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US soft power grows as the alternatives become clear
America is more attractive in the light of Russia’s failed aggression and China’s domestic troubles
10 hours ago
Pallets of 155mm shells on their way to Ukraine, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, US, in April © Alex Brandon/AP
In 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, 31 per cent of French people had a
favourable view of the US. (For reference, that is the same as it was the month when George W Bush launched an invasion of Iraq.) The number in Britain was a 21st century low of 41 per cent. In Japan, the same. In Germany, 26 per cent. South Korea, Canada, Italy and Spain all posted figures that were dire not just in absolute terms but even by the standards of the Donald Trump years.
Since then, those countries have been on what I believe is called a “journey”. In the past two years, America’s favourability score is close to having doubled in much of the rich world. Currently 9 out of 10 Poles and South Koreans are well-disposed to it. Germans are as smitten as they were in the first years of President Barack Obama. Brits are back on board.
What, besides human fickleness and whimsy, is at work here? The departure (for now) of Trump is part of it. But the timing and violence of the swing point to the pandemic being the machine element. In 2020, America’s handling of that crisis seemed to discredit not just a nation but liberal individualism itself. Now? No one would extol the record, not with more than a million dead Americans. But one might reasonably prefer it to the untenable rigours of
zero Covid.
China could cite the advantages of its strict model of government two years ago. That case is harder to make now. And this is before China’s property bubble and other domestic ills are counted into the bargain. The omnipresent state is starting to provoke shivers or even titters in the west, not the grudging admiration that autocrats hope for.
Expect this to be the way of the future. The more visible the challengers to it become, the better the US will look. Nor is China even the most generous donor to America’s global image. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen to that. Had the US said and done nothing, it would still have shone next to the violently revisionist Kremlin. Having sponsored Ukraine’s ever more successful defence, it stands out as a benign and effective superpower, at least in the democratic world.
Anti-Americanism is so often a luxury sport. It thrives when an alternative hegemon is too remote and ill-defined a prospect to merit scrutiny. The US is therefore compared to a perfect standard rather than the earthly options. Anyone can will a “multipolar” world into being (the French intelligentsia does it all the time) when the identity of those poles is unspecified.
Well, what China and Russia have done of late is define the choice. China, as it rises, will keep doing so. The price of great power status is scrutiny.
It is hard to know what is more striking: the surge in US popularity, or how little the nation has had to do to achieve it. Its arms donations to Ukraine are precious to that besieged republic but not even a rounding error in the American arsenal. “Don’t be Russia or China” is as elaborate as Washington’s soft power strategy has needed to be.
Popularity is not an idle asset.
Over time, it will bring the US diplomatic leverage, the force-multiplying effect of alliances and (always the neatest definition of soft power) other nations wanting what it wants. In other words, there are compensations to imperial decline. What the US loses in relative raw power — naval fleet vs naval fleet, gross domestic product vs gross domestic product — it can hope to redress in the less tangible form of cultural attraction.
To put it another way,
the unipolar moment after the cold war was never an unalloyed good for America. At home, the body politic was free to turn on itself. Abroad, the world was free to hold the nation to an impossible standard. There is no sign of the first of those curses fading. But the second one might be.
I don’t mean to suggest the world is seeing autocratic roughness and flinching from it out of principle. If that were true, the US would have gained in popularity during the Russian intervention in Syria in the past decade.
No, the story of the year is autocratic
incompetence. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” Osama bin Laden is supposed to have said, “by nature they will like the strong horse.”
This has been illiberalism’s pitch through the ages: not that it is nobler or more moral, but that it works. In this telling, democracy is a well-meaning charter for chaos and weakness. This trope somehow survives the regimes that peddle it: Prussia, the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union. It seems to need refuting each generation or so. So far, at least, 2022 is obliging.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
