized very differently over the last 80 years in a historically liberal society, and how you are attempting to understand this shift because it is literally kinetic in terms of the choice of actions that are being taken in geopolitics, and it is happening at a speed we have never seen before. One of the things I have been talking about a lot here internally is that the action in Venezuela would have had a shelf life of a few months in terms of Senate hearings, media coverage, and analysis, and now it does not last 60 days before something else happens.

I am framing this conversation in a way that, if you are working in geopolitics right now—I wrote a post the other day—it feels like you are “drinking through a firehose.” How do we understand soft power in this moment when it is a deluge of things happening almost on a daily basis?

That was a big windup, but I think it is important to set the scene in terms of where we are right now.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Absolutely. This is something we have to get our heads around and analyze and put into perspective.

First of all, I think it is important to not pit hard and soft power against each other. This is something that is often done politically and also scholarly or academically where you are either a proponent of one or the other. This is not very helpful, and we should see them as two sides of the power coin. There are different ways to get what you want, but you better do it with all of the tools. I think soft power is another arrow in your quiver, and if you do not want to use that, maybe you want to use others. There is always this tradeoff idea.

We have seen in the past that in certain administrations in this country but also with foreign policy in other countries there is always a negotiation between what you want to favor: Are you more in favor of the force or strength approach or are you more about deliberation, alliances, persuasion, and attraction? What we recently have seen, of course, is a shift more and more toward the approach of hard power not only first but almost hard power only. We don’t do soft power.

Even during the first Trump administration, when the first budget was published early in the first administration, Mick Mulvaney at the time said: “This is a hard-power budget. We don’t do soft power. It is not a soft-power budget.” So we can see these changes.

I think it is a shortsighted view in a historical perspective as well. If you think about it, the legions are long gone from Britain, but the baths of the Roman cultural heritage, if you would like to call it, are still there.

KEVIN MALONEY: The bath literally in Bath.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: The bath in Bath, Somerset, absolutely, where you can see statues around there, one of which is of Agricola, the governor who introduced this and is the one Tacitus wrote about somewhat favorably, not least because he was his father-in-law, but that is another story for maybe another session.

What we have to keep in mind is that if the force or money element disappears, then you lose your power very quickly. If you can no longer force somebody to do something or you are no longer willing to pay somebody to do something, then you lose this power over somebody, but if you use soft power, it can be more of a long-term project. It is much harder to do. As I said, it is longer term and winding roads, but once it is internalized I think it is even more powerful than outside forces. It is an inside force.

This is something, of course, which goes to the second part of your question. Right now we see a lot of spectacle and performative acts, a lot of performance politics, where you want to dominate the news cycle, where you want to appear tough and feed into this cycle of 20-second videos nowadays. This does not play well with soft-power work, which is more tedious and less spectacular. It is long-term and you do not get immediate results if you get them at all.

It is also very hard to sell quite honestly. If you ask, “Okay, what do I get for each dollar spent?” and then you have to make the case that maybe in the future somebody is attracted if they take part in this exchange program and then become leaders in another country, so it is decades sometimes that we have to keep in mind.

I think right now we are in a situation in the United States but also elsewhere, not least influenced by information technology, where everything has to be fast. You have to have quick results and spectacles on television or the internet, and those things do not play well with soft power. I think this is another problem soft power faces.

Also, by the way, in times of budget cuts and budget restraints, we have this whole idea also in the 1990s of the “peace dividend,” that now we could save on foreign investments and focus more, as Bill Clinton famously said, “like a laser beam on our own economy.” The first thing, perhaps understandably, that you cut are those programs which are long-term and winding, and you do not know if they are going to work at all but you hope for the best.

This is something that is also a practical or political problem that we have seen with past administrations as well, but the Trump administration, especially Trump 2.0, has made it very clear—I think this is also the title of one of Bob Woodward’s books, Fear—that for him power is fear. This is the idea that for him it is not about persuading others, working with others, or attracting them but rather forcing them, either militarily or perhaps also economically. We can see a clear shift, but at the same time, if you look at the National Security Strategy, published not too long ago at the end of 2025, you can see the term “soft power” in there, actually on four counts if you go through it.

