The launch in London on 15 January of the UK Soft Power Council by the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, and the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, came at an interesting moment. With Donald Trump in the White House, a narrative has developed in which persuasion and influence have been replaced by command and coercion in world affairs. We have entered, everyone is saying, an age ruled by force.
The reality is more elusive and paradoxical. Hard and soft power are not opposites, wholly separate and distinct. They interact continuously, sometimes in seemingly contradictory ways. Threats of tariffs fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Trump has used them to achieve non-economic objectives such as border control – Panama, Mexico and Canada folded quickly – and in this respect he is proving more of a rational actor than previous American presidents. The US and its auxiliaries expended vast quantities of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan. The predictable outcome was defeat and retreat. Lacking strategic goals and abandoning their allies, the West demonstrated that it could not be trusted. “Wars of choice” were exercises in soft power, but of a negative, self-defeating kind.
Keir Starmer’s exchanges with Trump in Washington showed the Prime Minister using soft power – a royal letter of invitation to a beaming president to visit Britain – with some success. That did not stop Trump asking Starmer puckishly if Britain could take on Russia by itself. No symbolic blandishment can alter the fact of British weakness, the result not only of decades of underfunding of the armed forces but of a perverse use of soft power to damage British interests.
Starmer’s plan for ceding the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which he seems to have persuaded the Trump administration to accept, is an example. The rationale is an advisory judgement of the International Court of Justice rejecting British sovereignty over the islands. The archipelago hosts an American military base in Diego Garcia, which Britain would lease back to Mauritius at a cost of £9bn or more, strengthening the position of China and Iran, which have a growing presence there. A monument to the dying cult of liberal legalism, the deal signals Britain’s virtue to an indifferent or hostile world.
The paradigm of negative soft power is British energy policy. The effect of a net-zero Britain on global warming would be minimal, and the prospect of anyone emulating Ed Miliband’s policies is remote. Miliband is himself following the example of Germany, whose Energiewende – shutting down coal and nuclear and transitioning to “clean energy” – has hollowed out the country’s industrial base. Especially in the Global South, countries shape their energy mix in accordance with their circumstances and needs, not messianic posturing by first-world politicians.
The chief result of net-zero targets is de-industrialisation, which reduces the ability of countries that adopt them to defend themselves. The supply chain for renewables is owned by China, with many of the necessary minerals located in Africa (where rivalries over them have fuelled devastating wars). Trump’s determination to “get” Greenland may sound outlandish, but he is not wrong in thinking it one of the last great sites of materials needed in the next phase of industrialisation. Gigantic AI data centres are energy-hungry beasts.
Before their explosive exchange in the Oval Office, Trump was going to sign a deal with Zelensky conditional on American part-ownership of mineral deposits in the territory Ukraine controls. After this moment of “great television”, as Trump described what may have been a well-laid trap for the Ukrainian leader, anything is possible, including Zelensky’s departure from the scene. With a more compliant government in Kyiv, Putin and Trump could divvy up Ukraine’s natural wealth between them. There have been reports of potential Russian-American cooperation in the Arctic, including opening new sea lanes through the melting polar cap. A new age of resource wars and great-power alliances has begun, driven by progress in technology.
There has been much talk of Trump’s selling out Ukraine in a rerun of Munich in 1938, when Nazism was disastrously appeased. A better historical analogy is the carve-up of Europe and the world at Yalta. In February, for the first time since the conference on the Black Sea in 1945, the US voted on an issue of global security with Russia against Europe, the UK, Canada and other Western countries when it rejected UN resolutions condemning the Russian invasion. The world order set in place 80 years ago is not so much coming to an end as being wilfully upended.
Trump is forging a multipolar international system he intends to shape in American interests. If Ukraine is a pawn in a deal on resources with Putin, Taiwan may be expendable in a grand bargain on trade with Xi Jinping. The fate of Gaza will be determined in a regional settlement that prioritises America’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel. That a certain hubris is inherent in the scheme hardly needs saying. Multi-polar competition is a notoriously dicey business, and Putin and Xi are masters in the realpolitik the reality-TV showman believes he excels in.
The Lancaster House summit chaired by Starmer on 2 March concluded with a passing mention of an awkward fact. Europe cannot match Russia in Ukraine without American support, which may not be forthcoming. Despite current sanctions, Russia has built up a formidable military machine – a decisive asset in attritional warfare. Rearmament in Europe presupposes reindustrialisation, a lengthy and forbiddingly costly business if the goal is to be genuinely independent of the US. There is a question of political will. Countries that have been balkanised by identity politics will not find it easy to mobilise against their enemies.
