Restoring American Soft Power

Is It Possible, or Desirable?

Trita Parsi points out:

Iran’s latest AI Lego video marks a significant pivot. Instead of taunting the US military, it reflects a new chapter in which Tehran will seek peace by reaching out directly to the American people, bypassing the US government. It's a mirror image of the US strategy of the past decades.

Some of the lines are quite noteworthy and will likely resonate with the anti-establishment sentiments prevailing among American youth in particular:

"I love the constitution, the way it was meant. But not the way your leaders bypass consent..."

I had noticed that video: it talks about how Iranians love America, its culture, music, fashion, films (we’re just like you, we watch films through illegal satellite dishes, not exactly), and even we love the constitution — but they are against our ruling class. Actually they have made multiple videos on this theme:

And many more.
I wonder if this doesn’t offer an alternative that many of us are normally too traumatized and pessimistic to consider — there might eventually be a way to rebuild American soft power. Even our “enemies” still admire us — or at least part of us. The U.S. was founded when a slaveholder composed the most beautiful words ever written about human equality. We have to fully recognize both parts of that sentence.

I was in Beijing during the first Trump administration for a dialogue that the original pre-DOGE United States Institute of Peace had sponsored with CICIR. According to Wikipedia:

The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR; KICK-er; Chinese: 中国现代国际关系研究院) is the cover identity of the 11th Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS). It is a set of research institutes used as a front to influence foreign diplomats and academics and collect intelligence.^[1][2][3]Located in Beijing, CICIR is operated by senior MSS officers.^[1] A 2009 report from the CIA's Open Source Center concluded that CICIR resembles a "Soviet-style intelligence organ" whose principle intelligence customer is the Foreign Affairs Leading Group. CICIR is overseen by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.^[4][5]

On that visit I arrived a bit early, and Hu Shisheng, the director of the Institute for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania had organized a dinner for me at a Manchurian restaurant. He also invited his wife. I eventually understood that the reason for her presence was to be a designated driver, which we needed by the time we were done.

The other guest was someone whose real name I still don’t know. Let’s call him Xiao. In 2008 he had been an official at the Chinese UN Mission. At the time Richard Holbrooke was still a member of the board of the Asia Society, and I was working on a Holbrooke-sponsored Asia Society task force on Afghanistan that I co-chaired with Tom Pickering. One of our recommendations was a U.S.-China dialogue about Afghanistan. At our launch event at the Asia Society, Xiao introduced himself and invited me out to lunch. There followed several years of increasingly expensive culinary adventures that seemed to exceed normal diplomatic entertainment budgets. This was confirmed when I received a visit from the FBI informing me that Xiao was an intelligence agent. The FBI did not discourage me from talking to him, but they wanted me to have situational awareness.

Xiao and I had very wide ranging conversations for a few years, which I reported to my superiors in the State Department while I was working there (and listed on the part of the application for my security clearance where it asked if I had ever met any foreigners), but then he was recalled to Beijing, and he went silent. He was unreachable by text or email at the contacts I had used. But a few years later, when I came to Beijing for the USIP meeting with CICIR, Hu told me he would arrange a dinner for us. He and his wife picked me up and took me to the Manchu restaurant, where Xiao was waiting for us. It turned out that he was now on the staff of the Standing Committee of the Politburo answering directly to Chair of the State Council Li Keqiang.

After the conference I was stayed on for a few days. USIP had put us up in a business/conference hotel a bit outside of the center of town, but I decided to move into a boutique hotel in a renovated traditional courtyard house near the old center. (A graduate student at Peking University once said to me in a car as he was escorting me to a lecture I was giving, “Mao destroyed the entire old city of Beijing. Even the Japanese did not do that.” We will return to the theme of conversations in moving vehicles.) Xiao and I were in touch for those few days, and he offered to pick me up at the conference hotel and transfer me to my new digs. During the longish ride through Beijing traffic with my luggage, he started querying me about Trump and his administration. That conversation continued that night over Peking Duck and Australian Shiraz (a felicitous combination) at a contemporary-style duck restaurant. All he wanted to talk about was Trump, not Afghanistan or anything else.

The key to his interest may have been in a remark he made earlier in the day during our drive. As I was recounting the various (in retrospect, relatively mild) ways that Trump was assaulting American democracy during his first term, Xiao seemingly took advantage of his confidence that his private car was not bugged, as he had to assume all stationary rooms were, to say something surprising. I had noticed this phenomenon before. In 1990, when I was a fellow at USIP, I was escorting the Soviet Union’s leading expert on Afghanistan, the late Yuri Gankovsky, around Washington. Gankovsky had spent eight years in the Gulag after serving in the Soviet army unit that captured SS headquarters in Berlin, the ruins of which I visited with him in 1998, while we were attending a consultation on Afghanistan convened by UN envoy Francesc Vendrell. In 1990, as the U.S.-Soviet dialogue on Afghanistan was stuck on the issue of whether President Najibullah should leave office before or after a political process about a successor regime, Gankovsky turned to me in a taxi from the State Department and remarked, “It is impossible for someone like Najibullah to remain in Afghanistan, because he is covered in blood from head to toe.”

In Beijing, in 2014, Xiao glanced at me as he was driving and said, “We don’t think that China can become a democracy. But the existence of a country like the United States gave us some kind of hope.”

If both an official of the standing committee of the Communist Party of China and the leaders of war propaganda for the Islamic Republic of Iran can acknowledge their admiration for the values of the Declaration of Independence, the constitution, Jazz, and Hollywood, there might be something for future U.S. administrations — and above all, American society — to work with in the future to rekindle our nearly extinguished soft power. The condition for that, however, will be America’s recognition of the dual nature of our heritage — as not just a flawed democracy, but a society in which freedom and slavery, equality and racism, independence and expansionist conquest have played equal parts. It will require an immense struggle with the remnants of American exceptionalism to recognize that what Solzhenitsyn wrote of individuals is equally true for nations: “The line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart.” But even our adversaries might be rooting for us. There are signs for those who know.