This administration on paper—we have talked about rhetoric and practice and we can also talk about strategy and practice, there might be differences—seems to be keen on using soft power, but what we can see here is that this is soft power with a very different idea and audiences in mind. It is a very different version of soft power, something I sometimes call “post-liberal soft power.”

I am not always sure if we do ourselves a favor adding those qualifications to soft power. There are some people who talk about “post-liberal soft power” or “illiberal soft power.” I have a friend at Oxford University, Corneliu Bjola, who speaks of “dark soft power” and also of tech companies and entrepreneurs. That might help us to clarify what we are talking about, but at the same time I think it is best if we just speak of soft power without qualifications because it is not easy to qualify power as nominatively good or bad.

By the way, it is the same with hard power. Hard power can also be used for good and noble purposes and causes but also for very egotistical and bad purposes. I think it is important to keep in mind that we are in a situation right now where soft power is not really changing but perhaps going back to where it originally came from, as another form of power, not better or worse, to get what you want through attraction. Different actors have used it, and different actors are using it now.

If we are talking about a return of great-power politics or great-power competition or something like that, this for me is an argument in favor of soft power and not against it, and not understanding great-power competition as merely being fought in the realm of hard power. Quite the contrary. Think about the Cold War. The Cold War was crucially fought in the realm of ideas and ideals and maybe even was won on that account. Of course, other forces played a role as well, but it also was won with this. If we are going back to the era of maybe 19th century geopolitics or if we are going back to Cold War 2.0, then we are also going back to a more realist understanding of soft power.

KEVIN MALONEY: The point to sift through for me is the dividing line between propaganda and what you would think about as soft power. You said something about the long-term benefit of soft power is that it gets into somebody’s soul. It gets into them when they are growing up.

There are many examples of very specific strategic approaches to influence a population, but that is not really what we are talking about in the U.S.’s version of soft power. This is the osmosis in terms of seeing Michael Jordan; it is the osmosis in wanting to come to a U.S. university. These have multigenerational impacts over somebody’s lifespan.

I think we are trying to work through this a bit at the Council in terms of, as you said before, what’s the Trump administration’s soft-power message and who are they sending this message to? Are they taking control of the levers of soft power, which used to be more capitalistic and diverse and less centralized, and are they attempting to control that message, and then who are they messaging to? The way I have been thinking about it is that there is more of a natural osmosis that is separate from propaganda, and you are thinking about this in previous U.S. administrations.

Then you also have right now a shift in the audience in terms of other elites in other parts of the world, other elites from private sector to private sector, transactionalism as this binding force, nepotism as this binding force, quid pro quo and corruption as this binding force, that is hovering around soft power at a systemic level in a way that I have not experienced in my lifetime.

Feel free to push back and disagree, but these are things that I am struggling with in terms of trying to use the concept of soft power to understand the moment, but there are so many new variables that are being introduced with the United States still being the most powerful actor in the world.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: You are right. To start with the latter observation, we talk a lot about global power shifts. Also at the University of Bonn, my home university, we have been working on global power shifts for years now, and I think what we can observe is that the area in which power has shifted the most for the United States is its soft power. It is still militarily well ahead of anybody else and economically on par with perhaps Europe if you consider Europe to be a single actor and perhaps China, but still even there it is advanced or ahead.

But if you think about it in the soft-power dimension, that is where we can really detect shifts both in terms of the amount of soft power but also in the type of soft power, and this is what you already mentioned. I think we can really see a change in content and a change in audiences. In this sort of post-liberal soft power, if you want to call it that, which the Trump administration seems to use if you think about strategy, rhetoric, and practice—and they do not necessarily all overlap, so we are still in the middle of that—what has changed first of all is the content.

It is no longer about multilateralism and alliances, providing and working for common goods, or the idea that it is good to have partners and allies, and that you have a values-based foreign policy and alliances. This is the liberal version. The post-liberal version is more on unilateral action, transactionalism, deal making, and more on nationalism and tribalism, more us against them rather than we. This is the content that has changed, first of all.

Then we must also acknowledge that this form of soft power also has its attractions. There are many people in this country and in other parts of the world, also in my country, Germany, who find that version of soft power attractive or this version of doing things very attractive. Some say, “Well, for the first time somebody actually says it.”

KEVIN MALONEY: Because the quid pro quo is on the table.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: It is on the table, it is no longer pretense, all this talk about human rights, ideals, and everything was just a façade, and now at least somebody has the audacity, guts, or courage to say it. This is attractive to many people to different degrees.

This leads me to my second point, that not only the content has changed, but also the audiences have changed. The audiences that this administration I think is keeping in mind or trying to target when it speaks of soft power in its National Security Strategy and elsewhere are other, like-minded audiences, and there are a lot of those. We must not fool ourselves. This goes back to the idea that soft power is just another form of power and is available to anybody, and there are many people who find that attractive as well.

So the audiences have changed, the content has changed, and there is a bit of a problem or paradox so far that I am not sure how it is going to be resolved, mainly because we are still in the middle of it, but there seems to be something of a paradox here: You cannot have an international nationalism. This is hard to do. It is easier if you understand soft power as this collaborative force, as a universalism approach to things like human rights, climate change, the community of nations ideas. It is easier to find a common ground there or find global audiences beyond your own borders, but if your soft power is more based on nationalism and America First, Germany First, Italy First, or Hungary First, if everybody wants to put their own country first, it is very hard to reach an international version of that.

We are still in the middle of that, but I think this, coupled with the fact that you mentioned that this administration does not seem to have a very long-term or very good soft-power strategy but rather is very transactional, very short-term, and very much based on gut feeling, does not really work for soft power because it is such a long-term project. You cannot say A today and B tomorrow, “blowing hot and cold,” as the old Greek fable goes. That does not work well. It does not win you friends if you think about the Greek fable. It does not work if you say A and do B the next day.

This is something that might get you some short-term advantages, especially if you are the biggest player around. We can do that with hard power. You can force or threaten others, but it does not really win you friends in the long run.

I think these two things, the paradox of an international nationalism and the lack of a clear strategy, what you want to achieve through a long-term strategy by the means of soft power, makes me think of this post-liberal soft power, so far, at least, of having feet of clay. It is all about spectacle and is short-term, but I do not know if this internalization process will happen, because as you said before it is a long-term process, and this idea of winning hearts and minds takes a lot of time. Maybe this is more like a fire. It flares up for a while but then burns out.

KEVIN MALONEY: This is very helpful for me and I think my listeners as well in terms of this kind of triangle framework that you talked about and the need to look at strategy, rhetoric, and practice in relation to soft power. I think where we can separate that structure out is in thinking about liberal values being associated with those versus more anti-pluralistic, nationalistic, or having that value system attached to it. Thinking about that breaks us free from the association of soft power with 1998 America.

I do think that is important. It has been clarifying for me just to take some notes here and think about that. Maybe that’s an article for you to write for us at Carnegie Council.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: We can do that together, yes.

KEVIN MALONEY: This has been very helpful in terms of framing.

I want to pivot into the closing section of our discussion today and maybe get the mood from Europe in terms of the transatlantic relationship. I have talked about this a lot on the podcast, but going back to the Munich Security Conference JD Vance’s speech in 2025 and then a slightly different version but I think with the same ingredients pretty much in terms of Rubio’s speech this year.

During Vance’s speech in 2025 you had gasps and outrage in the hall, and this year you had people standing up and applauding. The way I have talked about this with other people is that it feels like you basically lock somebody in a room and they are outraged when you do it, and then you show up a year later and give them a piece of bread, and they start kissing your feet. That is how I conceptualized what happened at the Munich Security Conferences.

