.webp?h=11)
The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.
Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.
These include the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO, and numerous philanthropic NGOs like (as has been in the news recently) USAID.
The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance. The British learned this and used prototypical methods of institutionalization in the declining years of their empire, but their American successors perfected it.
(If you don't understand how this works, I will link a post in the replies explaining how one example works - NATO)
The more sophisticated rivals of the US obviously know what's up, so they try to oppose or circumvent these institutions, but obviously the institutions are backed by hard power in the end. It sounds fair enough to say "if you don't abide by the 'rules,' we will invade you." It works well enough because it it sounds more fair to say that than "if you don't do what we tell you, we will invade you." Rival governments aren't fooled, but a lot of their ordinary citizens are, and combined with media dominance and control of the reserve currency (economic dominance), it's enough to keep everyone in line.
An unanticipated problem seems to have arisen:
It turns out that if you hide the levers of power, your own successors may have trouble understanding them. Especially if you failed to educate them, or let various cultural forces undermine the indoctrination of your elites.
With that happening, once the new generation of elites gains power, they don't recognize that the complicated weird control panel you built that doesn't seem to do anything but costs $10 billion a year to maintain is actually how you're controlling everything around the world and they take it down to save money. All because you did too good a job hiding the levers of power.
Soft power isn't "soft." It's real power. It's just soft because it's hidden.
I don't know how to solve this problem because I think hidden levers of power are definitely better, but you have to train a priesthood generation after generation to understand them, and that kind of thing corrupts itself too. Open power is much more honest, but no one likes it and it's hard to hold on to.
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Good find. That's a really good explanation.
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Go back to your groomercord server
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Go back to your parrot cage.
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But quad isn't in you're groomercord server?
@Grue stand with israel
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Downmarsey'd for stealth pinging me.
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Go to bed,
@Grue!!! 
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NATO is a military alliance. That isn't soft power. It's a credible threat of hard power. If that's their good example, then they're not making a good argument.
He tossed in NGOs and non-profits subsidized by USAID, but how much soft power is that? And is it 'good' power on net when the US is subsidizing LGBT+ nonsense in developing countries? Do the locals really like the US for that?? Regarding other programs, are they actually grateful? People get used to subsidies and feel entitled to more. In a way, you can call that soft power because they're addicted to it, which makes the threat of pulling it away effective. But, how often has that been exercised? I'd imagine US liberals would be furious if such a tactic would be used (so it epuldnt get used, thus doesn't constitute as soft power. It's simply a pointless subsidy for some political crony).
You know what also creates soft power? American cinema. It creates a positive association with the USA. I'd imagine American movies have made a more positive impact on the world's mind than all the subsidies into non-profits and NGOs combined.
May as well call it imaginary or non-existent.
Geopolitics is rife with this kind of hand-waving about how important X is because they don't really bother evaluating the impact of X. At least tell a good story (not NATO, the military alliance). An easy way would be comparing USAID costs from 45-55 and see if it even gels with the claim in his first paragraph. I bet it was much smaller than today (because he's overstating its importance).
One example was from a guy here. USAID was subsidizing some American (and probably also foreign) software developers to make an app that gave predictions on the weather for ideal crop cycles in Africa. I asked him how many people actually used it. No response. It's similar to the story about giving them mosquito nets to reduce malaria, but the locals use them for fishing nets because food is much more important to them. It's the same old knowledge problem of central planning (they don't understand the demand, they have no prices to look at in order to more efficiently allocate resources or even be able to evaluate the value of their own crap).
!chuds !nonchuds, "muh soft power" is still a crappy argument.
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I dunno. I think giant USAid food bags, tents, medical care and HIV drugs are pretty effective. I don't even care about those from a power perspective, we should do those because being a rich and powerful nation it's the right thing to do.
I wouldn't have cared if the train shit went away or they took the axe to many of the grant programs but the emergency aid, medicine & shelter programs and the HIV programs it was profoundly evil to just stop. I would have disagreed with eliminating them at all but they could have transitioned over a year so other countries could have taken over the burden.
