The Future of Soft Power
While the US is abandoning the power of culture, other nations are discovering it.
What happened at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, and in the year leading up to it, was a historic bet against “soft power.” As Joseph Nye, who coined the term, explained, soft power allows countries to get desired outcomes not through military or economic coercion but through attraction, by inducing foreign powers and populations to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s goals.
For Nye, the unrivalled champion of soft power was the United States. Writing in 1990 in Foreign Policy, he wanted to explain how the United States had won the Cold War. There had been plenty of hard power involved, from Reagan’s Pershing II Missiles to economic coercion, such as broad trade embargoes against the USSR, Eastern Europe and the Republic of China as well as blocking access to capital markets. But hard power alone didn’t explain the decisive victory over the Soviet Union. What made the difference was the decades-long deployment of cultural resources. While the Soviet Union had invested in propaganda, the United States had done something smarter: instead of churning out overt propaganda for the American way of life, it had promoted, sometimes through covert CIA funding, a large variety of cultural products, from abstract expressionism to little magazines, that highlighted the freedoms available to Americans. The unruly energy of American culture was not something a ministry of propaganda could ever have come up with. It was an organic result of political, economic, and cultural freedoms that characterized America. Almost everyone, including Soviet nomenklatura and Parisian Maoists, wanted a part of it, whether they admitted it or not.
Today, US soft power is in rapid decline. During my recent travels across Asia and Europe, I met not a single person who wanted to send their kids to US colleges anymore; most were afraid even to visit. Nye, who died in May 2025, lived long enough to witness his world champion of soft power voluntarily giving up on it. Shortly before his death, I had a chance to talk with him about the changing landscape of soft power. That conversation helped me see that soft power was now being wielded much more effectively by other countries. My subsequent travels have confirmed that view. For this post, I want to single out two of them: South Korea and Bhutan.
K-Everything
Perhaps it’s not surprising that South Korea would emulate the Cold War model of US soft power since it is the last country on earth still locked into a Cold War struggle. When I recently went to the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea, I felt like I was entering a time warp that took me back to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. For many decades, South Korea has faced a highly militarized opponent who is all about hard power. South Korea, by contrast, decided to supplement its military and economic might with strategic investments in culture.
The problem with soft power, as Nye pointed out, is that it is difficult to produce and even more difficult to deploy. Culture takes decades to develop; it requires a creative industry that must be organically grown but also left to its own devices. The harder a government is trying to steer it, the more likely it will become crude propaganda, and therefore misfire.
Beginning in the 1980s, South Korea did the right thing: it started to lay the foundation, through strategic public/private partnerships, for a culture industry focused on popular music and dance. Rather than mandating that this industry express some essence of Korean culture—the equivalent of Moscow’s Cold War Bolshoi Ballet—the Korean culture industry went on a mission of cultural appropriation, amalgamating American pop culture and Korean song traditions with new takes on costume and video. Then YouTube came along and PSY’s deadpan “Gangnam Style” took the world by storm, the first music video to hit one billion downloads in 2012. Suddenly, K-pop was a thing. It had taken twenty-five years to get there.
There is no sign of it stopping anytime soon. During a recent month in Seoul, I noticed that everything was branded K: Netflix series; shoes; perfume; food. Even rice grown in the Demilitarized Zone was becoming a branded export product.
The campaign that resulted in Han Kang receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 has been attributed to the power of K-branding, even though that novel has little in common with the products typically associated with K-pop. At a recent book festival in Shanghai, I was able to observe Korean popular culture, including literature, exerting its influence in China firsthand. With the US largely absent, I realized that South Korea had taken over as the most significant foreign cultural power.
Korean K-branding conforms well to Nye’s theory. Soft power needs time and room to grow. Countries must foster it over decades and refrain from steering it too much in one direction or another. They must create an ecosystem and then trust that ecosystem to work on its own.
Gross Happiness Index
During the height of the cold war, another soft power was taking shape in the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan. Small and landlocked, Bhutan is also wedged between China and India, the world’s two most populous countries. Its military or economic powers are negligible by almost any standard, and it has therefore tended to view the outside world with suspicion. In 1972, when King Jugme Singye Wangchuck was crowned at the age of 16, Bhutan had only recently established formal ties to the rest of the world.
A new actor on the world stage, how would this isolated, small, and largely rural Himalayan kingdom conduct itself? More specifically, what would it do about its paltry GDP? That’s a question that the king was asked during a stopover in Rome, on his way back from the UN. His off-the-cuff answer was that GDP was not everything. What really mattered was Gross National Happiness and Bhutan had plenty of it.
The spontaneous quip quickly turned into a deliberate campaign. Bhutanese thinkers elaborated it into a philosophy based on Buddhism, turning the remoteness of this kingdom with its breathtaking natural beauty into its greatest asset.
In 1999, the Center for Bhutan Studies was founded with the express goal of turning the philosophy of happiness into a measurable system: the Gross National Happiness Index. (In 2012, the Center was renamed Center for Bhutan Studies and Gross National Happiness.) In 2011, Bhutan introduced resolution 65/309 to the UN, entitled “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development.” The following year the UN published the first World Happiness Report.
During my travels in Bhutan in the summer of 2025, happiness was everywhere as a distinct Bhutanese thing. It was invoked in speeches and press materials, but also in private conversations about the country’s traditions and nature. When I returned from Bhutan, I was frequently asked about happiness, so the branding had clearly worked. From an off-the-cuff response, it had turned into a soft-power slogan. (In case this is relevant, my own subjective experience was that there were plenty of wonderful people in Bhutan, but whether they were, on average, happier than other people, I couldn’t tell.) What K-pop is for South Korea, Gross National Happiness (GNH) is for Bhutan.
This successful campaign of cultural influence is just getting started. Currently, under the leadership of King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the 5th king of Bhutan, the country is developing Gelephu Mindfulness City, a special economic zone near the border with India that will showcase the distinct Bhutanese brand of happiness, combining sustainability with a “modern Buddhist Lifestyle Destination.” By drawing international seekers of happiness into this special zone, Bhutan also continues its cautious approach to tourism. With travel to many parts of the country deliberately restricted, Bhutan will use Gelephu Mindfulness City as a gateway without being overrun by tourists.
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Before his death, Nye had begun to ask under what circumstances a country can lose the soft power it has so carefully fostered over many decades. Here is an initial answer: it’s not enough to have a culture industry, which the US continues to do. In order for soft power to work, a country’s hard power needs to leave room for soft power to exert its force. This was the case with the US during the Cold War, just as it has been the case with South Korea. (In the case of Bhutan, there is no military or economic power to interfere with its soft power.) The current US policy proves that a clumsy use of hard power can simply choke off a country’s soft power.
A second question remains unanswered: can a country that has lost, or deliberately thrown away, its soft power ever get it back? Perhaps we’ll get an answer in the coming years or decades.
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Good piece. Soft power works only as long as culture isn’t asked to prove its usefulness. The moment it becomes a tool, its pull weakens.