HARDER BATTLE FOR HEARTS & MINDS

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.

- KAJAL BASU

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 your 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.”