Donald Trump doesn’t understand soft power, but folds to hard men Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping

Loading

The land of hope and glory? Britain was left hoping while Trump took the glory. Rather than a demonstration of soft power, it seemed an illustration of its limits. The creator of the phrase, Harvard scholar Joe Nye, years ago explained: “Power is one’s ability to affect the behaviour of others to get what one wants. There are three basic ways to do this – coercion, payment and attraction. Hard power is the use of coercion and payment. Soft power is the ability to attain preferred outcomes through attraction.

“If a state can set the agenda for others or shape their preferences, it can save a lot on carrots and sticks. But rarely can it totally replace either. Thus the need for smart strategies that combine the tools of both hard and soft power.” He dubbed this “smart power”.

A bit of sycophancy can take the edge off an encounter with Trump. But soft power doesn’t interest him. He believes in hard power only – tariffs and threats and private pay-off.

He’s busily destroying the soft power that America had built over eight post-war decades through its (mostly) benign hegemony, its rebuilding of vanquished Japan and Germany, its Marshall Plan, its cultural power, popular brands, leading universities, its creation of public goods such as the World Bank and the UN, its image of cool modernity.

That’s all lost or under threat. Soft power doesn’t work on Trump, so he doesn’t grasp how it might work on others. Reduced to wielding hard power only, Trump has no chance of exercising “smart power”. In a coincidence of irresistible symbolism, Joe Nye died this year.

The US president may not have been swayed by a close ally’s best efforts at soft power, but he is deferential to the hard power of America’s traditional enemies.

Even as Trump was ceremonially paraded to Windsor Castle in a gilded horse-drawn carriage, Vladimir Putin was unleashing all hell in Ukraine and intensifying his intrusions into the airspace of his European neighbours.

In the past 10 days, Russian drones and fighter jets have violated the airspace of Poland, Romania and Estonia, all NATO countries. In a fourth event, German and Swedish fighter jets scrambled to monitor a Russian military surveillance plane over the Baltic Sea flying “dark”, transponders switched off and no flight plan lodged.

“Russia’s recklessness in the air, along our eastern flank, is increasing in frequency,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said. At the same time, Moscow has been unleashing some of the biggest one-day fusillades of its invasion of Ukraine.

Loading

The Bloomberg news service reported that Putin has concluded that he can escalate with impunity. It cited unnamed Kremlin sources as saying that after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska last month, the Russian leader decided that Trump is unlikely to “do much”.

So far, his bet is paying off handsomely. Trump has not lifted a finger against Putin. Indeed, he exempted Russia from tariffs even as he launched them against every US ally on the planet. Putin boasted in Alaska that Russian trade with the US was growing under Trump.

In the same week, Trump announced that he’d reached a deal with China’s Xi Jinping over the future of TikTok’s business in the US. The US Congress last year legislated that the Chinese owner, ByteDance, must divest it to prevent Beijing exercising control over its content. Trump endorsed the law at the time.

The news headline is that a consortium of US investors including Rupert Murdoch will buy the US business while ByteDance retains its ownership elsewhere. Mission accomplished, no?

No. The fine print exposes the true outcome. The American owners get the profits, but the Chinese creator gets to keep ownership and control of the algorithm, the “brain” that decides what US users see, and how and when they will see it.

The FT quotes a US adviser close to the deal as saying: “It’s the ultimate TACO trade. After all this, China keeps the algorithm.” TACO is the acronym for “Trump always chickens out”. But only in the face of America’s enemies. It’s America’s allies who have most to lose.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.