Photo from Bacalar, Mexico © Beringer-Dratch.

I was reading on Blogcritics about KFC . “KFC Raises Eyebrows, Cholesterol With New Offering” writes Pete Blackwell. He writes, amusingly, “It’s tough… out there in fast food land.” Perhaps the pseudo-chicken is crispy. But is it the American soft power that was once made of the Statue of Liberty, the American Dream, Levis and the vision of success in business?

American soft power that once made the world yearn to come to America and to emulate its’ ideals has become crispy and sometimes rancid. The Statue of Liberty needs a 1400 mile to protect her. Levis are no longer banned in Russia and the rest of the world has knocked them off or made designer versions. Mexico has tequila and Mayan ruins. Italy offers style. Our insistent powers of attraction and of the American dream have soured into Blackhawk helicopters and smart bombs, Guantanamo and Alcatraz.

The new soft power of the most powerful nation on Earth is fast food, junk food, sweet drinks, convenience foods and abominable movies of sex, violence, superficiality and money-worship. In the world of junk food,

Competition is fierce and marketing budgets are immense. In an attempt to get a leg up, fast food outlets are forced to continually update their menus with new—or apparently new—items. 

Now come the new huge servings for the newly huge Americans: “… Hardees has … their new gigantic hamburgers and Burger King … their Enormous Omelet Sandwich. Talk about truth in advertising: the latter fare, which consists of bacon, sausage, cheese and eggs on a bun, weighs in at 730 calories, 47 grams of fat (including 87% of the daily allotment of saturated fat) nearly 2,000 mg of sodium and 138% of the RDA for cholesterol.” (For me this is a day’s worth of salt, a week’s worth of cholesterol and 1.5 days of fat.) This is America. It has become a symbol, a icon of the American Dream with gas guzzlers, smart bombs, border walls and surly security people. America is rewriting itself. It is finding new types of “soft power” with which to influence the world.

This is America’s legacy to the world that once looked to the Liberty Bell, Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth and Hollywood. Our soft power base has gone from the Dream to breast-like golden arches, the kid on a Dominos motorbike and a president spying on all his own citizens.

Soft Power is, as Joseph Nye, Jr, the originator of the term, writes:

… the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important in the war on terrorism, but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished. 

What can the government do? Soft power grows out of both U.S. culture and U.S. policies. From Hollywood to higher education, civil society does far more to present the United States to other peoples than the government does. Hollywood often portrays consumerism, sex and violence, but it also promotes values of individualism, upward mobility and freedom (including for women). These values make America attractive to many people overseas, but some fundamentalists see them as a threat.

Contrasting views often exist side by side in the same country. For example, Iranian officials excoriate America as a “great satan” while teenagers secretly watch smuggled Hollywood videos.

Peter Ackerman, the chairman for the International Center For Non Violent Conflict in 2004 spoke to an open forum on soft power,

I think it’s fair to say we are all here today for a common reason: because we care about democracy and human rights, and we want to explore new policy approaches. We typically see policy options through the dichotomous lens of hard and soft power. Hard power is the use of military force and economic measures, often in response to short and intermediate crises; its policies are generally more coercive. Soft power is what makes America’s ideas and society more attractive, in the words of Joe Nye, and includes measures such as cultural exchanges and public diplomacy. Soft power is applied consistently over the long term, and is designed to encourage cooperation and accommodation. 

The debate over the merits of each form of this power is decades, if not centuries, old. It has intensified certainly since 9/11. One side declares soft power irrelevant — these are the enemies to whom the U.S. will never be attractive; while the other side claims our military initiatives could never succeed with the world hating America. Yet the debate is really two sides of the same coin: that foreign policy initiatives emanating from the United States or other major powers are all that counts in world affairs.

In 2005 Carl Bildt in the Financial Times laments the tensions building in Europe to negate the positive aspects of its soft power under the post 9/11 worries about security in his article, “Europe must keep its ’soft power” from June 1, 2005

in recent years, Europe has prided itself on the perceived success of its so-called “soft power”.Indeed, there is no way to explain the swift and smooth transformation of societies from Estonia to Bulgaria without referring to both the magnetism of the EU and the model it was able to provide. Hard power can certainly bring down regimes, as Iraq demonstrated, but in order to build new regimes, soft power is largely required.

But there is now a serious risk that Europe will curb its soft powers just when they are perhaps most needed. Such a development would have grave consequences for the stability of the wider region.

Here in Mexico we see the results of America’s exports of addictive foods that might look cheap in America but are quite expensive here. They are bringing America an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and stroke. Yet they are one of our major exports visible to others. In Mexico the diabetes rates and level of heart problems increase. Check out a few Blogcritics articles on the subject:

“Burger King: Eat Like a Pig” by Screen Rant.

A review of Eric Schloesser’s book, Fast Food Nation

Eric Schlosser delves deep into the history, practices and culture of America’s love-affair with fast food, and the lasting impact (both economic and otherwise) that the obsession creates. Schlosser’s pen is wide ranging, from the cattle farms, feedlots and agribusiness of yesterday, today and tomorrow to fast-food’s impact on labor practices and the meat-packing industry (guaranteed to make you view vegetarianism with a more sympathetic eye). His comprehensive tome examines the history and development of fast-food, including such varied and little known subtopics such as the taste-enhancing chemists (housed quietly in the New Jersey industrial strip) that add the final filip to the industry’s special sauces. Very little escapes his gaze, including elegant factoids such as the profit margins on soft drinks (very, very high, particularly when you “supersize” your drink) to internal McDonalds’ discussions on the brand merit of keeping the golden arches (The gist is that they resemble female breasts… 

And the recent “The Healthy Skeptic: I Hate The Food Police And You Should Too” bySal Marinello.

The fast food controversy is funny if serious. The exportation of Ronald MacDonald with a Mexican accent is less than evil but the fact remains that the world has begun to see us not as a bastion of freedom and opportunity but as a purveyor of greasy food, bad taste and unbridled lust for profit. And that is soft power. When it comes to the real stuff — stealth bombers, cruise missiles, satellite surveillance and black ops against any government that dares to disagree; then we are losing our place on the world’s stage where the hero stands and there are always new would-be heroes ready to woo the audience with their values.

Photo © Beringer-Dratch. Mime in New Orleans before the deluge.