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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.

Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.

Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.

The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.

Today's kids would never see it past the layer of AI. To them AI is the top level abstraction and that's it.

We have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.

Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web.

What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.

Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.

I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation.

[1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...

You completely misunderstood what everyone was talking about. The point is to make people in other countries do what we want them to do.

American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non Americans here.

Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don’t want young Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian website.

I was trying to reply to a post that was worried about education in america. I messed up.

You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data

As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside world, in some way at least.

PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.

I grew up outside the US. I have a distinct memory of using the Factbook for homework assignments and being told it is a reliable source of information. That shapes people's perceptions of the US and the CIA from a young age.

Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes:

"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...

> Wait until they start paying for what comes next

They'll just blame liberals and double down on the authoritarianism as they've always done.

One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power

I agree, well mostly.

The administration is dispensing with the institutions of soft power. I don't think it's the main goal so much as a consequence of their worldview. Soft power is essentially worthless to people who have no interest in maintaining a facade of international cooperation.

I remember this from literally 20 years ago.

Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?

And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.

Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.

Like how they deny visas to fact checkers.

I don't know if you jest but thats exactly what they did with many other words. What a timeline.

Reminds me of the forbidden word lists that they created at the beginning of the second Trump term: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...

“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.

Credibility is not what soft power means, though they are related. Power is the ability to get other people to act in your interest. Hard power is when that is done through immediate, direct economic or military coercion. Soft power is everything else.

In International Relations, my #1 or #2 hobby, credibility does not refer to soft power. (my number 1 hobby is philosophy)

Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or fostering genuine cultural attraction. Without that perceived reliability, the indicator "soft" loses it's meaning.

>Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or fostering genuine cultural attraction.

Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility. (Credibility and cultural attraction? Pretty sure these have little correlation. Dictators can make creditable threats.) Further, its a debatable claim that there is a 'core currency' of soft power.

As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill for your personal meaning of Credibility. But I can attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger than any International Relations Realist practitioner would make.

It's not that complex, good faith builds good will.

It's a shame we can't have nice things.

You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.

Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number.

There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent

Interesting. I read about this. "Concealment and spinning" are two ways to not lie.

What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?

Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minutes.

Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.

> build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade

How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?

I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."

Among the countries that host US bases, how many had to accept it under the threat of force, invasion, or occupation? I would guess Japan and Germany (initially). Look at the map here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_bases_2.png . Brute force was not a facto in the vast majority of them.

Shape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be strong primarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Make the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of facilitating gentle commerce?

I believe Trump has asked that exact question. But also asked how much it costs and whether it can be privatized.

Did you forget the /s?

Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.

Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.

Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).

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