Iza Ding, a social scientist, is a keen observer of how culture and politics are imbricated. Her third piece for us, on the hoary concept of soft power as applied to China, provides a singular mapping of modern Chinese history and contemporary culture. Ding suggests that soft power is better understood as a messy admixture of politics and market power whose global appeal represents an accidental propaganda success. By masterfully dissecting the viral toy character Labubu, she unpacks the complicated ways in which a culture is spread. In the end, she writes, soft power is “the softest alibi” of hegemony.
Nicholas Bequelin lived in and has studied China for decades. Unlike many China hands, Bequelin seeks not to explain an inscrutable China to a mass audience (as necessary as this may be) but to showcase the unusual developmental and strategic paths taken by the Chinese state. Simple explanations won’t suffice. Similar to Ding’s effort to complexify the Chinese condition, Bequelin argues that the development of AI doesn’t pit China in a race against the US so much as reveal the two countries’ distinctive political histories and developmental commitments. The future, he argues, for China and the world, may not be rosy.
The historian Daniel Bessner has hardly been shy in taking on challengers to his reinterpretation of postwar American history. His essay here might require him to keep at his intellectual pugilism. Bessner argues that the world is moving into a post-American, non-ideological era where power—not ideals, not ideas—drives international politics. This system may be more realistic but also more fragmented and dangerous, and it will require new forms of cooperation to avoid war.
IL 63’s curated section leads with the acclaimed historian Jeremy Adelman. Adelman, whose book on the history of capitalism will be published later this year, digs into Sven Beckert’s recent doorstopper on capitalism’s development and questions Beckert’s insistence that liberalism and capitalism are invariably at odds.
We follow with Nils Gilman’s trenchant look in Dissent at the new world order. He is guardedly optimistic about the potential for so-called middle powers to play a formidable role, just as the non-aligned powers once did. Read Gilman’s piece after Bessner’s; you’ll sleep better at night.
We conclude with Krithika Varagur, a co-founder of The Drift, with a Paris Review essay that echoes Ding’s take on soft power. Varagur creatively studies the original house journal of Saudi Arabia’s main energy company—Aramco World—not only to observe how Saudi Aramco burnishes its image but also to argue that the Islamic world is less a problem to be explained than a rich field of culture and everyday life.
Duke Ellington’s corpus of compositions is so profound that it invites continued interpretations. Shortly after Ellington’s death in 1974, the guitarist Kenny Burrell organized a large ensemble to play the great man’s music. Here’s the classic “Mood Indigo” with Burrell’s slow-tempo guitar and an intro by Jimmy Smith on the Hammond organ.
—Leonard Benardo, vice president at the Open Society Foundations
The Grinning Defiance of Chinese Soft Power
Iza Ding
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Ding revisits the concept of “soft power” that Joseph Nye coined three decades ago and later applied to China, to say the country was in deficit. As China’s global cultural presence expands in ways that are diffuse and often unintended, its influence resists the terms meant to contain it, prompting some in Washington to recast it as “sharp power.” Ding sees in the worldwide popularity of Labubu—a quirky, “ugly-cute” toy—a form of attraction that emerged by neither ideology nor design.
“The monster exposes the tautology inside Nye’s claim that soft power stems from ‘the universalism of a country’s culture and its ability to establish a set of favorable rules and institutions that govern areas of international activity.’ If a country can ‘establish a set of favorable rules and institutions that govern areas of international activity,’ it already has power. And if it already has power, it will always argue that its power is soft and legitimate. Nye’s examples of historical soft power reach back to every Western empire that ever ruled, from Rome’s roads and laws to the British Empire’s language and free trade, though neither Rome nor Britain was a democracy at the height of its dominance. The pattern is clear: First comes dominance, military or economic; then comes the culture that dominance circulates; then comes the argument that people were attracted to the culture all along, that the dominance was earned, that the empire was loved and not merely endured. This is what Gramsci understood about hegemony: It can make dominance feel like generosity, subordination like consent or even preference, and hard power feel soft. Reading history forward, soft power is not the cause of hegemony but its softest alibi.”
Shooting the Suns
China and the Future of AI
Nicholas Bequelin
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Bequelin situates China’s approach to artificial intelligence within the country’s longer trajectory of treating science as a primary engine of development and state-building. That history has produced in China a distinctive confidence in progress—and a political tradition in which technology is inseparable from state control over society. Bequelin argues against the ubiquitous framing that the US and China now are engaged in an AI “race”: The real question is not which country will lead, but how they both use the language of necessity to fold AI into their respective logics of power.
