Soft Power and Geographic Influence

The concept of soft power was introduced by the American political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., a Harvard professor and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, first in his 1990 book Bound to Lead and developed at greater length in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004). Nye defined soft power as the ability of a state to shape the preferences and behavior of others through attraction and persuasion, rather than through the coercion or payment characteristic of "hard power," resting on three principal resources: a country's culture, insofar as it is attractive to others; its political values, when it lives up to them both at home and abroad; and its foreign policies, when they are seen as legitimate and holding moral authority by other states.