A new framework for understanding what makes soft power work, and why the question has never been more urgent
This blog was prompted by our participation in 'Is the West Losing Young Minds? Global Trust and the New Soft Power Race', a panel session organised by the British Council and held at Amerikahaus Munich on 13 February 2026 as part of the Munich Security Conference’s Emerging Leaders programme. The discussion drew on the British Council’s new comparative research across 25 countries and on its Global Perceptions 2025 report on young people’s views of the G20 nations. The session convinced us that the question of trust in soft power has never been more urgent or more complex.
The interpretations offered in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the British Council or its officers. Similarly, the authors take full responsibility for any errors.
Governments invest heavily in developing soft power (through cultural programmes, international education, development cooperation, digital diplomacy) yet measuring what these investments achieve remains one of the hardest problems in international relations research.
Since Joseph Nye first defined soft power as the ability to shape others’ preferences through attraction rather than coercion, scholars and practitioners have struggled with a basic question: how do you know if it is working?
That question has always been difficult. It has now become critical. As the Munich Security Conference reports of 2025 and 2026 document with striking clarity, the international environment within which soft power operates has undergone a fundamental transformation in barely twelve months. The 2025 report described a world shaped by 'multipolarisation': a simultaneous diffusion of material power towards a greater number of actors and a deepening ideological polarisation between and within states. By 2026, the picture had darkened considerably. The follow-up report, titled 'Under Destruction', diagnosed what it called 'wrecking-ball politics': an era in which the most powerful state in the international system was no longer merely withdrawing from multilateral commitments but actively dismantling the institutional architecture it had built over eight decades.
For anyone working on soft power measurement, this shift has profound implications. The frameworks we use to assess international influence were largely developed during a period when the liberal international order, however imperfect, provided a relatively stable normative backdrop. Countries projected soft power into an environment where shared institutions, common rules, and broadly convergent expectations about legitimate behaviour provided the connective tissue through which attraction could operate. That environment is now fracturing, and our measurement frameworks need to account for this.
The FAIO framework: From measurement to diagnosis
Existing measurement approaches tend to fall into one of three camps: counting inputs (how much a country spends on cultural diplomacy), tracking activities (how many exchange programmes it runs), or surveying perceptions (how favourably foreign publics view it). Each captures something real, but none connects the whole chain from domestic capability through international delivery to reputational outcome. Our research develops a framework, Foundation–Assets–Infrastructure–Outcomes (FAIO), that attempts exactly this connection, tracking the process from a country’s structural conditions through to its international standing.
In an era of relative stability, such a framework serves primarily as a performance measurement tool. In the current environment, it takes on a more diagnostic function. It helps us understand not merely which countries are performing well, but why some are better positioned than others to sustain international influence when the rules of the game are being rewritten around them.
Beyond assets: The foundation layer
Most soft power indices start with what countries have: universities, museums, media organisations, research capacity. These are important, but they beg a prior question. Why do some countries generate stronger soft power assets than others from apparently similar resource bases? The FAIO framework introduces a Foundation layer beneath the familiar asset categories, capturing the deeper structural conditions (historical trajectories, governance quality, demographic characteristics, cultural orientations) from which assets emerge.
Among these foundational conditions, social trust deserves particular attention, and the events documented by the Munich Security Conference reports give it a new urgency.
Trust under destruction
The importance of trust to soft power is not a new discovery. It has been recognised in the literature since the concept’s earliest formulations. When Nye distinguished soft power from harder forms of influence, the implicit differentiator was credibility: the capacity to attract rests on being believed and being believed depends on being trustworthy. Subsequent scholars sharpened this point. Jan Melissen’s work on the 'new public diplomacy' placed trust and relationship-building at the centre of effective international engagement, explicitly contrasting this with the one-directional persuasion model of propaganda.
Nicholas Cull drew a similar distinction in his taxonomy of public diplomacy practices, arguing that listening, exchange, and long-term cultural relations all depend on mutual confidence in ways that information broadcasting does not. The point was reinforced empirically by the British Council’s own research into trust and soft power, which found consistent associations between perceived trustworthiness and willingness to engage across a range of international behaviours, from study destination choices to trade preferences and diplomatic alignment. In short, soft power scholarship has long understood that trust is not merely a helpful background condition but a constitutive element of the phenomenon itself. What propaganda seeks to circumvent, soft power depends upon.
It is worth stating explicitly what the current geopolitical moment makes unmistakable:
trust is important to international relations today partly because our adversaries understand it to be so and are investing systematically in its destruction.
