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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.

2/ The Trump administration's complete neglect of soft power meant that when it turned around to NATO for help getting out of its self-created quagmire, not even the UK turned up. Meanwhile Zelenskyy charmed, memed and right-side-of-historied billions in aid that kept Ukraine in the fight.

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.

6/ The extent to which other countries will do things for you depends in part on: a) How much do they like you? b) How much do they trust you not to fuck them? c) Will being seen to work with you play will in their domestic press? That's soft-power baby.

Then there’s uk who pissed on EU’s chips now has to play nice since Trump wants to screw us over

I’m no diplomat or trade expert But being an arse to EU seems unwise in hindsight

Starmer : we aren’t going back into eu Trump : back our war and here’s some tariffs Starmer : um EU maybe I was hasty