[rayiner]

“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.

The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

[derriz]

How is soft power is a fake concept?

At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.

Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.

It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.

[rayiner]

“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.

E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.

[alienthrowaway]

> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so

This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.

Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?

[oezi]

This is the same way to say that friendship is a fake concept just because it is intangible.

Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.

[insane_dreamer]

If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.

For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.

[ergl]

Is this comment satire?

[actionfromafar]

It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and that's saying something these days.

I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.

[ok_dad]

No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?