The HIV drugs are going to be a particular issue as there isn't a clear legal path for another country to make most of them.
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Yeah, it's nice. Not sure about the food when it competes against the prices of local farmers. Then there's unintended consequence of that country's institutional failure. Why fix shit if some other country will bail you out?
Other than that, meds are nice. Not sure what % that is of USAID (should be 100%, but there's too many hands in the pie which is why we get counter-productive programs like LGBT+ nonsense). Much of it needed to be gutted.
From what I recall, the HIV programs were reinstated or not cut to begun with.
For really poor countries, you're right--with that one caveat about food.
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Most food aid is used specifically for emergencies, there are agriculture programs (now mostly cut) for simply insecurity. Exceptions are mostly around infant and children nutrition programs as malnutrition is significantly more of an issue <12.
HIV drugs USAid paid pharma cost (no IP because of TRIPS) to run excess capacity on their lines and send the drugs to low-income countries. Usually drugs were distributed by the country itself, if they don't have a functioning healthcare system then usually UN or WHO did it.
Train shit was a tiny portion of the total. The claims of it being a giant grift machine don't have any evidence. I'm predisposed to believing grift claims as they are so common but the MAGAs just made up a bunch of nonsense to have an excuse to cut everything illegally.
A not r-slurred approach would have been to attach efficacy requirements to forward funding.
They have mostly been cut. Most of the US response was via PEPFAR which itself just expired and had it's USAid drugs funding zeroed and the NIH diversion programs zeroed.
NIH were also primary sponsor of the clinical trial network used to ensure new HIV & AIDS drugs are able to be efficacy tested and that got cut.
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Much of the world would be in food emergencies if they had shitty institutions and shitty governments. Again, if you keep subsidizing it, you'll only get more of it. There's no conditions or goals attached with these subsidies, so it's counter-productive in the long-run. But hey, as long as it makes you feel good in the short-run, keep doing it (with other people's money). The people getting paid to run these programs are looking forward to a good retirement without solving any underlying issues.
It's only one part of this crap, and negativity toward USAID predated MAGA. How young are you?
And they all would have claimed to be doing great. There's no equivalent to measuring profit as in the world of markets. This is central planning nonsense, just like with non-profits where they ascribe their own values for their projects and magically conclude that all of them are necessary.
You have never dealt with these people. You have no idea what you're talking about. This is not some altruistic system where the people involved will magically phase themselves out if their program is not beneficial on net. They won't even bother with trying to determine that because none of them even know how to go about calculating it.
You are naive.
!chuds !anticommunists, look at this stupendous r-slur.
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Almost all of the countries that have gotten US food aid in the past have phased it out long ago, dumbfrick. The main recipient used to be India, where it fed a huge part of the population, and they're net food exporters now.
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They're doing good only because of shifting to a more market-based economy. Subsidizing them during their commie days only prolonged it.
!anticommunists, look at this fool.
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I'm sure our local pajeets (btw did I mention that I'm an extremely racist butthole?) can explain better, but I think it was more a matter of getting electricity out to rural areas for stuff like irrigation pumps. This happened back when they were still run by socialist tards from the Congress Party.
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Making a beachhead for liberal social values increases the effectiveness of cultural exports and makes it harder for competing powers too muscle in
But sure hand the BIPOCs over too the Confucian Institute
@Grue stand with israel
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No, Grue. We don't need government-imposed beachheads. We need Total Cultural Domination through the power of the !freemarket.
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Levers of power is kinda the key thing, though. Rs may fail to understand the value of the levers, but Ds fail to understand that a lever needs to be mobile to be useful.
You're not in a position of power with your hands on a valve locked open. "Money always flowing all the time, always" isn't soft power.
Parents that give their kid no allowance (Rs) and parents that give their kid an unconditional allowance (Ds) are actually similar in effect. Soft power is being the parents who give their kid an allowance conditioned on standards.
