Soft Power
Joseph Nye's term for getting what you want because other countries want it too, through attraction rather than payment or force.
Joseph Nye coined the phrase in 1990, in a book arguing against the fashionable belief that America was in decline. His point was that people counting tanks and GDP were missing a source of influence that appears on neither list: the ability to get other countries to want what you want, so you do not have to pay them or threaten them.
Nye named three sources. A country's culture, where other people find it appealing. Its political values, when it actually lives by them. And its foreign policy, when others see it as legitimate. Hard power gets you compliance. Soft power shapes what other people think is normal and worth copying, which is cheaper and lasts longer.
What it is not
Soft power is not propaganda, and confusing the two is how governments waste money on it. Most of a country's appeal is produced by things the state does not control: its films, universities, music, companies, and the behavior of its citizens. American influence during the Cold War came less from official broadcasting than from jazz, jeans, Hollywood, and the hundreds of thousands of foreign students, including many future ministers and central bankers, who studied at American universities and went home with an argument in their heads.
It is also not a substitute for the other kind of power. Nye later coined the term smart power specifically to stop people reading him as saying that being liked could replace being capable. Alliances hold together better when the leading country is trusted, and coercion works better when the people being coerced think the cause is fair.
The tools and their limits
Governments have built machinery to try. The British Council, the Goethe-Institut, and the Alliance Francaise represent a century of practice. China has spent heavily on Confucius Institutes, foreign-language broadcasting, and infrastructure diplomacy. Qatar built Al Jazeera. The clearest recent success, the Korean Wave, was mostly not a government product: the state supported an export industry and the industry made things people actually wanted to watch.
The failures are just as instructive. Soft power is hard to measure and harder to convert into a specific decision. Audiences around the world loved American culture while opposing the invasion of Iraq. It is destroyed quickly by behavior that contradicts the story a country tells about itself, which is what Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did to American claims about the rule of law. And it can be useless at the moment it is most needed: South Korea's huge cultural presence in China did nothing to stop Beijing's economic retaliation over a missile defense deployment in 2016.
The term has also been stretched past the point of usefulness. Buying a football club, hosting a tournament, or funding a think tank is not soft power in Nye's sense. That is money, and everyone can see it is money.
The idea survives because it names something the usual measures of power miss. States are not only threatening each other. They are also competing over what a successful country is supposed to look like, and that competition was much of what the Cold War was about and much of what the argument between Washington and Beijing is about now.