I, like others respect Professor Nye’s development of the idea and practice of soft power. Diminution of America’s soft power influence on global security and cooperation did not, however, begin with Donald Trump’s term in office; its decline has much deeper causes. Trump simply exploited America’s long-standing and deep racial divide and its more recent poorly conceived and executed attempts to reshape the Middle-East post 9-11. American culture’s sources of resilience are now depleted, not because of Trump, but because of a deep existential failure to acknowledge and rectify the gross injustices inflicted on the descendants of its slave and indigenous populations. “[C]apacity for self-reflection and self-correction” are thus not characteristics that many would now grant to America. Not least, US defence of its archaic constitutional second amendment right to bear arms and consequent world-unique record of yearly mass shootings of innocent students and citizens contradicts any favourable judgement of America’s cultural resilience or its capacity for critical self-examination. America’s influence on the world is based almost entirelyon its undoubted hard military and industrial power. But these powers were grossly misused in GW Bush administration’s war on Iraq on now thoroughly discredited grounds. Its subsequent failures in both Iraq and Afghanistan reveal glaring weaknesses in US hard foreign policy. For far too long America has relied on its previously uncontested hard power; let’s hope that President Biden can restore America’s much-needed soft power and prestige.

Optimism is good. Realism is better.

At this time, the US fits the description of an ungovernable country, heading into South American political and economic mess with nukes in hand. The fact that half of the population is willing to vote for people who turned brazen public lying into their political doctrine should inspire some realism?

The specific, historical conditions that turned the US into a superpower will not repeat themselves. FDR was able to break the Great Depression with radical reforms that were only possible because of the national emergency of WW2. I do not think that WW3 is a possibility one should contemplate in the nuclear era. The US economic system has been brought to the state similar to conditions that sparked the Great Depression. Central Bank intervention today, absent structural reform, simply adds progressive debasement of money to this set of conditions. I doubt that even a small fraction of the US population has any comprehension of this reality and can thus be easily distracted with things like critical race theory or abortion.

Without action, hope is more dangerous than helpful.