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1/ We got 50,000 articles about how weak and impotent soft power has proven in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the "1st army in the world" can't bend Iran to its will and the (self-proclaimed) "2nd army in the world" is over a thousand days into its 3 day special military operation.

2/ The Trump administration's complete neglect of soft power meant that when it turned around to NATO for help getting out of its self-created quagmire, not even the UK turned up. Meanwhile Zelenskyy charmed, memed and right-side-of-historied billions in aid that kept Ukraine in the fight.

3/ Obviously hard power is important - you need weapons if you're going to arm an ally, and if you don't have them you end up like the EU, signing an unbalanced trade treaty just to keep them flowing. But no one has ever said "hard power is irrelevant" whereas soft power is denegrated constantly.

5/ In real world international relations you constantly need other countries to do things for you that are important but not so critical that you'll bomb their cities or blockade their ports to get it. It's a big, complicated planet! You need people's cooperation and soft-power helps you get it.

6/ The extent to which other countries will do things for you depends in part on: a) How much do they like you? b) How much do they trust you not to fuck them? c) Will being seen to work with you play will in their domestic press? That's soft-power baby.

7/ Obviously there are limits to soft-power and hard-power is important too, but the reason I wang on about this is no one has ever argued that whereas people seem to implicitly or directly make the opposite argument all the time!

Just need to look at Brexit, May tried to maintain all three, Farage and Johnson explicitly set out to undermine all three and look where it got us.

watching the US of all people do this is bizarre, but then I've also spent most my life face palming as successive UK governments have denigrated, defunded and abused every single thing the country does well, allows it to punch well above its weight and be thought of fondly by people around the