Emmanuel Macron’s offer to extend France’s nuclear shield will not prevent an escalation over the coming years of the campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks and assassination that Russia is already waging in Europe. Irregular warfare prosecuted by “little green men” – Russian forces with their military insignia removed, like those who seized strategic positions on the Crimean peninsula in the invasion of 2014 – would likely slip under the nuclear tripwire. Then there is the small matter of politics: neo-Gaullist visions of strategic autonomy screen out the long march of the far right across Europe. Macron can barely form a government. What will a French nuclear shield be worth if he is followed as president by the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella? Will Germany want the shield if the advance of the pro-Russian AfD and far-left Die Linke in February’s elections continues?
At some subliminal level, Europe’s ruling caste appear to realise and accept their powerlessness. As Angela Merkel’s security and foreign policy adviser and German ambassador to the UN, Christoph Heusgen was one of the delegation sneering and laughing when in 2018 Trump warned against Germany’s reliance on Russian energy. As chair of the Munich Security Conference, Heusgen openly wept after vice-president JD Vance’s barnstorming speech, and his tearful breakdown was applauded by the audience of European notables. Beneath all their conceit and bluster, Europe’s elites are gripped by a Houellebecqian impulse of submission to a fate they suspect they cannot avert.
Geopolitics is not just about resources. It is also a war of myths. The release in January of DeepSeek, a Chinese app supposedly built by a start-up at a fraction of the cost of comparable American models, hit Wall Street like a guided missile. Using fewer high-end chips of the sort banned in exports to China, it can be downloaded for free. Some suspect the start-up, a spin-off from a little-known local hedge fund, may have been nurtured by agencies of the Chinese state. The chatbot censors itself in real time, deleting any information blocked by the Chinese Communist Party. From this perspective, DeepSeek looks less like a commercial enterprise than an intelligence operation – in other words, a highly effective exercise of soft power.
The true shock inflicted by DeepSeek is to the myth that liberal societies are bound to outpace authoritarian regimes in technological innovation. Tsarist Russia, imperial Germany and Meiji Japan industrialised without being or becoming liberal. For the most part they were importing technologies invented in open societies such Britain and the US, just as China has done. With DeepSeek, China goes further. Stimulated by US restrictions on the export of high-end chips, it has created an AI model better anything devised in the West.
Myths are stories humans tell to make meaning in their lives, and cannot be falsified like scientific theories. They can be rendered useless by events, and this is what the arrival of DeepSeek has done to the ruling Western myth. The monotheistic foundations of Western values have been hacked away. Any sense of the West’s achievements has been erased by indoctrination in a myth of its unique complicity in racist oppression. The legend of its inherent technological superiority is all it had left.
China’s myth of national renewal may be more resilient. Underneath the carapace of surveillance and repression, many of the vulnerabilities of liberal societies – chronic debt, youth unemployment, anomie – can be detected. Where China has the advantage is that its ruling elite is not possessed by loathing of their own history and traditions. It teaches its people their civilisation is superior to that of the West.
This is where Donald Trump comes in. His sweeping election victory expressed the rejection by a large section of the electorate of a progressive ideology that smeared and derided American civilisation. Tapping in to the depths of the American psyche, he has released a euphoric energy suppressed in the listless years of liberal drift. The vibe shift he has orchestrated – soft power in its purest form – is invincible for now. Stunned by a reversal they never imagined, progressives are stuck in a paralysing cognitive meltdown.
Yet the euphoria could quickly dissipate. With Steve Bannon denouncing Elon Musk as “truly evil”, the Maga coalition of national populists and techno-futurists has fractured. A looming landslide of federal debt hangs over everything. Trump’s regime change may prove to be another phase in Western decadence and decline. Whatever the upshot, the impact of his presidency will be irreversible. Through the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Musk and his Generation-Z guerrilla army are systematically deconstructing the modern administrative state. From being an instrument of progressive social engineering, government is being remodelled as the enabler of a Dionysiac hyper-capitalism. From being a vehicle for a universalist ideology, the US is asserting a particular idea of America itself.
The Trumpian paradox is that while the Pax Americana is over, America is reclaiming its global ascendancy. Post-Cold War liberals brought their nemesis on themselves. Squandering their soft power in vanity-fuelled wars, demolishing their industries in a madcap green-energy crusade, parroting anti-Western narratives and wasting decades in neglecting to build up hard military power, they are the authors of their impotence. The task at hand is to survive in the anarchical world self-sabotaging liberals have made. Like it or lump it, Trump’s America is the only game in town.
[See also: Volodymyr Zelensky’s war of wills]