!neocon !neolibs
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
The most effective weapon is the one you never have to fire.
Trump has pulled all the levers and broken half of them. America's allies will not trust it for a generation or more.
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I'm not defending Trump. I'm saying that Dem-style unconditional aid doesn't produce soft power. Unconditional denial of aid -- what DOGE seems to be pushing -- also undermines soft power.
Power is the ability to make good things happen to people who please you and bad things happen to people who don't -- or to maintain a credible threat of doing so (fleet in being).
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I think if you look for about 5 minutes you'll find numerous examples of the WTO and the World Bank, etc. flexing their power to make nations fall in line. It's not as crude as "we threaten to take away money", but bailouts, development loans, international aid almost always come with plenty of strings attached.
!neolibs
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I agree that those organizations effectively flex power. They're also (1) not USAID and (2) hated almost universally by the US left wing.
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It's all part of the same system. Some parts are designed to convince the world that America & friends are benevolent/neutral, others are designed to quietly coerce compliance, still others are there to provide the credible threat of violence. But it's all one edifice: "the rules-based international order"
If the chuds are going to cop to being just as stupid and blinkered as the tankies, then I can't argue with that.
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Don't forget the IMF!
Most important part of the United Nations
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WB and, the better example, the IMF have "forced" countries to adopt better economic policies (excluding their failures to do so), but like
@syscoshill was saying, if the loan payments are forgiven or simply not paid and if there's no serious consequence, then it undermines that kind of soft power.
What a smarty!
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all aid is warfare it's agaisnt the elite and the population. starving people can't think and fat rulers cant hide. aid props up regimes while threating them both monetary and intellectually as the impoverished wake up. enough aid and the regimes can recruit those who achieve, too little and you end up on a sharp sword.
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Try and keep up: The whole thesis of this post is that soft power is backed by the implicit threat of hard power. There is no hard/soft distinction, there is only hidden power used with discretion or naked power wielded haphazardly.
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Soft power is not hard power in disguise and it never has been
It is everything that attracts or persuades someone to voluntarily like something or even everything about your system, ethics, or ideas. There is no threat there is just "wow that sounds better than what I have..."
If people want to immigrate to your country because they think it looks cool on TV shows (from your country) and they won't get arrested for criticizing the government like they do in their home country, that is soft power
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Sorry chuds have told me that soft power is fake and straight, so that doesn't count.
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That kind of soft (cultural) power exists, but it doesn't require subsidies and non-profits since the market already provides it through music, film, and literature.
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It kind of is. It is ephemeral anyway. Being an object of envy is not something you can manufacture although you can advertise if you have it in the current political moment.
As an example the USSR tried to manufacture soft power with potemkin villages and duped some gullible westerners and diehard commies but ultimately it hurt their credibility because it was fake and straight.
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Pls add me to neocons, I love drones.
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Just request to join, bb.
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This.
There is no point in arguing about soft power if you fold every time after your threat, and there is no power at all if you just completely pull out and act unpredictable.
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"Listen chud, the only way the USA can maintain its power is if we send billions of dollars around the world to pay for things like transgender clinics in India. And if my family happens to get enriched along the way that's just happenstance."
Well I'm convinced.
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Too bad chuds couldn't pick a hatchetman with common sense who could distinguish the grift from useful programs and instead chose a botched peepeelet with daddy issues.
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No one can distinguish grift from useful programs in US government aid, its purposefully structured that way. This previously thwarted any reform attempts because past presidents were too kitty to have the bad optics of cutting good programs. Trump 2.0 just DGAF and is employing elon as a headsman, not a hatchetman. Cut it all, rebuild from acratch. Getting what i voted for, smooches beautiful!
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do magats repeat this lie out loud because they are annoyed by the implicit understanding that they were lied to
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No, i repeat it because it drives shitlibs absolutely bonkers. It's just another version of YesChad.
