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Welcome to Perspectives with Wenchi Yu where we discuss Trump 2.0's policies and politics and their implications for Asia, China, Taiwan and beyond. On May 6, the world lost a giant scholar and an influential thinker who redefined our understanding of power, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joseph Nye. I had the honor of interviewing him for a Taiwanese TV program about soft power in the Taiwan-China context.
and sharing a panel at Kennedy School discussing geopolitics and semiconductors. His most significant contribution was illuminating the multifaceted nature of power. He demonstrated that power can be appealing, attractive, civil, and cultural, extending beyond mere military and economic strength. American power at its zenith was projected through education, Hollywood, culture, foreign aid,
and the promotion of democratic values and human rights. Alongside its military might, leadership, and economic prosperity. He was not only a thinker, but a doer. In practice, he created the Women and Public Policy Program at Kennedy School. I'm not delusional to think a return to that era is likely anytime soon. Even Professor Nae acknowledged that soft power rarely operates independently.
It requires a foundation of hard power. In his final opinion piece for the Financial Times, he lamented the death of American soft power following the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid. Recorded on April 18th, weeks before Professor Nye's passing, I spoke to Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations about America's soft power under Trump 2.0. Here's his perspective.
Welcome, Yanzhong. Thanks so much for joining us. Today, we wanted to talk about the idea of soft power. Maybe we can start by defining what is America's soft power from your point of view and how do we examine whether America is losing its edge in that area.
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Soft power as we know that is a term coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye. It refers to a country's ability to influence others without resorting to coercive or remunerative means. So over the past many decades we've seen how soft power has helped America achieving its foreign policy goals.
by American cultural when they see American liberal democracy, how it works and how its diplomacy performed. This can be examined in multiple dimensions. You could look at American education, could look at American cultural, foreign assistance, how they use the military power.
right, essentially some people call it the smart power, it's the combination use of the soft and hard.
When Joseph Knight coined the term, when was that? That was in the 90s?
It was 90s, yeah.
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Yeah, it was in the 90s. That was a different era when America's power was at its peak. Economically, militarily, politically, you know, Hollywood, education, university, private sector, technology, everything just seems to be at the top of the world. When we talk about soft power, does it always have to be attached to actual hard power? Do you think soft power can stand alone?
Well, certainly in this optimal situation, you want to use both hard power and soft power, but we do have cases that you don't have to have hard power and you can still achieve policy objectives. An example I can think of is Vatican, right? Clearly it doesn't have any hard power, but nobody can deny, right?
the potency is soft power, This is how it attracts people to that small city state and how, the pop say, it becomes so influential.
Yeah, that's a really interesting way of looking at it. Let's go through some of the aspects of America's strongest self-power, maybe education to start with.
Well, yeah, sure. We know that until recently, The US being a global education powerhouse, right?
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In 2023 and 2024 academic year, they had over 1.1 million international students. If you compare that with China, but even like the pre-pandemic level in 2018, there was a total of like 260,000 foreign students receiving academic education in the country. with America, it's more than four times of level.
of China and globally they were over a million international students.
What does that mean in terms of percentage of the whole student body?
Well, so 2022, they were total of 6.9 million international students. The U.S. actually hosted approximately 16 % of this total. And just to put that into perspective, the next largest destination for international students are the United Kingdom. is 10 % of the global students. Germany, 6%.
followed by countries like Australia, Russia and Canada.
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You know, the still tops the world right now, right? People still believe that. It is still attractive to global students. Are we seeing any signs of, you know, the attractiveness decline?
Currently, are seeing that this status by being the world's high education powerhouse, you know, being threatened with the distinctions between the federal government and the elite universities, you know, we have seen, for example, the administration and singled out institutions like Harvard, Columbia, basically, you know, threatening to slash farms unless they satisfy the requirements of the
federal government. More recently, even threatened to curb Harvard's ability to host international students and scholars. We are also seeing the implementation of policies by signaling that foreign students are unwelcome, such as visa revocations.
That all reduced America's appeal as a hub of international education and innovation.
These are government interventions that make it more difficult for international students to come. But do you think America's academic excellence just by itself is still most attractive? Or perhaps we don't know how good things are in China academic institutions and R &Ds or elsewhere in the world. Is that also happening that we're just not aware of or we're not paying as much attention to?
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Thank
Well, China has never been hiding its ambitions to be major
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power attracting international students, being the world's high tech power producing more PhDs nowadays than the US. They are trying to recruit more international students. They have been producing some of the best minds in the world.
Think how, for example, the owner of the DeepSeek by Liang Wenfeng, he graduated from Tsinghua University, he does not have any overseas education experience. This is just an example, they are actually quickly catching up.
Especially in the science and technology field, right? I think that when Feng was a graduate of Zhejiang University Yeah, seems like China or in many other countries STEM education is pretty strong and there's that Government support as well as historic support for STEM education. Yeah
I'm sorry, it's Zhejiang University.
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We've seen for example they have invested heavily in research and development that is quickly approaching the US level. Some of the universities like Fudang, are restructuring their curriculum to focus more on AI, high technology. To my knowledge, the university president is actually requiring each department to have at least one AI course offered. So now they're offering more than 100 AI related courses.
They want to be the leader in the field. At the time, we are cutting federal grants by including those from the NIH. That threatens research and development that is so critical to the U.S. reputation for technological leadership.
Without government funding support, do you think American institutions, elite institutions, can continue that lead in the world or they're being caught up by China?
