Soft Power
Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio demolishing our relationships with our closest allies is just one way they have been obliterating U.S. soft power around the world.
“Soft power” is a concept coined in the late 1980s by the American political science Joseph Nye, his central theme being that the U.S. enhances its global authority by promoting values like human rights and democracy. Soft power allows us to cultivate goodwill, influence others, and impact global politics through attraction and persuasion (think culture, values and policies) rather than coercion, economic pressure, and/or military action (a.k.a., hard power).
Although people in the Trump/Vance administration clearly don’t understand this concept AT ALL, can you guess who does understand it perfectly? Yep, you guessed it. Chinese leader Xi Jinping… which is why he is also laser-focused on obliterating U.S. soft power around the world.
A report from the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center reveals that “the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “spends billions of dollars annually on foreign information manipulation efforts. Beijing uses false or biased information to promote positive views of the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the same time, the PRC suppresses critical information that contradicts its desired narratives on issues such as Taiwan, its human rights practices, the South China Sea, its domestic economy, and international economic engagement. More broadly, the PRC seeks to cultivate and uphold a global incentive structure that encourages foreign governments, elites, journalists, and civil society to accept its preferred narratives and avoid criticizing its conduct.”
“The PRC’s approach to information manipulation includes leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, pairing cooptation and pressure, and exercising control of Chinese-language media.” The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right-of-center American think tank, put a dollar number to China’s efforts: $10 billion.
China has also been busy boosting its geopolitical standing by giving all-expenses-paid trips to American social-media influencers they hope will help promote a “cooler China.”
Russia is also heavily into the propaganda game. The Kremlin’s official declared expenditures report showed they spent 13 percent more on spreading propaganda in 2025 than the year before (around $1.4 billion) and you can bet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The way Russia significantly and systematically interfered in our 2016 elections is outrageous, and the fact that Vladimir Putin has never been held accountable is disgraceful.
But it’s not just America; Putin pulls this mess across the board. The minute Russia brutally attacked Ukraine, Putin’s propaganda went into overdrive. To justify the invasion, he told the Russian people that he started the war to “demilitarize and denazify” the Ukrainian government. He perpetuated the lie that Kyiv had been carrying out “genocide” against the Russian-speaking people who live in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine (known as the Donbas).
The New York Times reported that, after the war started, “the Kremlin cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children.”
The RAND Corporation – an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm – “characterizes the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as ‘the firehose of falsehood’ because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, ‘new Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.’”
But nevertheless, from Day One the geniuses in the Trump/Vance administration tried to take away our very best way of combatting the propaganda nonsense spread by China and Russian by cutting funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – which means they tried to silence the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, among others.
USAGM networks bring news and information to 427 million listeners around the world in 64 languages, producing more than 3,000 hours of original programming each week. < Following legal battles, federal courts ordered a temporary reinstatement of these funds, then Congress did the right thing and passed funding for them once again. >
We cannot overstate how stupid jeopardizing USAGM is (we don’t like using that word, but we can’t think of another one in this case). Just think about it in terms of our fight against global terrorism. For decades, terrorist organizations have worked hard to distort America’s image for a vulnerable portion of the Muslim world in hopes of enlisting new recruits to their cause.
These terrorists have done a masterful job of making sure their target audience knows all about the “evil” that is America: The brutal, wealthy bully that uses power and military strength to repress Muslims around the globe. Naturally, the terrorists are the good guys who fight bravely and unselfishly to protect Islam and its people.
Terrorists do this because they understand the alluring power of democratic values, and that those values are a potent antidote to their extremist actions.
So, without question, the best way to fight against the propagation of radical ideologies and false American narratives that help drive their recruitment in the Middle East is a massive, global counter-ideology campaign that reframes this highly damaging, globally destructive narrative – and USAGM is one of the only vehicles we can use for this.
The same goes for repressive regimes. The bottom line is this: The number one thing we have going for us in our competition with China is the fact that WE ARE US! We are the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We’re free! We’re hip! We’re cool! We’re FUN!! We have great sports, great food, great clothes, great movies and great movie stars.
In 2025, the animated sequel Zootopia 2 made more money than the second Avatar thanks in large part to China, where it earned $104 million in its first day (it’s now grossed over $625 million there).
The first Zootopia, which until its sequel was the highest-grossing American animated film in China, made over $236 million in 2016. Disney opened a Zootopia-themed land at Shanghai Disneyland in 2023 (yes, although it’s kind of surprising that Xi Jinping allows it, a Disney resort opened in China in 2016. It’s a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and the Shanghai government and features classic Disney elements with a Chinese twist).
There is no easier or more effective way to block China’s global progress than to unleash American democracy and culture on them. As Judy Hopps, the Zootopia bunny rabbit police officer says, “Life’s a little bit more complicated than a slogan on a bumper sticker. Real life is messy. We all have limitations. We all make mistakes. Which means, hey, glass half full, we all have a lot in common. And the more we try to understand one another, the more exceptional each of us will be. But we have to try. So, no matter what kind of person you are, we implore you: Try. Try to make the world a better place.” : )