U.S. soft power took decades to build. Trump is dismantling it in weeks.

[cigaretteman]

Political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to denote “the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than just coercion and payment.” Long before this capability had a name, it was a key part of America’s power projection: Soft power helps to explain why the United States has military bases in at least 80 countries, why the dollar has become the international reserve currency, and why English has become the global language of business and diplomacy.


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China and Russia are also powerful militarily, and China is an economic superpower, but they don’t exercise anywhere close to the global influence that the United States does. That’s because the United States has been a uniquely beneficent superpower. America has committed its share of crimes and blunders, to be sure, but it also has a long history of altruism (think of the Marshall Plan or PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The United States has also long stood as a beacon of hope to millions “yearning to breathe free,” and it has generally supported international norms and institutions that, to some extent, constrain its own power.
While America’s soft power took decades to accumulate, President Donald Trump appears determined to destroy it in a matter of weeks. Witness the trade war he launched this past weekend with Canada and Mexico (before pausing the tariffs for a month on Monday), the freeze he just imposed on U.S. foreign aid programs and the heartless decision he just reached that could send hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees back to the Marxist dictatorship they fled. Each of these moves amounts to another nail in the coffin of U.S. soft power.


Start with what the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board rightly calls “the dumbest trade war in history.” Trump announced he is imposing 10 percent tariffs on China, the United States’ chief competitor, and 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Why? His explanations are nonsensical. He claims that Mexico and Canada aren’t doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants into the United States while also complaining about U.S. trade deficits with those countries.
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Yet U.S. trade with Mexico and Canada — which in 2022 totaled more than $1.7 trillion — is mutually beneficial. The automobile industry is so integrated across the three countries that Trump’s tariffs, if implemented, will almost certainly cause massive disruption to U.S. automakers. As for the claim that Mexico and Canada aren’t doing enough to stop the flow of migrants and drugs, they appear to be doing their level best. But there are limits on their ability to control their own borders, just as there are limits on the ability of the U.S. government to stop the illegal export of guns to both countries. (“In 2023,” the BBC reports, “90% of handguns recovered after violent crimes in Ontario — Canada’s most populous province — were traced back to the US.”)
Canada is particularly blameless: In fiscal 2024, the U.S.-Canada border accounted for less than 1 percent of all fentanyl seizures and 1.5 percent of all apprehensions of undocumented immigrants at U.S. borders. On Monday, Trump said he was delaying the tariffs for a month while both Canada and Mexico beef up border security, even though in Canada’s case there was no problem with border security to begin with.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/03/donald-trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-soft-power/

 

[cigaretteman]

No wonder that Canadians “are a little perplexed,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday, “as to why our closest friends and neighbors are choosing to target us.” This, after all, is a country that sent its soldiers to fight alongside U.S. troops from the beaches of D-Day in Europe to the villages of Kandahar in Afghanistan. Canadian TV anchor Adrienne Arsenault says the “whole country” is receiving “a lesson in heartache.” Ordinary Canadian sports fans showed their feelings by booing the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at NBA and NHL games over the weekend.
By freezing most U.S. foreign aid for 90 days and moving to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, Trump is alienating many more people around the world who have come to rely on U.S. help to survive diseases such as AIDS and malaria, to get access to clean water or to stave off malnutrition. Far from being an “evil” and “criminal organization” that deserves “to die” — as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bizarrely labeled it on Sunday — USAID has been a vital component of America’s soft power. No doubt some aid programs are wasteful and in need of reform, but there is no excuse for this kind of blunderbuss assault on all foreign assistance.
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio granted an exemption from the aid freeze for lifesaving humanitarian work, outside aid groups say that USAID’s payment system has been dismantled and that “medicines are still sitting on shelves without nurses to distribute.” Whether this is malevolence or incompetence doesn’t matter; the result is the same.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/24/georgia-elections-ivanishvili-russia-autocracy/

In Uganda, the New York Times reports, insecticides aren’t being sprayed and bed nets aren’t being distributed to combat malaria. In Zambia, drugs that can stop hemorrhages in pregnant women are not being distributed. And all over South Asia, Africa and Latin America, thousands of people enrolled in clinical trials are no longer getting access to treatment. As researchers and program managers talked about the results of the U.S. aid freeze with a Times reporter, many of them “broke down in tears as they described the rapid destruction of decades of work.”
And for what purpose? To save 1 percent of the federal budget?
No doubt the Venezuelan refugees who will now be forcibly repatriated to their destitute and repressive homeland will also shed more than a few tears. Rubio himself, while still a U.S. senator, said in a 2022 letter that deporting Venezuelans would be a “death sentence.” And Trump, in his first term, had offered Venezuelans a reprieve from deportation because of what he described as the “catastrophic” situation in their country.


But whatever restraints guided Trump in his first term are rapidly being shed in his second. So, now, the Department of Homeland Security is revoking temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelan refugees in the United States, thereby placing them at risk of deportation. This is a betrayal of America’s identity as a nation that offers a haven for refugees — including my own family when we fled the Soviet Union in 1976.
It is staggering to see how much damage Trump has done to U.S. soft power in just two weeks and painful to imagine how much more he could do in the next 206 weeks. Whatever minor concessions Trump might be able to extort from U.S. allies such as Mexico or Canada with his heavy-handed demands are not worth the damage to America’s long-term relationships with those countries.
The major beneficiary is likely to be China, which, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) warns on X, “will fill the void” caused by the end of U.S. aid programs. Now that Trump is capriciously imposing tariffs on U.S. allies, China, notwithstanding its bullying behavior, will also become a more attractive trade partner and counterweight to U.S. power for many nations around the world. Far from making America great again, this erosion of soft power will undermine the United States’ economic and national security for years to come.