I know this is one slice of the rhetoric pie within soft power, but I wanted to get your reaction to that and maybe your European opinion on that as well. This is me thinking about this for a few weeks now, but I was shocked at the different reactions, but the content if you looked between the lines was seemingly quite similar.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: That is a good question. I think there are different answers to that. One goes back to the idea that I just tried to include in our conversation that this form of doing politics both in style and in substance has attraction to many people. Many people find this version of going about international relations, transatlantic relations, or relations with any other actor as attractive. So there could be some actual substantial attraction in this approach. That could be one explanation for why people clap or why they want to also maybe follow.

There is a long tradition in soft-power literature, in this country in particular, of leading by example. We can see that other countries and other leaders follow this example that the current administration in the United States has set for a number of years now, if you consider also the first administration, but certainly a year into the second. There is still this power of attraction, of leading by examples of others following who maybe are attracted to that.

I was in Munich this year. I was not in the room when Rubio gave his speech, but I was in the wings, if you will, and listened to that speech. I think apart from the genuine attraction it had for some of the members of the audience the general feeling was one of relief, the idea that it could have been worse given the experience of last year’s JD Vance speech and also given the experience of all that had happened since then.

I think partly it was relief, that maybe we were better off than we feared we would be, and part might also have been an attraction, but I think it is too early to reach a verdict here because as I said before and as we have now discussed several times it is such a long-term thing. If you think of soft power resting on different sources—Joe Nye spoke about foreign policy, values, and culture; I would argue that today you could strike out the word “foreign;” it is policies, because we have a chance to be informed about policies internally in countries in basically every corner of the world. So your policies, what you do both at home and abroad, your values, and culture have the ability to create soft power. Let’s put it this way.

I also argue in some of my works that we also should include personalities as perhaps a fourth resource that have their own soft power, specifically charismatic individuals. This notion of charisma is very much in line with some of the soft-power vocabulary or literature. It is a very interesting concept, I think.

KEVIN MALONEY: This goes to some of the data on trust in terms of individuals versus institutions versus states now, and this is a huge question for us now at Carnegie Council.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I absolutely agree, but the thing that I wanted to get to is that those four sources or resources of soft power operate on different time schedules. Policies are short-lived, especially today. We talked about that. There are policy changes basically every day not just here but everywhere. You can see things going back and forth, and you open your phone, and, “Okay, what happened now?” Some of the most longstanding, almost sacrosanct, conventions are thrown out overnight. This is changing rapidly.

Values and culture are much more durable, I think. In my latest book, which is on U.S. soft power toward Germany, over almost five centuries of transatlantic interactions you can see those forces at play, from the very naming of America, from the very idea of having this new world somewhere that you want to get to or “discover,” if you want to call it that, to where we are today, you can see those different forces at play, but they work on different levels.

Sometimes I conceptualize it as a cross-section of an ocean. There are some that are very deeply embedded into the sea bed and others that are happening on the waves, and there are lots of fluctuations. This specifically holds true for the personalities, who come and go. There are elections, and there are new politicians coming in, and these factors you can also detect if you think about some of the polls that institutions like Pew and others have been doing for many years. You can see those spiking and going back and forth, whereas the cultural attraction or the values-based attraction is much more durable.

I think this is also something we are seeing today sort of on steroids. It is accelerated today, also through communication and technology, and charismatic individuals can do a lot for a nation’s soft power or an actor’s soft power, but at the same time, what happens if they are gone?

Charismatic individuals usually appear in times of crisis. You do not look for a messiah when everything is going well; you look for a messiah at least when there is some perception of crisis. But what if the crisis ends, or there is another one? What happens if they lose their attraction or fail to deliver on their promises? Then this sort of soft power can spike, but it can plummet again very quickly. This is something I have observed studying transatlantic relations, more specifically German-American relations, from a soft-power perspective. The values and culture are much more longstanding than the politics or policies and especially the personalities.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think one of the big themes of the conversation you and I are having today is the durability and long-term ability of values and culture versus hard power and the legitimacy equation that is required for international influence really being hard power plus soft power.

