OPINION — When President Trump, on the first day of his second term, closed the U.S. Agency for International Development and began dismantling the Voice of America, he also severely curtailed what had been America’s soft-power dominance in the world.
With those actions, we abandoned something of inestimable value: the ability to project Americanism, our ideals. Trump retired an entire diplomatic system that had served the United States well since we more or less inherited it from the British.
Soft power was codified as a concept by the late Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye Jr. in four books published between 1990 and 2023.
