Time was—in the 1960s and 1970s—when the world was ostensibly a socially gentler, less structured geopolitical space, where soft power was a welcoming, well-arranged library in a tony part of the central business district, a quiet postal delivery to home, or in raucous cinemas. It exercised itself in American libraries, in Soviet magazines and books with stunning production values, in rakish Indian cinema of a certain universal emotionality, in the ‘Cool Japan’ (or kuru Japan) wave that followed the successful spread of ‘Cool Britannia’ that was a consequence of the Swinging Sixties.
And then, Harvard’s Joseph Nye invented the phrase ‘co-optive or soft power’ in 1990—a year before the Cold War ended and a quarter-century after soft power had already been doing the business of sociopolitical persuasion by States that presumed they had a say in global matters. What Nye did was put words to a performance so old that it counts historically as ancient. The Indian subcontinent, the Roman empire and what the Romans called Arabia Felix had been at it for a long time.
But Nye’s definition of soft power makes it a modern-day phenomenon, a product of contemporary geopolitical dynamics instead of one reaching back into history when cultures were not just absurdly strange but often inscrutably alien. “Both academics and practitioners in international relations tended to treat power as tangible resources you could drop on your foot or drop on a city,” he wrote in 2017. “Everything was coercion and payments, but sometimes people influence others by ideas and attraction that sets the agenda for others or gets them to want what you want.”
Nye was quite the power maven. Simultaneously with soft power, he coined the term ‘hard power’, since it was difficult not to, because they belonged together. But it took him 13 more years to coin the term ‘smart power’—in order, according to Model Diplomat, “to address criticism that his earlier idea of soft power was being misread as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, traditional hard power”.
One might not have anticipated this when countries were exercising soft power in the 20th century’s post-bellum counterculture years, but soft power and hard power were to become two faces of the same coin, with both to be opportunistically conjoined under the rubric of another term that Nye created: ‘public diplomacy’.
Those were also the median years of the Cold War (1947-91), when superpowers and wannabe superpowers, hard powers like the US and the USSR and soft powers like India and China, were jostling for “hearts and minds”, a phrase coined in the sense used today by British General Gerald Templer in reference to Malayans. But it took the term ‘smart power’ six more years after being coined before secretary of State Hillary Clinton shoved it into the mainstream US diplomatic vocabulary in 2009, affirming it as the plinth of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. By then, the whole shebang had morphed into a technocracy-driven ‘3D approach’—defence, diplomacy, development.
And the essential, often benign simplicity of soft power devolved into a muscularly argotised mess in part-military, part-wonk haute couture: contextual intelligence, alliance maintenance, multilateral engagement, investment in civilian capacity, strategic communication and credible narratives. The umbrella term for all this is psyops—an abbreviation of psychological operations coined by Rear Admiral Ellis Mark Zacharias of the US Navy in 1945. But it took until 1951 for the US military to formalise it over the use of psychological warfare—because it had become “concerned about the continued use of a term that includes the word ‘warfare’ to describe an activity that is directed at friends and neutrals”, according to a 2004 paper written for the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
And so it was that the terms soft power and psyops were both born in proximity in time and circumstance. It was only a matter of time before their operations and intent merged. Timothy Frye wrote in Harriman Magazine’s 2026 issue, “Each day they arrived early: Uzbeks and Ukrainians, Georgians and Russians, lined up between temporary steel barricades to enter ‘Information USA’, a US Department of State cultural exhibit that travelled across the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1988. … By the end of each day roughly 6,000 Soviets had seen their first copying machine, sparred with their American guides about the arms race, and left with a changed view of the US.”
Is this sort of soft power possible any longer—or has it actually long been dead, subsumed under the sweeping internet infotrash vortex? Or was soft power always compromised, a velvet glove on a leprous hand?
Reader’s Digest, for example, beloved of readers in India, was alleged as being part of the CIA’s media influence programme. The spiffy Sputnik magazine, published by Novosti, the official press agency of the USSR, was created as a socialist offset to Reader’s Digest’s all-Americanism. The latter had some great, seductive writing, like the painter Norman Rockwell literalised. Sputnik had outstanding photography and production that the US couldn’t beat. Both steadily racked up losses. The US establishment buttressed Reader’s Digest; the USSR’s Communist Information Bureau funded Sputnik. The former is limping along, while the latter shut down in 1991 in its print form, only when the USSR’s disintegration made the Cold War unnecessary.
Is there any other kind of power left?
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)