China, almost all universities are state-sponsored. So government funding is the most important source of the support. In the United States, certainly we have private institutions, much more important compared to China. But government funding is very, very important. If you look at Harvard, now you have this nine billion dollars, federal funding now at stake.
There is about one quarter of Harvard's total budget, so there still a source of support, without the federal funding, a lot of these projects and programs can no longer function well.
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We probably won't see it now, but in a couple of years, we'll probably see the impact by such large funding cuts. want to talk about foreign assistance, which has been an incredible part of American soft power, whether it's USAID or State Department funding, global health-related funding around the world, humanitarian assistance. It seems like Trump 2.0 is less interested in continuing this tradition of American support.
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US State Department, USAID, they operate it as America's primary foreign aid organizations.
with projects in over 100 countries to promote democratic institutions, human rights, other initiatives by the USAID programs, offer reflective American values and approaches to governance and development that served for American influence. Now with the cutting closed down of those foreign aid institutions and support, we can expect that American soft power
power in those recipient countries will be seriously damaged and that creates opportunities for my geopolitical rivals to step in and feel they will.
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Are we seeing that? you think that's even possible? Because the areas that we just mentioned, whether it's democracy, human rights, global health, you know, all these areas, or education, doesn't seem to be any other major competitor's focus.
We are indeed seeing this the China is partially filling the void left by the US.
How did I do it?
You know, they have rollout policies driving the scientific talent migration. In fact, right after the US cut the NIH by indirect cost rate, we've seen some of the Chinese universities advertising, know, recruiting those, the scientists by
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very recent. Although they have the talent programs, been more than a decade, but they've been so aggressively recruiting, targeting this group of scientists. After the US announced the shutdown of this IED, we are seeing that some of the countries in Southeast Asia indicating they're going to switch to China, and China also indicate they're going to increase
know, support in some of those countries that traditionally are receiving US foreign aid.
Is China also targeting these areas or are they doing it differently?
That is a good question. We see China has a different model in terms of to project soft power. They are more interested in using hard power and soft power in combination, integrating soft power in projecting hard power, like the Belt and Road Initiative. They are focusing on those infrastructural capabilities, building hospitals, clinics, for example. That expands the charter
China's soft power, in the meantime, you know, also help expand China's geopolitical initiatives and expanding its market. If you compare that with the United States, just to use example of global health projects, we are more interested in projects that promote governance, law and human rights. So when the U.S. is withdrawing from Africa in terms of HIV prevention, because this is not sort of like
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a foreign aid priority for China so don't expect China to in and fill the void at least in the short term.
It sounds like China does believe expanding its hard power and soft power could come with it, but it won't be suing and alone soft power support only, which is what the US has done quite a bit and primarily through foreign aid assistance like USAID. We rarely see Americans building bridges or
buildings and construction sites. The US has been more interested in promoting ideas, building individual capacity. It to be two very different approaches. It'll be interesting to see years down the road, which type of approach.
maybe viewed more favorably by the locals. We were just talking about Joseph Nye's soft power and he also recently said in an FT article that it is the end of American soft power with the Trump
administration. But would you say it actually started before Trump?
Trump did not start the decline, The US soft power has not indicated in his recent piece. US soft power has experienced periods of decline before, notably during the Vietnam War and the Iraqi War. But we know the US demonstrated resilience through reforms and shifts in leadership, through the policies of Gerard Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Just to give you an example,
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The Vietnam War led to global protests, American civil societies, civil self-criticism and cultural exports, and civil rights movement maintained some attractiveness. Also, have to keep in mind the 2008 financial crisis that didn't help US soft power projection. In fact, that was the beginning, in my opinion, of Chinese loss of faith on the American
American economic model. no longer treat the US as teachers. of course, January 6th kept a riot. Further damaged the perception of US democratic stability. People started to be skeptical of the US political system. But these declines built on pre-existing challenges. Joe Biden's soft power partially recovered because of his reaffirmation of alliances and democratic
rhetoric, although domestic polarization persisted. But it seems to be increasingly clear that on Trump 2.0, the decline has accelerated because of this deliberate policy choices that rejected the traditional pillars of soft power.
For Trump administration, is it just returning to hard power, economic security, military security, even creating a global order that is more based on hard power and strengths?
We're seeing the world sort of experiencing a shift toward a more hard powered system, right, especially with the U.S. policies under the current administration, but it hasn't fully returned to a rule of the jungle, you where only force, corrosion, know, payment matter, right? But under the President Trump, we're seeing the U.S. is focusing more on military, economic strength, right?
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like increasing defense spending. The focus on hard power only reduces the reliance on soft power, like diplomacy, cultural influence. In the meantime, if you look at the global trends, there seems to be a rise in great power competition. We're seeing, right, bilateral institutions' influence is in decline, not just, right, certainly, right, the United Nations.
in multilateral itself seems to be under attack. the soft power and global rules still are not irrelevant. For example, the sovereignty, territorial integrity by those norms and rules highlighted by international institutions like the UAE continue to be the main norms dictating countries' external behaviors.
Though only 100 days into a second Trump term, the administration's disruptive approach to traditions and norms has signaled a clear direction to change America's role in the world. Given Professor Nae's observation of historical fluctuations in American soft power, the question remains, is this erosion of American soft power temporary? Only time will tell. This is Perspectives with Wenchi Yu.
where we analyze the policies and political strategies of Trump 2.0 and their implications for Asia, China, Taiwan and beyond. Thank you for watching and listening. We value your feedback. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and podcast. See you next week.