A former Harriman Director recalls his participation in U.S. soft power projects and considers the consequences of Trump’s America First policy.
Each day they arrived early: Uzbeks and Ukrainians, Georgians and Russians, lined up between temporary steel barricades to enter “Information USA,” a U.S. Department of State cultural exhibit that traveled across the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1988. Starved for accurate information due to vast censorship in the Soviet Union, they came to pepper me and the exhibit’s 23 other American guides with questions about Michael Jackson, Social Security, and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
“Why do people in the U.S. have to sleep on the streets?”
“Is Nancy Reagan really a Georgian?”
“How do you catch criminals if you have no internal passports?”
By the end of each day roughly 6,000 Soviets had seen their first copying machine, sparred with the American guides about the arms race, and left with a changed view of the United States. This was soft power in action, in the final years of the Cold War, when my Russian Studies training enabled me to become a first-hand witness to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to take part in several soft power efforts in the former Soviet space, and their effects have been transformative—on the world, and on me as well.
In international affairs, powerful countries use their military and economic might to get what they want. But for decades, the United States saw soft power—its ability to influence others by relying on culture, values, and persuasion—as its not-so-secret weapon. Successive U.S. governments sent musicians, ordinary citizens, and experts of all kinds on cultural exchanges and development programs to improve the U.S. image in ways that served broader policy goals. The Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Europe and create markets for the United States after the devastation of World War II. The Peace Corps sent 240,000 Americans to some of the poorest countries of the world to build goodwill and promote economic development. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program to end HIV globally, saved an estimated 26 million lives, mostly in Africa.
For all their differences over policy, Republican and Democratic administrations believed in the power of U.S. values and culture as a force for good in the world.
But under the Trump administration, the weapon of soft power has not only been holstered; it has been dismantled. The White House has reduced the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Voice of America to empty shells and drastically cut funding for PEPFAR and the Peace Corps. The new Trump team at the U.S. Agency for Global Media even disconnected satellites carrying Radio Free Europe to Russia. Closer to our region, we see drastic cuts to funding for foreign language training, as well as cuts to academic research that benefited generations of scholars studying the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Rulers in Moscow and Beijing who for decades devoted vast resources to undermining U.S. soft power can hardly believe their good luck.
Of course, political interests have always driven soft power. President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps in part to sway newly decolonialized nations to side with the United States in its global battle against communism. President George W. Bush launched PEPFAR to burnish his image as a “compassionate conservative.”
But the Trump administration’s foreign aid policies are a stark departure. While prior administrations saw themselves as white-hatted heroes who ride in to save the day (albeit often with very mixed motives and results), the Trump team claims to be correcting perceived injustices and slights that supposedly have been heaped on America by enemies and allies alike. The current resident of the White House presents the United States as a victim that must be constantly on guard against a cruel, ungrateful world that only takes advantage of Washington’s supposed generosity and weakness.
To be sure, soft power has its limits, and it is often difficult to measure the impact of foreign aid and soft power projects. Culture, values, and ideas often work in subtle ways. But as Washington cancels its decades-long bipartisan promotion of soft power on a global scale, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the many and diverse benefits of U.S. soft power. Over the course of my career—from working for the State Department in the last days of the Soviet Union, to advising the Russian government during the excitement of the 1990s, to writing about Russia for more than 30 years in academia—I have seen the rise and fall of U.S. soft power.
State Department Traveling Exhibits
From November 1987 until January 1989, I traveled to six Soviet cities, stopping for two months in each as part of “Information USA.” Often working in pavilions previously dedicated to the achievements of Soviet workers and scientists, we displayed fax machines, bar code readers, personal computers, and other forms of information technology to highlight how the free flow of information benefits daily life in the United States—and to draw a sharp contrast with the censorship of the Soviet Union.
