On the morning of 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot through the heart while elevating the chalice during Mass in a small chapel in San Salvador. He had been vociferous for years, documenting the atrocities of El Salvador’s US-backed military junta — the disappearances, murders of clergy, the torture, the death squads. His final sermon, delivered on the eve of his assassination, became a final plea for conscience, directly addressing the American-trained soldiers, “In the name of God…I beg you; I command you: stop the repression.”
The Reagan administration, inheriting a policy established by Jimmy Carter, continued military aid to the junta. Declassified documents later confirmed that the CIA had intelligence on death squad planning networks that included Romero’s killers. Washington chose to be silent and sent the cheques. This was not an aberration in American foreign policy. It was the modus operandi at the peak of the Cold War, interpreting any civil rights movement in Latin America to be a communist insurgency.
The United States was, simultaneously, the world’s most prolific exporter of democratic values and the silent guarantor of a regime that murdered a bishop for beseeching peace and choosing life over death. That contradiction exposed the mirage of soft power.
The academic and Harvard Professor, Joseph Nye, coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to describe America’s ability to shape global preferences through attraction rather than coercion – through culture, democratic values, human rights, diplomacy, and the secular credentials of its institutions, not only guns and dollars. It was a seductive formulation. Ironically, the US soft power, from the outset, was a façade deftly employed for its realpolitik motives — global hegemony, economic dominance and expansionist ambitions — clothed in the language of universal values.
Long before Nye theorised attraction as an instrument of influence, Hans Morgenthau’s realist theory recognised that international order rested ultimately on the pursuit of power. He conceded that moral principles could inform political rhetoric and diplomatic parlance — but that states consistently subordinated them to imperatives of power whenever the two competed.
History offers scant evidence that attraction alone commands suzerainty. The Delian League, which loosely resembled modern-day NATO, was soft power’s earliest incarnation — a defensive alliance of Greek states formed to resist Persian invasions.
Athens emerged as the leader of the voluntary coalition, self-appointed guardian of Greek freedom and champion of democratic ideals, drawing other states to join the maritime coalition. Eventually, it transformed into an imperial system dominated by Athens, where tribute replaced consent and naval protection became a form of coercive dependency. When the small island-state of Melos chose neutrality during the Peloponnesian War, Athens invaded it. In the Melian Dialogue—between Athens and Melos—narrated by Thucydides, Athenian envoys articulated the most prophetic maxim in geopolitical history: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” More than two millennia later, the logic still governs the behaviour of “great powers.”
Similarly, medieval kingdoms extended their cultural and religious reach through missionaries, dynastic marriages, and ecclesiastical influence, but their borders were ultimately drawn and defended by armies. For a thousand years, European kingdoms fought one another, their histories written in conquest and blood. In the post-Cold War order dominated by the United States, the ancient manifesto of dominion did not disappear; it merely re-emerged beneath the polished jargon of liberal internationalism. The old poison ivy of empire continued to spread quietly across the global order – through markets, institutions, military alliances, military bases and dollar-denominated financial systems. Attraction was the perfume. Coercion remained when it wore off.
The United States elevated soft power to a doctrine because it needed a euphemism for dominance. The liberal international order — Bretton Woods, the United Nations, NATO, the Washington Consensus — was presented as a gift to humanity: rules-based, universally beneficial, and egalitarian in scope. In truth, it was an architecture designed to entrench American primacy, lock in dollar hegemony, and open foreign markets to American corporations. The institutions were real. There were tangible benefits: trade liberalisation lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; American universities drew the world’s talent and powered the scientific revolution of the late twentieth century.
Yet the same architecture that enabled these gains made alternatives unthinkable — structural adjustment programmes dismantled public institutions, decimated labour unions, and gutted collective bargaining power across the developing world. Enforced austerity compressed the fiscal space for welfare, education, and public health investments. The Washington Consensus left a trail of debt and dependency from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa.
The Helsinki Accords created political space for dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain, gradually eroding the ideological legitimacy of Soviet bloc regimes. Any intellectually honest accounting must acknowledge these achievements. But they were downstream of American hard power. As Robert D. Kaplan argued in The World America Made, the order functioned because of overwhelming American military superiority, control over the global financial architecture, and underwriting by dollar hegemony.
When states challenged this system – through nationalisation, geopolitical non-alignment, or alternative economic models – the rhetoric of liberal internationalism gave way to coercive instruments of power: sanctions regimes, covert destabilisation campaigns, proxy warfare, intelligence operations, and training or arming of insurgent forces against governments deemed hostile to American realpolitik motives. The human rights framework invoked against Soviet violations was sanctimoniously discarded whenever American strategic interests demanded it.
The Latin American record is a grim testament. Between 1950 and 1990, the United States sponsored or orchestrated the overthrow of democratic governments in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic – installing authoritarian regimes that served American geopolitical and corporate interests.
The CIA enforced the United Fruit Company’s influence over Central American governments. Allende’s Chile was dismantled not because it threatened American security but because it threatened American copper interestsand the broader ideological project of containing socialist governance. These were not aberrations in US foreign policy. They were the policy. Soft power – democracy promotion, the rhetoric of freedom – was the marketing department. Hard power, economic coercion, and covert action formed the operational core.