I had an interview with Matias Spektor, who is the dean of the International Relations School at FGV in Brazil, and a lot of what we talked about was the dynamic in terms of having at least values that people strove toward in the international system and the consequences of having no hypocrisy in the future. At least there was hypocrisy, and from a normative perspective that signaled something, even if they were constantly being broken and tossed aside.

We talked about this dynamic in a world where values are basically put completely to the side. Hypocrisy is inherently bad, but it is also useful politically and useful in terms of moving societies or moving states in a direction that you might think of as more positively liberal or aligned with universality. Amartya Sen talks about this a lot from a human security condition, especially from a net benefit over a certain amount of time. Is it important to have that north star even if we trip and fall as we attempt to chase it?

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I could not agree more. Actually, this brings us back to the very beginning of our conversation and to the core value system that we talked about and whether you can achieve or attain that. I think there is a difference between knowing the limitations and striving for this ever closer, more perfect union or more perfect way of doing things, and the idea of just abandoning it outright. We are full-circle now.

If you think about some of those values or virtues that we talked about, things like justice, prudence, moderation, or courage, these are the ones that we also need in international relations. It is exactly the same, especially things like moderation.

There is this tendency if you are a big power, whether it is Rome that we talked about, the British Empire, or the United States in the 20th or maybe the early 21st century, if you do have a lot of hard power, it is very easy to be tempted to use it. If you have the big hammer, all the problems look like nails. It is very understandable.

At the same time, we have had instances of politicians, across party lines, by the way, who argue for modesty and for restraint. I think of President George Herbert Walker Bush after the end of the Cold War, when he said: “This is not the time for triumphalism. I do not want to dance on the Berlin Wall. We are a gentle power. We restrain ourselves.”

We have the same with the founding of the United Nations and President Harry Truman saying almost the same things, so this is something that is deeply ingrained in the political DNA of this country, and I think we have to take into account the long-term benefits. You can bully or buy others, you can force others to do something, but if you want to be successful in the long run and perhaps also if you want to be successful beyond your own borders, then you better also take those things into account. I think this is something we can learn.

Speaking of historical perspectives, the United States is celebrating birthday 250 this year in July, and if you read the Declaration of Independence, there is a famous passage in there that says, “With a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Of course, all those values are in there, but specifically interesting I think is also the “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The idea is that if the country wants to be independent, they should declare the causes which impelled them to that independence.

Keeping the opinions of mankind in mind I think is very important, and it is even more important today than it was 250 years ago, when we had less communication and fewer democracies. Today sometimes I have the feeling that the opinions of mankind are not only disregarded but that they are openly being worked against in some parts of the world. You have a sense that there is not virtue signaling, as I recently read somewhere, I think in The Atlantic, but actually vice signaling, so you make a virtue out of being perceived in a bad way. You stop worrying and enjoy having a bad reputation.

I think this is something that is very short-term and which can get you where you want to be on a short-term basis some of the time but certainly not in the long run. Even the most powerful actors in the world need allies to tackle some of the problems we are facing, and you cannot have allies without regarding, at least to a certain degree, their opinions as well.

KEVIN MALONEY: I am glad we came full-circle on that. There are definitely two frameworks to take away from this conversation for the audience, and that is more short-term soft power that has maybe a smaller, elite, transactional audience, and then there is the applied ethics and human nature approach to values and universality, and these things find their ways into people’s hearts and homes with very little effort because they are inherently attractive to them.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Absolutely, and they work across time. I think this is something else that those classics we mentioned in the beginning still speak to us today. They speak to us through two-and-a-half millennia of history. They speak to us across boundaries and across countries. Those ideas originated in a totally different setting from where we are, but they still speak to us as individuals and as humans. I think this is a very powerful message that we can take from those classics.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this is a great point to end on. Hendrik, thank you so much for coming back to Carnegie Council.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Thank you. It is always a pleasure to be here.