Why America’s global appeal is in decline

The three pillars of US soft power are crumbling In May 2025, Joseph Nye, the American political scientist and Harvard professor who coined the term ‘soft power’, died. For more than three decades, his concept shaped how governments, journalists, scholars, and diplomats thought about influence. Nye insisted that countries could get what they wanted not only through coercion or payment, but through attraction, in culture, political ideals and policies seen as legitimate by others. A year after Nye’s death, against the backdrop of Washington’s military campaign against Iran, it became clear that American soft power had entered a state of clinical death. It outlived the creator of the concept by only a short time. Nye always insisted that soft power was a scientific concept, but, in reality, it was never especially precise. Its definition shifted across his work, and the term itself was elastic enough to be used by almost anyone for almost any purpose. Yet that vagueness helped make it popular as governments across the world seized on the idea that national image and values could become instruments of foreign policy. The EU embraced it, while China studied it and Russia debated it extensively. Books, articles and conferences appeared everywhere, often urging national governments to learn from the American example. In the US, soft power reached its peak under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These Democratic administrations believed in a values-based foreign policy and in extending American economic and political leadership across the world and they needed tools that could shape the desires of other countries rather than merely force their compliance. The concept fit the post-Cold War moment perfectly as America presented itself not only as the victor of a geopolitical struggle, but as the natural model for the rest of humanity. Democracy, human rights, and the free market were promoted as universal standards. The American interpretation was treated as the global benchmark.

Read more The West is losing the diplomacy war and ASEAN is quietly winning it Under Clinton, democracy promotion became a central aim of US diplomacy. Under Obama, the appeal of American values was declared to be the foundation of American leadership. Hillary Clinton’s ‘smart power’ was an attempt to combine Nye’s soft power with the more traditional instruments of military and economic pressure, but in practice the combination never truly matured. The rhetoric was sophisticated, yet the policy remained dominated by coercive tools. The decline began before Donald Trump. Sanctions had already become a routine mechanism of US policy and Russia experienced this directly under the Biden administration. But Trump stripped away the old language as he made it clear that he is interested in hard power, war, blackmail, tariffs, sanctions, and pressure. Values-based diplomacy was replaced by ‘America First’ and the image of the US no longer rested on attraction, but on force. This didn’t create the crisis of American soft power by itself; it exposed it. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has moved from being an ideological leader for much of the world to a country increasingly associated with threats to sovereignty and identity. The aggressive policies of Western neoliberal elites over the past three decades produced a growing refusal, even among some allies, to accept the imposed global standard without question. In other words, the three pillars of American soft power have all eroded. Read more Trump’s Iran truce marks a defeat for American power The first is culture. American mass culture remains powerful as Hollywood, music, digital platforms, and consumer brands still have enormous reach, but Americanization has reached its limits. In many countries, the loss of cultural roots in favor of Western mass culture has come to be seen