Soft Power in Trump 2.0
Daniel Runde
Daniel Runde is a senior executive and strategist in international development, international trade, investment, global business and organizational change. Runde is the author of the book The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power.
Daniel F. Runde has spent the last 20 years working on global development and American soft power. He is Senior Vice President, Director of the Project on Prosperity and Development, and William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Prior to CSIS, he held leadership positions at USAID and the World Bank Group and worked in both commercial and investment banking.
Runde serves on several boards, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bretton Woods Committee, and previously chaired two U.S. federal advisory committees that touch on soft power. Furthermore, he is a contributor to thehill.com and hosts a CSIS podcast series called Building the Future: Freedom, Prosperity & Foreign Policy with Dan Runde.
The American Imperative Summary
We are in a new age of a great power competition. This competition will not be fought in Beijing or Moscow, rather it will be contested in Ukraine, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Daniel Runde makes the case for renewed American engagement in the developing world for our own prosperity and security, but also because foreign assistance and other forms of soft power are largely where this competition is going to be contested. The developing world has changed over the last several decades – it is richer, freer, and has a lot more agency. Russia and China can fill vacuums: digital vacuums, trade vacuums, vaccine vacuums and infrastructure vacuums. The United States and our allies must offer a positive agenda that meets the needs and aspirations of partner countries. If this is not done, these countries will turn to Russia and China.
Leadership is a choice, and Daniel Runde argues that the United States, in partnership with its friends, allies, the private sector, civil society, and average voters, should seek to be on the side of peoples’ aspirations and hopes as often as possible. The book calls for a fundamental review and rethink of how and why the United States uses soft power and addresses several issues that have emerged over the last several decades. The book hopes to spark a national conversation about how and for what end we will use our non-military forms of our power overseas given the challenges and opportunities in front of us.
The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power is the first book in decades to look at our non-military power through the lens of great-power competition. It calls for: supporting broad-based economic growth, supporting good governance and anti-corruption, long-term training, differentiating our approaches in middle-income countries and fragile states, and stronger US leadership in the multilateral system.
The book closes with a call for major fixes to the current system of soft power: the way we are organized, the “plumbing” issues, how we dole out monies, and personnel issues. We need a 20-year strategy for our soft power that works for Republicans and Democrats and will respond to the challenges of today.
What Others Say
“In The American Imperative, Daniel Runde makes clear that building a better future requires prevailing in competitions short of armed conflict. He recommends how America can regain global leadership by taking a fundamentally different approach to diplomacy and foreign assistance. We cannot afford for Runde’s recommendations to lie inert in this excellent book. This is a book that must be read, debated, and applied to improve policy development and implementation.”
–H.R. McMaster, former United States National Security Advisor and author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
“Development is an underrated but mighty power. It opens the opportunity for freedom and self-sufficiency. With The American Imperative, Daniel Runde reminds us that both good and bad actors can fill vacuums in the world. By making a case for a renewed foreign policy agenda that emphasizes broad-based economic growth and good governance for the developing world, his book outlines how the United States can lead for good.
–Henrietta H. Fore, Former Executive Director of UNICEF and Former Administrator of USAID and
“An absent America will mean ceding burgeoning economies, emerging technologies, influential institutions, and the very values of work and governance to authoritarians with no interest in the words and propositions of the Declaration of Independence. To forestall this, Runde in this book provides the playbook, one in which America leads with the tools of diplomacy and development to advance democracy and opportunity the world over, not at the point of a sword but with a helping hand. It is time for the policymakers to read it, get off the sidelines, and put it into practice.”
–Senator Todd C. Young, U.S. Senate
“Dan Runde has a mission: to integrate development assistance within a comprehensive U.S. foreign policy. His book efficiently explains the purposes, history, changing themes, tools, traps, reforms, and institutions of aid—with an eye on the practice and practicalities of experience. The American Imperative advocates a valuable conservative internationalism amidst the transformations and competition of the early 21st Century.”
–Robert B. Zoellick, former President, World Bank, U.S. Trade Representatives, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, author of America in the World
“The United States has a unique role to play in the worldtoday. Of course, it will need military power to play that role. But most of the challenges facing America require harnessing other forms of power. In The American Imperative, Dan Runde explains the importance of non-military power and provides a blueprint for a long-overdue bipartisan consensus on how the country can strengthen these other instruments of national power.”
–Stephen J. Hadley, former United States National Security Advisor
“The rise of China under the rule of the Communist Party poses perhaps the greatest threat to the United States and our way of life that we have ever seen. To prevail and ensure that we enjoy another American century, we must use every tool of national power. Dan Runde is one of the nation’s preeminent experts on international development. In The American Imperative, Runde gives us a blueprint for how America can complement its military strength with diplomatic, cultural, and economic power to ensure victory in the long struggle ahead.”
–Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, former United States National Security Advisor
“America regularly assesses the strategic threats that confront us and relentlessly seeks to fund, build, and maintain the military forces needed. But as Dan Runde deftly argues, our efforts to mobilize and focus the elements of soft power that constitute what can actually be our greatest advantage is haphazard at best and at worst, dangerously deficient. A great read and an essential primer in today’s environment.”
–Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command
“If, as Clemenceau said, ‘War is too serious to be left to the generals,’ global development is too important to be left to well-meaning philanthropists and multinational development agencies. Hard-headed realists miss the point when they categorize a coup in a developing country by Putin’s Wagner Group of paramilitary mercenaries as hard power while a different country falling into a debt trap by Xi Jinping is treated in the category of ‘soft power,’ when the consequences of the latter may in fact have a greater impact on the hard subject of great power competition. The American Imperative r is the first book that I can recall reading by someone with deep experience and involvement in the issues of global development policy who addresses that subject from the hard-headed perspective of whether U.S. policies—and those of the multinational institutions that pretend to be apolitical but which often serve to compete for national and commercial interests—do in fact serve the interests of the American taxpayers who fund them.”
–Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank Group and former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense
“Will competition with China for world leadership mean military conflict? Dan Runde explains how to fight– and win– peacefully by making our policies and bureaucracies fit for the 21st century. In the struggle for influence in the developing world, Runde tells us what cards we hold–and how to play them.
–Elliott Abrams, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy
“Dan Runde is one of our nation’s foremost scholars of international security. In The American Imperative, he takes us inside the global competition playing out in the developing world between the United States and our values and our authoritarian adversaries and their values. This is a competition we cannot ignore and one we must win in order to safeguard our own security. Policymakers would do well to study Runde’s blueprint and put it into action.”
–Representative Mike Gallagher, U.S. House of Representatives