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1/ We got 50,000 articles about how weak and impotent soft power has proven in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the "1st army in the world" can't bend Iran to its will and the (self-proclaimed) "2nd army in the world" is over a thousand days into its 3 day special military operation.

3/ Obviously hard power is important - you need weapons if you're going to arm an ally, and if you don't have them you end up like the EU, signing an unbalanced trade treaty just to keep them flowing. But no one has ever said "hard power is irrelevant" whereas soft power is denegrated constantly.

4/ A country's reputation in the world matters. It just does. "All that naive hippy shit is irrelevant, what it all comes down to is missile destroyers and GDP" is the sort of faux-savvy world-weary cynical take that sounds like wisdom until you remember geopolitics isn't a game of Starcraft.

5/ In real world international relations you constantly need other countries to do things for you that are important but not so critical that you'll bomb their cities or blockade their ports to get it. It's a big, complicated planet! You need people's cooperation and soft-power helps you get it.

watching the US of all people do this is bizarre, but then I've also spent most my life face palming as successive UK governments have denigrated, defunded and abused every single thing the country does well, allows it to punch well above its weight and be thought of fondly by people around the