The sophisticated disinformation operations of authoritarian states do not primarily target military capacity or economic advantage; they target credibility – the confidence of publics in institutions, in journalism, in democratic processes, and in the reliability of their governments’ international partners. This is not a side-effect of authoritarian foreign policy; it is a central objective, and it reflects a clear-eyed understanding that soft power depends upon trust in ways that hard power does not. By getting into the question of trust, we are therefore not merely refining the measurement of soft power; we are addressing the more fundamental question of why soft power exists and why it matters.
There is also a temporal dimension to trust that the current crisis throws into sharp relief. Trust is inherently a narrative phenomenon: the trusting party stands in the present, drawing on accumulated experience, the history of the relationship, to form a judgement about the trustworthy party, while projecting forward an expectation about how they will behave.
Trust, in other words, always involves a story with a beginning, a middle, and an anticipated end: the trusting party is located in the middle of that story, using what has gone before to assess what is yet to come.
This temporal structure explains both why trust is so difficult to build and so easy to destroy. For soft power, it means that reputations are always simultaneously retrospective and prospective: countries are judged not only on their record but on what that record leads others to expect of them in the future. The norm-breaking behaviour documented in the MSC 2026 report does not merely damage the immediate relationship; it rewrites the anticipated story for years to come.
Where the existing literature is less developed, however, is in specifying what kind of trust matters, and in understanding what happens to soft power when trust itself comes under systematic assault of the kind that is now commonplace in the international media environment debased by mis- and disinformation. It is here that recent events, and the analytical framework we propose, advance the discussion.
A substantial body of research, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama to Bo Rothstein, associates high social trust with institutional effectiveness, civic participation, and openness to international engagement: precisely the qualities that underpin successful soft power projection.
At first glance, the policy implication seems straightforward: higher trust equals stronger soft power.
But it is not that simple. As the political theorist Russell Hardin argued, social capital (the networks, norms, and cooperative capacity that trust sustains) carries no inherent normative valence. It is a capacity for coordinated action, and the ends it serves may be constructive or destructive. Tightly bonded communities may enforce conformity rather than foster openness; high in-group trust may coexist with deep hostility toward outsiders. The same structural features that the social capital literature associates with civic virtue can equally sustain exclusionary enterprises. Pre-Meiji Japan offers a compelling historical illustration: the Tokugawa shogunate generated exceptionally high in-group trust within its tightly administered social hierarchy, while the sakoku policy, which sealed the country from foreign commerce and influence for over two centuries, represented the logical extension of that same social architecture into the international sphere.
The 2026 Munich Security Report gives this theoretical problem an uncomfortably concrete illustration. What it describes as 'Zerstörungslust,' a lust for destruction, is precisely a form of high-energy social capital directed against the institutional order. The 'demolition men' the report identifies (Trump, Milei, Musk, and their imitators) have mobilised substantial reserves of particularised trust among their supporters to tear down structures that were built on, and depended upon, trust in institutions, rules, and procedural fairness. The very social capital that drives their domestic political success actively corrodes the foundations of international credibility. This is the Hardin problem made manifest at the level of state behaviour.
Generalised versus particularised trust: The key distinction
Eric Uslaner’s distinction between generalised and particularised trust provides a key analytical differentiation. Generalised trust is a broad moral orientation extending beyond familiar circles: a willingness to extend good faith to strangers, including those from different backgrounds or nationalities. Particularised trust remains confined to known and fundamentally similar groups, whether family, community, or co-religionists. Rothstein and Stolle’s research adds an institutional dimension: trust generated under conditions of procedural fairness tends to take the generalised, boundary-crossing form, whereas trust generated under institutional capture or corruption tends to remain particularised.
For soft power, this distinction has practical consequences.
Countries characterised by high generalised trust and strong institutional quality (the Nordic states are a frequently cited example) tend to achieve disproportionate soft power returns relative to their size and spending.
Their trust environments correlate with disproportionate soft power returns on composite indices, though the causal pathways from domestic trust to international audience perception remain underexplored, and the available survey evidence is weighted towards OECD publics.
What the MSC reports now add to this picture is a temporal dimension. The 2025 report documented a world in which multiple order models were competing and coexisting, and in which the ideological foundations of the liberal international order were under increasing strain from both internal populist challenge and external authoritarian contestation. The 2026 report showed that strain reaching breaking point, with the order’s principal architect actively undermining it.
