Soft Power and Hard Views: How American Commentators are Spreading over the World’s Opinion Pages

Abstract

In 1981, British realist and writer E. H. Carr defined international power as being divided into three categories: military, economic and power over opinion. The last of these is notoriously difficult to measure, and to consciously control. To date, theorists like Joseph Nye have used public opinion polls, particularly those canvassing the attitudes people in other countries hold towards the United States, to try to gauge how effective American soft power is, and how palatable its ideals are beyond its borders. For this paper, I chose to examine the export of American thought by documenting the presence of American columnists on newspaper opinion pages around the world in the 2000s. This was in part an attempt to assess what impact, if any, September 11 and the war in Iraq had on the demand for American opinion by editors who act as local gatekeepers of thought.