“Information USA” was part of a long-standing cultural exchange organized by the U.S. Department of State and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Soviet officials agreed to host the traveling exhibits only grudgingly, in hopes of getting concessions from the United States in other areas such as trade. From 1959 to 1979, and again from 1986 to 1991, the U.S. and Soviet governments exchanged traveling exhibits in hopes of improving their images among their rival populations. Soviet exhibits in the United States were not well funded and often sparsely attended, but the U.S. exhibits in the Soviet Union were a hit from day one. The first exhibit took place in Moscow in 1959 and featured the “Kitchen Debate,” in which Nikita Krushchev and Richard Nixon sparred in good humor over the affordability of dishwashers, access to housing, and whether the Soviet Union ultimately would surpass the United States.
Nineteen U.S. exhibits on design, photography, hand tools, and other topics rotated through Soviet cities, with themes changing every few years. The “American Exhibits,” as they were known, aimed to reach a cross-section of Soviet society with an emphasis on citizens beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg; think Rostov and Irkutsk, Tashkent and Tbilisi. The exhibits often displayed new technologies in accessible ways, allowing non-specialists to understand their use and importance. And the exhibits prioritized contact between ordinary U.S. and Soviet citizens. The American guides who staffed them and met with the Soviet public were chosen via written application and oral interviews, conducted in Russian. They came from all walks of life, including students, teachers, businesspeople, artists, and physicians. They were typical Americans, albeit Russian-speaking ones. The job came at just the right time for me, as I had recently finished my undergraduate degree and was looking for an adventure.
The cliché goes that diplomats are sent abroad to tell lies for their country, but the exhibit guides had different marching orders. We were told to describe U.S. policy as accurately as possible, but we were also encouraged to express our personal views on whether we agreed or disagreed with the policy. Many of the most powerful moments during the exhibit were debates and disagreements among the guides themselves about U.S. foreign policy; I remember the surprise of our Soviet visitors when I argued with a fellow guide over U.S. policy in Central America.
The exhibits also offered a space for Soviets to discuss these issues among themselves, which they were much freer to do in the late Soviet era. In 1988 in Magnitogorsk, a Russian city that had been closed to foreigners for decades, I was reduced to the role of spectator as our guests debated the merits of conservative Politburo member Yegor Ligachev’s criticism of perestroika at the All-Union Communist Party Conference that year. In Leningrad a few months later, several guests almost came to blows over the effectiveness of public protests for greater freedom of speech.
The exhibits in general, and “Information USA” in particular, painted the United States as forward-looking, open, and tolerant. Our visitors were often staggered to learn that most guides in the exhibit voted in 1988 for Michael Dukakis rather than George Bush and that we were willing to criticize many aspects of U.S. politics rather than simply spout a party line.
It is hard to measure precisely the impact of soft power efforts like the exhibits on American foreign policy goals, but for decades U.S. government leaders clearly felt that they were important. Internal memos from the National Security Council argued that no broader exchange agreement with the Soviets could be concluded without the exhibits.
They also had an impact on Soviet society. Famed Soviet human rights activist Viktor Bukovsky claimed that he became a dissident after witnessing the first traveling exhibit in Moscow in 1959.
Not all Soviet visitors to the exhibits became dissidents, of course, but they came in large numbers and often more than once.
Our guests occasionally brought znachki (badges) and plastic bags with emblems, saved as souvenirs from past exhibits, to discuss with us. From time to time, I was asked about guides from past exhibits who had come through their city years earlier.
A less obvious impact: the exhibits produced a cadre of U.S. experts with deep knowledge of the Soviet Union and strong language skills who then went on to staff embassies, run businesses across Eurasia, and report for major news outlets. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2008–2012) John Beyrle was part of the “Exhibit Guide Mafia,” as were Harriman Institute luminaries like Elizabeth Valkenier, a guide at the famed “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow, and former Harriman director Richard Ericson, a veteran of “Research and Development U.S.” in 1972. As for me, the exhibits not only improved my Russian language and public speaking skills, they provided a special window onto Soviet society and politics at a critical moment in world history and convinced me to apply to graduate school to study political science.