In this context, the question is no longer simply whether a country possesses generalised trust, but whether its trust environment is resilient enough to sustain soft power projection when the international norms and institutions that once amplified it are themselves being dismantled.
Operationalising the distinction in a fragmenting order
The FAIO framework proposes to operationalise the trust dimension through a composite indicator drawing on three elements: generalised trust levels from the World Values Survey; institutional quality from Transparency International and the World Justice Project; and a proxy for the generalised–particularised balance, constructed from World Values Survey items measuring trust in people of other nationalities, religions, or encountered for the first time. This composite captures not merely whether a society is trusting but whether its trust environment is of the kind that supports internationally projectable soft power.
In the statistical analysis, the trust score operates both as an independent variable (does trust character predict soft power outcomes after controlling for GDP, population, and spending?) and as a moderating variable, testing whether equivalent investments in assets and infrastructure yield different returns depending on the domestic trust context. The latter question is particularly important for policymakers: it helps distinguish between strategies that can work within existing structural conditions and those that require more fundamental institutional development.
The current crisis adds a third analytical function. Trust character now operates as a resilience indicator. The Munich Security Index data reveal that across all G7 countries surveyed, only a tiny proportion of respondents believe their current government’s policies will make future generations better off. In France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, absolute majorities expect these policies to leave future generations worse off. Feelings of helplessness in the face of global events have risen sharply across all Western democracies since 2021. These are precisely the conditions under which generalised trust erodes and particularised trust (bonding within like-minded groups, often in opposition to perceived elite failure) increases. The Foundation layer of the FAIO framework allows us to track this erosion and model its implications for soft power capacity.
What this means for policy: Three scenarios
The Foundation layer does not replace the practical business of measuring what countries invest and what they achieve. It provides the structural context within which those measurements become interpretable. But the trajectory revealed by the MSC reports, from multipolarisation in 2025 to active institutional destruction in 2026, compels us to think about what comes next. Three broad scenarios suggest themselves for the period to 2030 and beyond.
The first is continued fragmentation.
If the trends documented in the 2026 report persist, we may see a world increasingly divided into spheres of influence where regional hegemons set the rules within their domains.
In such an environment, soft power as traditionally understood (attraction exercised through universally recognised norms and institutions) loses much of its purchase. What replaces it is something closer to transactional influence: deal-making, conditional market access, bilateral patronage. Countries with high generalised trust would retain reputational assets, but the infrastructure through which those assets are projected internationally (multilateral organisations, development cooperation frameworks, educational exchange systems) would be severely degraded. The FAIO framework’s Infrastructure layer becomes critical here because it would register the collapse of projection mechanisms well before outcome indicators caught up.
The second scenario is defensive consolidation. The MSC 2026 report already documents movements in this direction: the unprecedented number of new trade agreements being negotiated in defiance of US tariff policy; the European push for strategic autonomy; the willingness of Global South powers, particularly India, China, Brazil, and South Africa, to step into gaps left by Washington’s retreat. In this scenario, coalitions of the willing form around preserved elements of the rules-based order, building new institutional infrastructure where old structures have been demolished. For soft power, this scenario places a premium on exactly the foundational qualities the FAIO framework proposes to measure.
Countries and groupings that can demonstrate high generalised trust, strong institutional quality, and credible commitment to rules-based cooperation become disproportionately attractive as partners.
The trust dividend, already visible in our analysis, would intensify. Germany’s efficiency as a soft power performer, which our comparative research identified as driven by its tripartite institutional structure and strong domestic governance, exemplifies the potential here, though the current German public’s deep pessimism about their government’s capacity to deliver for future generations represents a significant vulnerability.
The third scenario, and the one that deserves most careful attention, is generational reorientation. Both MSC reports hint at this, though neither develops it fully. The 2025 report noted that visions of multipolarity are deeply polarised between those who experienced the unipolar moment as a golden age and those who experienced it as exclusion. The 2026 report found that in China and India, 50 and 57 per cent of respondents respectively believe their countries should contribute more to global problem-solving, even as G7 publics expressed little enthusiasm for stepping up. This generational and geographic divergence in willingness to invest in collective outcomes may be the most important variable for soft power in the coming decade.
The countries and institutions that can credibly speak to younger, more globally networked populations, offering not nostalgia for a lost order but a compelling vision of what comes next, will be best positioned to convert foundational trust into international influence.
The FAIO framework’s Outcomes layer, which tracks international recognition and reputational standing, will need to incorporate generational segmentation to capture this shift.
