American soft power is often overstated: While the US excels in science (Nobel prizes), popular culture (Hollywood, McDonald’s), and business (AI, tech), many regions (India, Africa, Latin America) retain strong local or European cultural influences.

Europe and Asia have significant counterweights: European countries lead in literature Nobels, classical music, and quality-of-life metrics; India, China, and others have vibrant cultural identities and growing global influence.

US strengths are in specific areas: American soft power is most dominant in business, arms exports, and popular entertainment, but much of the world does not feel culturally overwhelmed by the US.

Is the world being captured by what the late Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, has termed American “Soft Power”? President Donald Trump says he’s pushing for this.

The debate about American influence on the world at large is not new. Charles Dickens, the great British nineteenth-century novelist, on a visit to the US had no compunction in thinking America’s culture had little to offer the world. He said it was “a clamorous gang of fakes, fools and tricksters”. (And he hadn’t heard of Trump.) In the early twentieth century, the writer Virginia Woolf of the Bloomsbury Group, one of the guiding spirits of London’s intellectuals, treated America with a mixture of disdain and disinterest. In 1931 a former viceroy of India complained to parliament that Hollywood had helped shatter “the white man’s prestige in the........

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