You think USAID is some sort of global force for good or whatever virtue signalling gobbledygook.
I know USAID is a CIA front explicitly designed to do the dirty work CIA can no longer do after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s.
We are not the same.
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the CIA is good and you're a bad person
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Begone Glowneighbor!
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Only as much as soystrags repeating the lie about vote regret because the alternative was just oh so much better
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You can't rebuild it, you idiot. That's the point: you only get one shot at burning 75 years' worth of trust and then it's done.
Why would any other nation ever rely on America's word again?
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I'm really not convinced we had 75 years of trust built up anywhere in the present day tbh bb. People have taken issue with US hegemony far too much for that to be the case. Not to mention various actions we took in South America during the cold war, or more direct conflicts like the Vietnam War where our role was basically trying to prop up a very corrupt and very hated "pro-US" government in South Vietnam.
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Americans still have this obsolete view that South Americans hate them because le dictatorships whereas just a few years ago polls consistently showed a favorable opinion of the US among the populations of most Latin American countries. I would argue that yes, most of the governments and the public in LATAM have a positive view and trust in the US, but since Trump took over guys are seen as an unreliable partner.
Heck, even Vietnam has a positive view of the US, money simply speaks louder that some event from decades ago, but as with LATAM if there's more convenience in making deals with China then their governments will push for them.
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Jewish Lives Matter Less Than Palestinian Lives
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wow you're actually fricking r-slurred
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Not anywhere?
I was in Poland toward the end of the Obama years and they fricking loved America. Britain, France, Germany, Japan - there's many many places that trusted America, sometimes more than their own governments... the Philippines, Korea?
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I was in Europe right before the 2024 election, and almost everyone was excited about Trump winning. They looked at Biden as feeble and directionless while Kamala was completely clueless.
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Oh noes! How will all the eurocrats propped up by by "definitely not CIA propaganda" USAID ever trust America again? Lolololol buncha whiny sugar babies getting cut off and sperging out.
There is no trust in international relations, only interests. Other nations will rely on America when it is profitable to do so, just like they always have.
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White extinction is long overdue because the burgertard forgets Canada even exists
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Of course i havent forgotten about my hat. But letting articles of clothing set policy is just silly.
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Wow, women suck at reading.
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Because the US has a military that can force them to do what it wants, and because no country in the world has a choice but to cooperate with the biggest economy in the world. Just its oil industry is necessary for the world to function, let alone its minerals and electronics.
I hate the US as much as any other Serb, but to pretend that the world isn't dependent on the Muttland just by the virtue of its existence is only something that a fearmongering libtard would suggest.
The US can break its word a hundred times, and the rest of the world would still have no choice but to cooperate with them.
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Again, this is only true in the short term. In 20 or 30 years China may be a credible alternative hegemon, or more fancifully the EU (lol).
Look at how quickly the British Empire crumbled to nothing in the wake of the Suez Crisis. It's too early to say, but this might be the beginning of the end of America as the irreplaceable nation.
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I dawned on me the other day that if you told somebody in 1966 the Soviet Union only had 25 years left, they'd laugh in your face
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Britain lost its hegemony because its power lay in its colonies, and not in its native land. The US has its territory in one place, not counting the unincorporated territories, which don't really produce all that much of the United States' income. No one would be dumb enough to risk a nuclear war with the US to invade its territory.
Maybe the loss of the Panama Canal would pose a threat to the United States, but the US always protected the canal through hard power, and I can't imagine that will change.
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You're ignoring yishans point that the apparatus was doomed to fail because nobody was taught how to understand and maintain it, Ds included. If R's are tearing it down because they only understand hard power then D's are letting it rot because they don't understand soft power must still curb advantage for America and not be kumbaya egalitarian strag shit.
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America (and Europe for that matter) should be pushing every birth-rate-lowering social norm as hard as possible in India.