Rebuilding trust: From diagnosis to action
The analysis above is diagnostic, but the question that dominated discussion at our Munich Security Conference event was inescapably practical:
what can be done to rebuild the trust on which soft power depends?
If generalised trust is the foundational condition that distinguishes effective soft power from mere expenditure, and if that trust is now under deliberate assault, then identifying pathways to its restoration is not an academic exercise but a strategic imperative.
The research points to several interconnected priorities. The first is institutional integrity. The evidence from Rothstein, Stolle, and others consistently shows that
generalised trust is generated and sustained by institutions perceived as operating with procedural fairness: impartially, transparently, and in the public interest.
For governments seeking to strengthen their soft power foundations, this means that investment in domestic governance quality, the rule of law, anti-corruption mechanisms, and independent oversight is not a separate agenda from international influence but a prerequisite for it. The countries that score highest on the trust composite in our FAIO analysis are, without exception, those with strong records of institutional quality.
The second priority is authentic reciprocity in international engagement. One of the clearest findings in the soft power literature, reinforced by the contrast with propaganda, is that
influence built on genuine exchange proves more durable than influence built on projection.
Cultural relations programmes that listen as well as broadcast, educational exchanges that benefit both sending and receiving countries, and development partnerships designed around mutual interest rather than donor conditionality all contribute to the kind of trust that crosses borders. In an era when populations are increasingly sceptical of top-down messaging, this reciprocal quality becomes not merely desirable but essential.
The third, and perhaps most consequential, priority is generational engagement. The MSC data reveal a striking paradox: the populations most disillusioned with current institutional arrangements are often the same ones most willing to invest in collective problem-solving, provided it takes credible new forms.
Younger cohorts in both the Global South and the Global North show consistent appetite for international cooperation on climate, technology governance, and economic fairness, but considerably less attachment to the specific institutional architecture of the post-1945 order.
Rebuilding trust with these constituencies requires not a defence of the old order for its own sake but a demonstrated willingness to reform, adapt, and share agency in designing what comes next. Countries and organisations that can credibly offer this, combining the procedural fairness that generates generalised trust with the openness to new voices that younger generations demand, will be best positioned to restore the trust foundations on which soft power ultimately depends.
None of this is quick or easy, and the FAIO framework is candid about the structural depth of the challenge. Trust of the generalised, boundary-crossing kind is slow to build and quick to destroy, a profound asymmetry that the current moment exploits. But the same research that reveals this vulnerability also reveals an opportunity. The demolition men documented in the MSC reports have mobilised particularised trust with great energy, but particularised trust is inherently self-limiting: it bonds but does not bridge. The latent demand for credible, rules-based international engagement that the MSC survey data consistently reveal suggests that the space for rebuilding generalised trust has not disappeared. It has merely been vacated, and it awaits actors with the institutional quality and the strategic imagination to fill it.
Conclusion: Honest measurement for turbulent times
Two countries may have comparable cultural budgets, similar numbers of international students, and equivalent media reach, yet achieve very different reputational outcomes. Foundation-layer analysis, particularly the trust dimension, helps explain why. In a period when the international order that once amplified soft power investments is itself under destruction, this explanatory power matters more than ever.
A country with high generalised trust and strong institutional quality occupies a different strategic position from one with high particularised trust and institutional capture, even where their nominal asset endowments appear comparable.
The former can invest with reasonable confidence that its delivery mechanisms will be perceived as credible; the latter may need to address foundational conditions before equivalent investments yield equivalent returns. This was never a comfortable message. In the current environment, where (as the MSC 2026 report warns) even the most basic norms of territorial integrity and the prohibition of the use of force are being disregarded by the system’s erstwhile guarantor, it is a stark one.
But it is also a message with a constructive corollary. The same trust dynamics that explain why some countries’ soft power investments fail also point to where strategic opportunity lies. The MSC data suggest that populations worldwide have not abandoned the desire for rules-based cooperation, even as their governments retreat from it. In less than half of respondents in any country surveyed do people believe that the major global challenges, from climate change to financial stability to peace in Ukraine, cannot be addressed without US leadership.
There is, in other words, latent demand for the kind of credible, outward-facing, institutionally grounded international engagement that high-generalised-trust societies are best positioned to supply.
Whether any actor can organise to meet that demand, or whether the demolition men will have levelled the structures through which it could be channelled, is the defining question for soft power in the years ahead.
The full methodology, including detailed operationalisation of the Foundation layer and its integration with the Assets–Infrastructure–Outcomes framework, will be set out in an accompanying academic research paper, currently in preparation.