Cold War Hard Power Essay

The Cold War was fought and won with soft power rather than hard power. Discuss.

Soft power is anything but the use of force. It includes manipulating economic and cultural influence for persuasive reasoning in politics , providing international aid for the purpose of allying one set of countries against another, giving speeches to rally the people and to attract them towards an ideology, building relationships, and so on, all of it in order to gain an objective. There are also extreme uses of soft power as used by the imperialist powers in the seventeenth century, to defeat their enemies by bringing diseases to the colonies.

The term ‘soft power’ is sometimes described freely. Not all aspects of non hard power are soft power. The two Great Wars during the twentieth century were fought using hard power (utilization of infantry and weaponry, bombing, raids, force, sanctions) as compared to soft power. But there was another war in the latter half of the twentieth century, which was majorly fought using soft power as compared to the utilization of hard power. But the use of soft power did not end there. Till now, America and China use culture and their strong economic status to influence regular people towards them. For example, in American movies, the villains are always either Russians or the Chinese, mafia or otherwise. These movies and other types of media propaganda was sent inside the iron curtain to undermine the communist lifestyle.

Despite the fact that the theory of 'soft power' was coined at the end of the twentieth century , the idea has been diligently used by politicians, fifty years prior, throughout the Cold War, hence the name. Joseph Nye wrote a book which described soft power in depth. He divided power into thre...

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...e notion that to avoid a hot war, the two superpowers turned to the use of soft power, without actually knowing the term for it. All of the leaders in the two countries made sure to avoid a hot war at any expense, knowing the consequences. The speeches, telegrams, letters, summits and so forth guaranteed that a nuclear war would not take place. There is a consensus that the United States of America won the cold war, somewhat because its major rival fell apart. In any case, it was also because the Americans did not send troops directly into the zones controlled by the Soviets in Eastern Europe, but used force in the areas where they couldn’t let the countries succumb to communism such as Korea and Vietnam. The Cold War was majorly fought using soft power than hard power and this is the reason why we live in times where the world is not destroyed by nuclear weapons.