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we need to be airdropping manga on the streets of Bombay smh
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they already did? forced sterilization in india was encouraged by sweden and the world bank as an initial experiment with TFR and controlling populations. the world bank / euros took the wrong lesson as Indians birth rate did not fall till recently. easy google been going on since the 70s
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I'd become an ultra UN fan if it starts a global project to build a wall around india even closing off the sea.
This alone will immediately reduce ocean pollution rates by 90%
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This is entirely true btw
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Soft power is a real thing but some of the nonchuds of this site think anything America does was soft power. Not funding drag shows in Ecuador was a terrible blow to our global influence, or something
But people across the world use shit like that to prove how "corrupting" we are. There's a million trillion thirdie social media posts — especially popular in the Chinese part of TikTok, for example — going off about America pushing alphabet whatnot on other countries. The same kinds of people who were already frustrated by baseball and Hollywood definitely don't appreciate the outright enforcement of
values.
What America was doing is better called proselytizing. True believers in our government were spending our soft power because they believed converting people was more important.
When Spain and Portugal got kicked out of Japan because they Jesuit missionar-ied too hard, but the Japanese remained willing to trade with the Dutch because they felt Protestant countries didn't try as hard to force western values on them,
Well let's just say that the Iberians could have preserved their soft power if they didn't try to use it as a toehold for proselytizing :marseyanalogy:
!chuds discuss
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!sd marsey analogy
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Wtf this isn't my account
@Aevann
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yes it is
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Marsey analogyJump in the discussion.
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The soft power was generated because there was an implied threat that the money could be turned off. Once this soft power morphed into basically a welfare system for the elites the other countries/entities correctly assessed that they would keep getting the money regardless of their actions (within reason).
A glaring example was WHO. US was contributing like 90% of their budget, but their members would disconnect from a livestream if someone mentioned Taiwan.
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That got me to pretty much swear off WHO. How is it right that we give more deference to the culprit that hid the pandemic from us for months?
I am biased on this one, of course, which makes this even darning to me.
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Yishan is an insufferable faggot and even when he's right I disagree with him on principle.Jump in the discussion.
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No elon musk understands how these structures work
It's just that the structures were being used against him
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And trump.
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!tldr
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TL;DR: US Empire's Secret Sauce Explained (Sorta)
"US basically hid all its power behind a bunch of fancy orgs & institutions, so no one knows what's really going on ( except us). Problem is, now the next gen doesn't know how to keep it working, and they're like "can we just cut 90% of that budget?" Genius plan, right? Soft power ain't soft, it's just... hard to understand, apparently. Can't win 'em all."
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Sending people money obviously influences them until the dems want to talk about "the science" that they throw money at year after year and that always agrees with them.
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Soft power enjoyers be like
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That's the thing, this "soft power" only really benefited the single party of the USA and now that Trump was elected it had to go. The carrot was taken away, now there's only a stick.
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Yeah pretty much. But maybe the instruments actually are corrupt already? China runs WHO, shit like that.
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Reddit has been losing its soft power for a while
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The US soft power led to the rise of Al Qaeda due to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the rise of ISIS due to the Arab Spring, and the rise of the Taliban due to the fall of the Soviet Afghan government.
Maybe it should be called "US jihadist power" instead?
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Right, sorry, both the US hard power and the US soft power suck equally.
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fax
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Some chick made fun of his non existent bulge and decided to write out an essay on US foreign policy.
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Trvkular Energy
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If you tell people your vote it won't come true
Snapshots:
https://x.com/yishan/status/1906592890845028405:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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This is the start of a solid argument against Trumpism, but ultimately fails.
For one, he is not explicit enough. How exactly does USAID promote American dominance? USAID is unironically most famous for funding Drag Queen dances and free condoms in 3rd world nations. Are these cultural exports actually a Psyop to demoralize America's enemies?
If so, say it outright don't beat around the bush.
The problem is all this "soft power" looks like you're applying it the same to foreign enemies and your own domestic population alike. If so, what does that say about how the elites view their citizens?
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