“When states or tech companies invoke the language of scientific objectivity or technological inevitability—‘the science is clear’; ‘the data show’— these phrases launder inherently political decisions about who gets what and how into the seemingly neutral register of technical necessity. But science does not, by its nature, dictate policy nor any next social arrangements. The sleight of hand that claims political choices are dictated by science operates differently in Washington and Beijing but it operates in both places. In the US, the language of inevitability is market-inflected and imperial: AI will transform everything, the race must be won, regulation is a luxury that only the losing side can afford. In China, the language is developmental and civilizational: AI is a productive force, its diffusion is a historical necessity, its deployment by the state is an extension of the Party’s mandate to make the country secure and steer society toward its flourishing.”
Power without Ideology
Welcome to the Multipolar World
Daniel Bessner
The Ideas Letter
Essay
The US’s global hegemony has ended. The post–Cold War unipolar moment is giving way to a multipolar order that, Bessner argues, will now be pyramidal in structure: dominated by the US and China; with India, Russia, and the European Union below them; and a series of middle powers at its base. Unlike the geopolitical orders of the past two centuries, this one will be defined by the open pursuit of material national interest through raw power rather than by battles of ideology. This configuration is already coalescing into spheres of influence, as major powers consolidate their authority over the regions around them and calibrate competition among themselves accordingly.
“The most significant difference between the new multipolarity and the unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar worlds of eras past is its non-ideological tenor. Here, I do not intend my use of ‘non-ideological’ to suggest that ideas will no longer shape international affairs. Rather, I use it to indicate that, for the foreseeable future, no nation-state will dedicate itself to promoting, exporting, or even defending a universalist ideology on the world stage. This is a very different situation than previous periods.”
Why Capitalism Persists
How Tensions and Resistance Can Drive Reinvention
Jeremy Adelman
Foreign Affairs
Essay
In his review of Capitalism: A Global History, Adelman dissects Sven Beckert’s argument that capitalism is not intrinsically tied to liberalism but emerged from alliances between capital and state power that predate democratic ideals. Beckert presents a system driven by coercion, commodification, and the steady erosion of freedom. Adelman resists this determinism, arguing that the history of capitalism cannot be reduced to domination alone. He emphasizes capitalism’s capacity to absorb conflict and resistance, to adapt and endure, by drawing on tensions, often mediated through liberal institutions, even as liberalism itself is under fire.
“Capitalist societies have had an uncanny ability to translate tensions and resistance into renovation. That was especially the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when liberal political systems allowed for contestation and debate that prompted the adjustments that helped reinvent economic systems. Each time observers predicted its end—beginning with the sages of the apocalypse, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—capitalism rebounded anew. Its pluralist forces found ways not just to survive but to take production and distribution to new levels. And even now, as so many take a dim view of the direction of capitalism, that past holds out the possibility of meaningful and positive renewal.”
A New Non-Aligned Movement?
Nils Gilman
Dissent
Essay
Global geopolitical rivalry today is driven less by ideology than by fundamental differences in the energy policies of fossil-fuel petrostates and green electro-states, argues Gilman. A group of middle powers, including Canada, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, are now central. Revisiting the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, Gilman suggests these countries may be able to coordinate a form of strategic autonomy by leveraging their positions within new energy systems.
“The stakes are ultimately much greater than the autonomy or sovereignty of the middle powers. If the petrostates prevail, the future involves runaway climate change or the hair-raising prospect of geoengineering gambles like solar radiation management. If the Green Entente wins, the world order will be organized under a new set of ideological and political dependencies favored by China. The new NAM represents a desperate, collective attempt to chart a third way that preserves autonomy in a world where the old rules have been torched. Whether it will succeed depends on the middle powers’ ability to build a resilient, cooperative world from the fractured elements of the old one, before they are consumed by the giants.”
The World of Aramco
Krithika Varagur
The Paris Review
Essay
Varagur delves into Aramco World, a magazine published by a US subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, as a strange and revealing artifact: a corporate publication that has, for nearly eight decades, quietly cultivated a cosmopolitan perspective of the Islamic world. Produced in the shadow of oil politics yet studious to avoid any polemics, the magazine resists the dominant tendency to frame the region through crisis and offers instead a cross-cultural sensibility built on curiosity.
“This willingness to look beyond, and sometimes before, Islam is not ahistorical kitsch, but a profound comment on how cultures actually accrete over time—how they actually feel. It cuts equally against the literalist Salafi impulse to cast pre-Islamic history as the ‘age of ignorance’ and the Western one to treat Islam as a hermetically sealed civilizational category.”