No single event in the twenty-first century has done more damage to the concept of American soft power than its unconditional support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Since October 2023, more than seventy-five thousand Palestinians have been killed. The majority are civilians and twenty-thousand children, making it one of the deadliest urban bombardments of the modern era.
International humanitarian organisations and UN agencies have repeatedly warned of catastrophic famine conditions, mass displacement, and the collapse of civilian infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and residential neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Videos of civilians killed while attempting to access humanitarian aid have circulated globally, transforming Gaza into a symbol not merely of destruction, but of the visible breakdown of the postwar humanitarian order itself. The carnage has seared itself into the global vocabulary. ‘Gaza-like’ is now the eponym for erasure of a civilian world.
Seven decades of American soft power investment — the promotion of human rights, international humanitarian law, the responsibility to protect — have been publicly incinerated in less than three years. The United States and European powers continued to provide military assistance, block or dilute ceasefire initiatives at the United Nations Security Council and deploy their diplomatic clout in defence of Israel’s human rights violations.
For the Global South, and the Arab and Muslim world, along with the growing populations in Europe and Asia, Gaza has been the definitive proof that American values were always conditional: invoked against adversaries, never binding on allies. The hypocrisy is not new. But its indifference, in the age of live-streamed destruction and social media documentation, is unprecedented. American soft power did not fade. It was unmasked.
If Gaza unmasked American soft power, the Iran war delivered its obituary. Driven by Washington’s longstanding strategic alignment with Israel and amplified by powerful domestic lobbies, it was more consequential than other Middle Eastern interventions in the past. It was the effective demolition of international law as a constraint on American power.
The strikes were illegal under any credible interpretation of the UN Charter. Military action was launched without Security Council authorisation, US Congressional support, and despite widespread international diplomatic opposition. Intelligence reports confirmed no imminent Iranian threat. The conflict with Iran not only pulverised Iranian infrastructure and disrupted regional stability but also destroyed the foundational fiction that the United States operated within a rules-based international order rather than above it.
The resurgence of hard power in geopolitical dynamics across the world is unmistakable. In Europe, the far right has gained electoral ground in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden, while anti-establishment populism continues to shape politics in the United Kingdom and the United States alike. India under Modi has pursued assertive Hindu ethnonationalism, exploiting historical grievances against Muslim rule and Christian conversion, causing a precipitous democratic decline.
The undercurrent uniting these disparate movements is not right-wing ideology alone, but a growing distrust of the liberal global order and its faith in market fundamentalism. For large sections of their populations, the promises of soft power — high living standards, shared prosperity, humanitarianism, peace and stability — grew detached from evolving socioeconomic realities. Deindustrialisation, financialisation, migration pressures, wage stagnation, and widening inequality deepened the economic chasms.
In the industrial towns of northern England and the American Midwest, decades of factory closures and economic abandonment fueled the political anger that animated Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. In France, the Yellow Vest movement exposed growing resentment toward a technocratic class perceived as governing for itself. The result has been the reassertion of sovereignty, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment, and the return of identity politics as the organising principles of these democracies. A report by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute shows that many democracies have autocratised measurably over the past decade, reflecting broader global democratic decline.
Beneath the rhetoric of soft power lay a global economic project that required the language of openness to function politically. Financialisation of economies gutted industrial production in the West, concentrated wealth, and relocated manufacturing to low-wage countries. The irony is that it imported the socioeconomic instability of the emerging markets back into the developed nations that had championed globalisation. The cultural instruments of soft power — films, universities, NGOs, think tanks, and media institutions — supplied the legitimating narrative for this order.
Antonio Gramsci understood that durable power rarely rests on coercion alone. Hegemony becomes strongest when institutions, culture, media, and education manufacture consent so deeply that particular political and economic models begin to appear natural rather than engineered. In the late twentieth century, the American-led order mastered this process with extraordinary sophistication.
Globalisation was presented as freedom. Markets were treated as synonymous with democracy. Integration into the liberal international order was framed not merely as a policy preference, but as espoused by Francis Fukuyama as the inevitable direction of modern civilisation itself. Within that framework, strategic dissent was portrayed not merely as geopolitical rivalry, but as irrational, primitive, and authoritarian.
The post-war architecture designed to prevent catastrophe — arms-control agreements, multilateral institutions, diplomatic norms, and international law — has weakened steadily over the past quarter century. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is dead. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is in ruins.
The United Nations Security Council is increasingly paralysed by veto politics. The consequence is not stable multipolar order, but escalating mistrust between nuclear-armed states, diminishing diplomatic consensus, and declining faith in the legitimacy of international institutions. Once populations from Caracas to Colombo to Copenhagen cease believing that rules are applied equally, coercion becomes the only remaining language of international order.
Oscar Romero was murdered at the altar for imploring soldiers to stop killing their own people. Four decades later, the international liberal order stands engulfed in a ferocity it once believed history has outgrown. Soft power steadily erodes as hard power reasserts its primacy in geopolitics. It is a warning.
History does not warn twice in the same language. The second time, it speaks in consequences.
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