The traveling exhibits ended in 1991, and it is a stretch to say that they brought down the Soviet Union that same year. But really, how can we ever know? As Joseph Nye, the political scientist who coined the term “soft power,” observed in 2019: “The Berlin Wall collapsed not under an artillery barrage, but from hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been affected by ideas that had penetrated the Iron Curtain over the preceding decades.” Surely the traveling exhibits were one of the most effective vehicles for promoting those ideas.
International Broadcasting
Government funded broadcasts like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) have long been key to U.S. soft power efforts. Founded during World War II, Voice of America broadcast news about the United States to a global audience, while Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came on line in 1950 and broadcast more politically pointed news toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, respectively.
While the traveling exhibits operated in a black-and-white world of communism versus capitalism, U.S. efforts to win hearts and minds in the Soviet Union became more complicated following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Soviet television and press were attracting large audiences by discussing previously forbidden topics, like Stalin-era purges, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and corruption in the Communist Party. For the first time, U.S. soft power efforts faced competition from Soviet media for listeners seeking an alternative to Communist propaganda, and RFE/RL had to adapt.
In the summer of 1990, I had just finished my first year at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the Harriman Institute and was looking for ways to put my academic training and experience as an exhibit guide to good use. With a little luck, I found the perfect summer job at RFE/RL in Munich: writing articles for a weekly magazine that reported on events in the Soviet Union. I shared an office with the legendary expert on Russian labor, Elizabeth Teague, and worked just down the hall from the spot where in 1981 a team of Basque terrorists—financed by the Romanian government and led by the Venezuelan terrorist Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, aka “Carlos the Jackal”—detonated a bomb that injured four RFE/RL staffers. My ten weeks at “the Radios” in Munich, though, were peaceful.
This was an especially interesting moment for the Radios. Many RFE/RL researchers and radio personalities were political dissidents who had left the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe in the 1970s and felt increasingly out of touch due to the rapid changes underway in their home countries. Their expertise on the “ins and outs” of the Politburo and their aging contacts in their homelands were becoming less useful as political change swept the region.
I had just spent 15 months in the Soviet Union, and they questioned me like an explorer freshly returned from a newly discovered territory. “Can you really travel freely outside of Moscow?” “What was Irkutsk like?” they wondered.
Rather than writing about ideology or the Communist Party, longtime staples of RFE/RL reports, the other summer interns and I focused on burgeoning movements for autonomy in the Baltics, efforts to create media programs to challenge the Soviet press, and attempts to conduct economic reforms that took power from state planners and gave them to new entrepreneurs—topics we knew from our recent travels were under intense discussion within the services’ audience.
I was especially interested in the creation of new political institutions, such as the Moscow and Leningrad City Soviets. For the first time, voters (rather than the Communist Party) chose the members of the local Soviets, and I explored the electoral strategies that brought anti-communist politicians to power. I published profiles of politicians like Leningrad Mayor Anatolii Sobchak and analyzed reforms to local and regional government. Events compelled us to take on novel topics, and we all recognized the importance of the moment. We felt like we were writing not only for our contemporaries but for future historians as well.
Did our work have an impact? Did the Radios foster political change in the region? The Kremlin’s longstanding, overheated rhetoric attacking these broadcasts is one measure of the success of U.S. international broadcasting efforts. Kremlin propagandists referred to the Voice of America as the “Voice of Lies,” (Golos Lzhi), while Soviet cartoonists depicted broadcasters in the form of a hideous snake in an Uncle Sam hat. Extensive Soviet jamming efforts gave further evidence of the importance of international broadcasting to U.S. goals.
Despite the jamming, the Soviet public tuned in. Estimates suggest that RFE/RL had 35 million listeners across the globe during the Cold War, with a large portion of them in the Soviet Union. During the Solidarity strikes of 1981 in Poland, one report noted that roughly two-thirds of Poles tuned in to Radio Free Europe. Even today, in an era marked by a tsunami of information from a range of sources, RFE/RL reports that in 2025 around 9 percent of adult Russians and one quarter of Ukrainians tuned in to their broadcasts.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin clearly thought foreign broadcasts helped drive political change. On Radio Liberty’s fortieth anniversary in 1993, he proclaimed: “It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Radio Liberty’s contribution to the destruction of the totalitarian Soviet regime.” Similarly, Lech Wałęsa, who was elected as Poland’s first post-communism president in 1990, said at the time that “the degree [of RFE’s influence] cannot even be described. Would there be an Earth without the sun?”
