Without soft power, Trump is left with the hard men of Russia and China

2 weeks ago 9

Opinion

September 23, 2025 — 5.00am

The whole world saw Britain lay on the pomp and circumstance for Donald Trump last week. As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, it was a “unique” tribute. No other US leader has been honoured with not one, but two, state visits.

Deploying the King, the Princess of Wales, the Royal Horse Artillery, Windsor Castle and Chequers was hailed as a case study in the use of “soft power”. Charles was reduced to uttering the phrase “British soil makes for rather splendid golf courses”. The things one must do for one’s country.

Without soft power, Trump is left with the hard men of Russia and China

What did Britain receive in return for its transparent obsequiousness? The big noise from the government was trumpeting US investment pledges totalling £150 billion. Which could be important.

Except that London’s Financial Times tartly summarised the deals as “a familiar Downing Street tactic – adding up a series of planned commercial decisions to come up with a big number, then claiming some of the credit”.

What else? Starmer sought to persuade Trump to change his position on two major conflicts, Ukraine and Gaza. The US leader didn’t noticeably budge on either. The king and the prime minister spoke about the importance of AUKUS. Trump was noncommittal.

And Trump’s tariffs? Naturally, the British hoped Trump would offer concessions. No such luck. The 10 per cent levied on British exports to the US remain in place.

And as CNN reported: “Before Trump’s arrival, Britain had hoped that the US would scrap the 25 per cent tariff currently applied to steel exports to the US. Those plans have now been put on ice, pushing Britain’s steel industry closer to the brink. Last month, its third-largest steelworks collapsed into government control.”

Trump did not publicly berate Starmer, which the British media counted as a big win – so low have expectations of Trump fallen.

But Trump did offer the British leader, who is under pressure from Nigel Farage over immigration, some gratuitous public coaching – “it doesn’t matter if you call out the military, it doesn’t matter what means you use” – to halt illegal immigration. That was about it.

The land of hope and glory? Britain was left hoping while Trump took the glory. Rather than a demonstration of soft power, it seemed an illustration of its limits. The creator of the phrase, Harvard scholar Joe Nye, years ago explained: “Power is one’s ability to affect the behaviour of others to get what one wants. There are three basic ways to do this – coercion, payment and attraction. Hard power is the use of coercion and payment. Soft power is the ability to attain preferred outcomes through attraction.

“If a state can set the agenda for others or shape their preferences, it can save a lot on carrots and sticks. But rarely can it totally replace either. Thus the need for smart strategies that combine the tools of both hard and soft power.” He dubbed this “smart power”.

A bit of sycophancy can take the edge off an encounter with Trump. But soft power doesn’t interest him. He believes in hard power only – tariffs and threats and private pay-off.

He’s busily destroying the soft power that America had built over eight post-war decades through its (mostly) benign hegemony, its rebuilding of vanquished Japan and Germany, its Marshall Plan, its cultural power, popular brands, leading universities, its creation of public goods such as the World Bank and the UN, its image of cool modernity.

That’s all lost or under threat. Soft power doesn’t work on Trump, so he doesn’t grasp how it might work on others. Reduced to wielding hard power only, Trump has no chance of exercising “smart power”. In a coincidence of irresistible symbolism, Joe Nye died this year.

The US president may not have been swayed by a close ally’s best efforts at soft power, but he is deferential to the hard power of America’s traditional enemies.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump leave a press conference at the end of their meeting in Alaska.

Even as Trump was ceremonially paraded to Windsor Castle in a gilded horse-drawn carriage, Vladimir Putin was unleashing all hell in Ukraine and intensifying his intrusions into the airspace of his European neighbours.

In the past 10 days, Russian drones and fighter jets have violated the airspace of Poland, Romania and Estonia, all NATO countries. In a fourth event, German and Swedish fighter jets scrambled to monitor a Russian military surveillance plane over the Baltic Sea flying “dark”, transponders switched off and no flight plan lodged.

“Russia’s recklessness in the air, along our eastern flank, is increasing in frequency,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said. At the same time, Moscow has been unleashing some of the biggest one-day fusillades of its invasion of Ukraine.

The Bloomberg news service reported that Putin has concluded that he can escalate with impunity. It cited unnamed Kremlin sources as saying that after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska last month, the Russian leader decided that Trump is unlikely to “do much”.

So far, his bet is paying off handsomely. Trump has not lifted a finger against Putin. Indeed, he exempted Russia from tariffs even as he launched them against every US ally on the planet. Putin boasted in Alaska that Russian trade with the US was growing under Trump.

In the same week, Trump announced that he’d reached a deal with China’s Xi Jinping over the future of TikTok’s business in the US. The US Congress last year legislated that the Chinese owner, ByteDance, must divest it to prevent Beijing exercising control over its content. Trump endorsed the law at the time.

The news headline is that a consortium of US investors including Rupert Murdoch will buy the US business while ByteDance retains its ownership elsewhere. Mission accomplished, no?

No. The fine print exposes the true outcome. The American owners get the profits, but the Chinese creator gets to keep ownership and control of the algorithm, the “brain” that decides what US users see, and how and when they will see it.

The FT quotes a US adviser close to the deal as saying: “It’s the ultimate TACO trade. After all this, China keeps the algorithm.” TACO is the acronym for “Trump always chickens out”. But only in the face of America’s enemies. It’s America’s allies who have most to lose.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor

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