It’s also formed through music, sports, media, and major industries like Silicon Valley and Hollywood.īut that doesn’t mean governments are absent from cultivating and wielding soft power. Soft power usually originates outside government in places like schools, religious institutions, and charitable groups. In practice, this process entails countries projecting their values, ideals, and culture across borders to foster goodwill and strengthen partnerships. coined the term soft power, defining it as a country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure. In the 1980s, political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. In this lesson, we’ll explore what soft power is, how countries exert it, and to what ends. But countries can also wield music, food, sports, and other cultural exports to bolster their international reputation and improve their soft power, or the ability to attract prospective partners. They can use hard power, which includes military force and economic sanctions. Governments have many tools at their disposal to extend their influence. society at large, leading other countries to identify more with the United States, capitalism, and democracy and less with the Soviet Union and communism. government hoped these efforts would demonstrate the individualism and creativity inherent in jazz and U.S. Amid the Cold War’s fierce ideological power struggle, the U.S. culture and improving the United States’ image abroad. The music ambassadors traveled to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and other regions deemed susceptible to communist influence with the explicit mission of showcasing U.S. government deployed the country’s most-revered jazz musicians-artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie-on goodwill tours around the world.

government indeed used the music genre as one of the many ways to counter its communist nemesis in Moscow.īeginning in the 1950s, the U.S. Okay, perhaps jazz isn’t your first association with the half-century conflict, but the U.S.

When thinking about the Cold War, what comes to mind? The Soviet Union? Nuclear weapons? The Berlin Wall?

Define foreigner