soft power

It's a pragmatic approach to using his royal soft power to draw in people who have the resources to help generate change.

For decades, American administrations run by both parties saw humanitarian diplomacy, or “soft power,” as a cost-effective measure to help stabilize volatile but strategically important regions and provide basic needs for people who might otherwise turn to international adversaries.

And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it’s much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed “soft power.”

He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,” that “might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.”

In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid.