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…
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