The Weekly Standard

The late 1980s and early ’90s were characterized by liberal optimism, if not triumphalism. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had dissolved, marking the end of the Cold War. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama had written an influential article entitled “The End of History,” which argued that with the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union, liberal democracy had prevailed as the universal ideology. While conflict might continue on the peripheries of the liberal world order, the trend was toward a more peaceful and prosperous world. The economic component of the end-of-history narrative was globalization, the triumph of liberal capitalism.

The end-of-history narrative was complemented by a technological-optimism narrative, which held that the United States could maintain its dominant position in the international order by exploiting the “revolution in military affairs.” This complementary narrative, arising from the rapid coalition victory over Saddam Hussein that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, led some influential defense experts to argue that emerging technologies and the military revolution had the potential to transform the very nature of war.

One of the most influential volumes of this period was Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990), in which Joseph Nye coined the phrase “soft power,” which he defined as shaping the preferences of others by noncoercive means such as culture, political values, ideology, and diplomacy in contrast to “the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” Even if soft power made sense in the 1990s, does it still makes sense today?

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