Maria Repnikova
Since the start of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has been dismantling the traditional channels of American soft power. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is no longer operational, and Voice of America is tied up in legislative and court battles. The State Department has significantly reduced its staff and programming. Restrictive new visa and immigration policies have made the United States less accessible and less attractive to potential visitors, and Washington’s coercive and transactional dealings with U.S. allies have damaged trust abroad. In The New York Times, Jamie Shea, a former NATO official, referred to these sweeping changes as the United States’ “soft power suicide.”
Many experts and commentators have interpreted the United States’ loss as China’s gain. The late political scientist Joseph Nye, who developed the concept of soft power, cautioned earlier this year that China “stands ready to fill the vacuum that Trump is creating.” Yanzhong Huang, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, similarly contended that the Trump administration’s actions have “boosted China’s charm offensive.”
But as I argued in 2022 in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-Chinese soft-power competition is not a zero-sum quest for influence. The two countries take distinct approaches to building soft power: China has tended to rely on drawing in other countries with pragmatic benefits, whereas the United States has placed ideals and values at the center of its outreach. Recipient countries, especially those in the so-called global South, have perceived Chinese and U.S. offerings as complementary, accepting both rather than seeing a need to choose one over the other.
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