The impact of Radio Liberty was also felt at the ballot box. One academic study from 2015 found that because atmospheric conditions often made Soviet jamming efforts ineffective, access to Radio Liberty varied a great deal across Russia. The researcher, Javier Garcia-Arenas, found that electoral districts where Russians had better access to Radio Liberty were much less likely to vote for communist candidates in the presidential elections in 1991 and 1996.
The Radios also changed my course. Given the excitement around the topics I was covering, I lobbied to stay on in Munich as an analyst and to put off finishing graduate school, but my boss, Paul Goble, discouraged me. He said that to understand the challenges underway in the Soviet Union I would have to develop new skills. I would have to learn about democracy and markets. I would have to become competent in statistics and research methods. And graduate school, he said, was the best way to do that. He was right. Shortly thereafter, I returned to Columbia to start the Ph.D. program in Political Science.
Rule of Law and Democracy Promotion in the 1990s
U.S. soft power projects in Eurasia peaked in the 1990s with efforts to promote rule of law, civil society, and democracy. Without an ideological rival to orient its efforts, the U.S. government took on tasks that far exceeded past programs. The goals were much larger than the Cold War-era efforts that focused primarily on improving the image of the United States among Soviet citizens. Now, U.S. foreign policy’s ambition was nothing less than to help build a democratic Russia, with a strong rule of law, that would be amenable to better relations with the United States. The scale and complexity of these efforts were staggering. As one longtime rule-of-law reform expert told the Carnegie Foundation’s Tom Carothers: “We know how to do a lot of things, but deep down we don’t really know what we are doing.”
In the 1990s Moscow was awash with consultants (“advizery”) and what one friend called “Arturchiki,” accountants for Arthur Anderson—all working on various USAID-supported projects. At the time, I had begun research for a dissertation on the emerging commodities, equities, and futures markets in Russia and landed a short-term position at the Russian Federal Securities and Exchange Commission in 1995–1996. We worked in a cavernous auditorium that shared space with the Gaidar Institute on Economic Policy, just down the street from Moscow’s first McDonald’s and the Main Telegraph Station on Gazetny Pereulok in central Moscow. In those offices, a large number of Russian accountants, economists, and legal experts, along with a small number of foreign advisers, designed plans to build a market infrastructure so that brokers could trade shares in Russia’s recently privatized companies.
We were especially interested in understanding how brokers traded with each other when the state was too weak to enforce contracts. Indeed, brokers worked with the understanding that all trades raised the possibility of disputes and the involvement of big men with big guns. At the time, mafia-like organizations and private security agencies hired by powerful new owners were a potential threat in any major economic deal. To help increase trust on the equities market, USAID and the Russian brokers association, known as NAUFOR, installed an electronic trading platform that allowed brokers to share information about their past trades with other brokers, so that everyone could identify who was a trustworthy counterpart and who was not. By allowing brokers to create a reputation for fulfilling their contracts that others could see, the system was supposed to spur trading on the market.
To see whether this project worked as predicted, I traveled across Moscow to conduct surveys of brokers. In long interviews, fueled by tea for me and cigarettes for my subjects, I asked about how they identified trustworthy partners, how they resolved disputes that inevitably arose, and whether they had experienced physical threats on the job. Some brokers were from prominent firms, like Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse-First Boston, but it was more fun to speak with the home-grown Russian upstarts, like Grant, Olma, and Rinako-Plus. As I documented in my book Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Market Institutions in Russia, brokers on this market rarely violated contracts with each other, even if they were not always as forthcoming as they should have been with their clients. NAUFOR survived the financial crashes in 1998 and became a building block for Russia’s small capital market; the association exists to this day.
Ultimately, most efforts at promoting democracy and the rule of law in Russia failed. These overly ambitious projects collapsed under the weight of vested interests, the communist legacy, a lack of technical expertise, and the simple complexity of rebuilding a society after seventy years of Soviet rule. The failure of rule-of-law programs hit home to me when I interviewed a banker at Incombank who wore a thinly disguised bulletproof vest covered in wool to look like a normal sweater vest.
The creation of a small but functioning Russian securities market was a rare example of a successful reform effort that lasted over time. This program not only helped to promote the market, it also trained a new generation of Russian economists, accountants, and regulators who ended up taking positions not only within the Russian state, but also in Russian and U.S. businesses. It was a rare bright spot, but bright nonetheless. It also had a direct benefit for me: the broker surveys I conducted for this project became a chapter in my Ph.D. dissertation and first book.
The End of Soft Power
However one judges the successes and failures of U.S. reform programs in the 1990s, efforts to promote democracy and the rule of law overseas have come to an end. In July 2025, just months after dismantling USAID, the State Department terminated nearly all programs of its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Andrew Roth, writing in the Guardian, succinctly noted that this move “effectively ends the department’s role in funding pro-democracy programming in some of the world’s most hostile totalitarian nations.”
Of course, it would be wrong to romanticize soft power. On its own, its impact may be limited. Nye, the soft-power guru, summed up the concept when writing in 2023 about the age-old debate over whether it is better to be feared or loved. “In today’s world,” Nye wrote, “it is best to be both.”
The impact of soft-power programs also depends on how well they are designed. Some are more effective than others; some fail because they do not take into account financial realities or the difficulty of building strong democratic institutions in a place with powerful vested interests that have other agendas. Attempts to introduce jury trials, retain judges, and create more independent courts in Russia all went awry. Efforts to promote free media in Russia—at least partially successful in the 1990s—were eventually strangled by a hostile Kremlin under Vladimir Putin (though many of the hundreds of independent journalists who have fled Putin’s Russia continue their reporting from exile).
In addition, soft power can be abused. The recent documentary Soundtrack to a Coup, depicts how Washington enlisted American cultural icons like Louis Armstrong to improve the image of the United States in the Congo even as the American government was plotting to overthrow Congo’s leaders.
Yet for decades soft power and foreign aid were successful and cheap tools for U.S. foreign policy. According to the Brookings Institution, while many Americans estimate that up to 25 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, the actual figure is less than 1 percent. The Trump administration has successfully exploited the ignorance of the public about foreign aid to its advantage.
Are Cuts in Funding Really the Problem?
Upon deeper reflection, soft power efforts by America may no longer work under current circumstances, even with generous funding. Soft power requires having a good story to tell. For decades, U.S. soft power could tell a compelling tale of a country with a powerful economy and a flawed but robust democracy. They could point to programs to promote human rights abroad and strong legal institutions at home, even if these efforts often came up short.
But the United States is hardly a model of democratic success in the eyes of the world today. The assault on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, sharp and increasingly violent partisan political conflict, and erosion of democratic institutions all weigh heavily in assessments of the United States around the world. Pew Global surveys from 2025 reveal sharp declines in the favorability of the United States, with the steepest drops in countries that had close relationships with the United States in the recent past. Pew reports that “across 24 countries, a median of 34% of adults have a lot or some confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs. Around six-in-ten (62%) have little or no confidence in Trump.”
In the current moment, the best way to promote U.S. interests and democracy abroad over the long term may not be to deploy soft power, but to get our own house in order. With a U.S. government that is ostensibly putting America First—and the rest of the world a very distant last—soft power and foreign aid are much harder sells. The United States will be worse for it, and so will the world.◆
Timothy Frye is Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy, a former director of the Harriman Institute (2009–2015), and an alumnus (Ph.D., GSAS, 1997).
Featured Image: Author next to a poster for Information USA in downtown Tbilisi. All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise indicated.
