{"id":576520,"date":"2026-04-10T19:46:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T19:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/576520\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T19:46:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T19:46:13","slug":"the-charisma-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/576520\/","title":{"rendered":"The Charisma Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at his first summit with Ronald Reagan looking and sounding nothing at all like any previous Soviet leader. This was no dour apparatchik in an oversized coat, dispensing dull Marxist monologues. Gorbachev wore sharp suits, smiled for cameras and spoke in snappy soundbites. The makeover worked: A global audience was wowed by the Russian, arguably even more than his American counterpart. It was the start of a phenomenon that would come to be termed \u201cGorbymania<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony was rich. Here was the general secretary of the Communist Party\u2014supposedly representing workers of the world\u2014challenging, even exceeding, the charisma of a former Hollywood actor. It was an early warning that the rules of international politics were changing in ways the cold warriors didn\u2019t fully understand. The medium was becoming the message, and the messenger was becoming the medium.<\/p>\n

In November 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at his first summit with Ronald Reagan looking and sounding nothing at all like any previous Soviet leader. This was no dour apparatchik in an oversized coat, dispensing dull Marxist monologues. Gorbachev wore sharp suits, smiled for cameras and spoke in snappy soundbites. The makeover worked: A global audience was wowed by the Russian, arguably even more than his American counterpart. It was the start of a phenomenon that would come to be termed \u201cGorbymania<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony was rich. Here was the general secretary of the Communist Party\u2014supposedly representing workers of the world\u2014challenging, even exceeding, the charisma of a former Hollywood actor. It was an early warning that the rules of international politics were changing in ways the cold warriors didn\u2019t fully understand. The medium was becoming the message, and the messenger was becoming the medium.<\/p>\n

Hendrik W. Ohnesorge\u2019s magisterial new book, Soft Power and Charismatic Leadership in German-American Relations<\/a>, arrives at precisely the right moment to explain what\u2019s happened since. In roughly 850 densely researched pages, the University of Bonn political scientist does something remarkable: He takes Joseph Nye\u2019s celebrated concept of \u201csoft power\u201d\u2014the ability to attract rather than coerce\u2014and demonstrates that in the 21st century, the personality of leaders has become the single most important variable in how that power operates.<\/p>\n


\n \"The<\/p>\n

The book cover features a solid red background with the title in large white text and a faint graphic of a globe at the top. The book is part of the “Global Power Shift” series.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Soft Power and Charismatic Leadership in German-American Relations<\/a>, Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, Springer, 852 pp., $209, December 2025.<\/p>\n

More importantly, he shows why this represents a fundamental shift from the 20th century, when ideology, culture, and institutions did most of the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

When Nye popularized the phrase \u201csoft power\u201d in 1990, it was still possible to think of it primarily in terms of culture (Hollywood, jazz, blue jeans), values (democracy, human rights), and policies (the Marshall Plan, international institutions). The personalities of individual leaders mattered\u2014think of John F. Kennedy, or Reagan\u2014but they were more like the cherry on top of an already impressive sundae. The soft power of the United States derived fundamentally from what it was, not who led it.<\/p>\n

This is why a dour Richard Nixon or a sanctimonious Jimmy Carter didn\u2019t fundamentally damage U.S. attraction abroad. The Cold War binary was so stark, the ideological contest so all consuming, that individual presidential personalities were secondary concerns. Even Leonid Brezhnev\u2019s spectacular dullness couldn\u2019t undermine Soviet soft power among true believers; the ideology carried the weight. It didn\u2019t matter that the man was about as charismatic as a cement block.<\/p>\n

But that world is gone. And Ohnesorge\u2019s book\u2014drawing on five centuries of German-U.S. relations but focusing intensively on Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump\u2014demonstrates why personality now matters more than ever.<\/p>\n

The numbers tell a devastating story. As Ohnesorge shows, when Bush left office in 2009, German approval of the U.S. had cratered to historic lows. When Obama arrived, approval ratings skyrocketed overnight. The swing had nothing to do with U.S. culture (still globally dominant) or values (unchanged) or even policies (continuity on many fronts). It was pure personality effect. Obama\u2019s charisma became what Ohnesorge calls a \u201cfourth resource\u201d of soft power, joining Nye\u2019s original trinity.<\/p>\n

The Trump years confirmed the pattern in reverse. Between 2017 and 2021, every indicator of U.S. soft power toward Germany collapsed\u2014United Nations voting coincidence, public approval\u2014not because U.S. universities got worse or Hollywood stopped making movies, but because of one man\u2019s spectacular unsuitability for global leadership. As Ohnesorge puts it with characteristic understatement, Trump\u2019s presidency represents \u201ca study in soft power squared\u201d\u2014meaning soft power loss squared, catastrophically multiplied.<\/p>\n

Why does personality matter so much more now? The answer lies in the fragmentation of the global information ecosystem and the celebrity-fication of politics everywhere.<\/p>\n

During the Cold War, soft power operated mostly through institutions: cultural centers, exchange programs, international broadcasting. These were slow-burn, long-term investments that created diffuse attraction over time. Leaders could be boring because the institutions did the work. The BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe didn\u2019t need charismatic directors; they needed credible content.<\/p>\n

Today, leaders are the content. In an age of social media, 24-hour news cycles, and TikTok diplomacy, political leaders have become celebrities whether they like it or not\u2014and the smart ones very much like it. As Anders Wivel and Caroline Howard Gron argue<\/a> in their pathbreaking work, Charismatic Leadership in Foreign Policy, modern leaders engage in constant \u201ccommunicative practices\u201d that make sense of \u201cwho \u2018we\u2019 are and where we are going.\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t optional anymore. It\u2019s the job.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s Narendra Modi is a master of political theater, Emmanuel Macron positions himself as Europe\u2019s philosopher king. Among those who have recently exited high office, Canada\u2019s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand\u2019s Jacinda Ardern built global profiles that far exceed their countries\u2019 geopolitical weight. They\u2019ve all read the same playbook: In a celebrity-obsessed age, charisma is policy.<\/p>\n

This creates a dangerous vulnerability that the Cold War\u2019s institutional soft power didn\u2019t have. When soft power resided in culture and institutions, it was resilient. But when soft power becomes personalized, it becomes brittle. What Ohnesorge calls a \u201csoft power pendulum\u201d swings wildly with each election: Clinton\u2019s charm to Bush\u2019s catastrophe to Obama\u2019s restoration to Trump\u2019s demolition. Four-year (or eight-year) cycles aren\u2019t long enough to build anything sustainable. Allies can\u2019t plan. Adversaries can wait it out.<\/p>\n

Juliet Kaarbo, a foreign policy scholar at the University of St Andrews who has written extensively on leader personality and decision-making, warns of an even darker possibility in her research<\/a>: Leaders\u2019 personalities can change over time, usually for the worse. Power corrupts, yes, but extended time in office also makes leaders more authoritarian, more overconfident, more prone to catastrophic mistakes. When soft power depends on personal charisma, and charisma curdles into narcissism, entire nations pay the price.<\/p>\n

The solution? There isn\u2019t an easy one. We can\u2019t uninvent social media or reverse the celebrity-fication of politics. What we can do is understand the game that\u2019s being played. Ohnesorge\u2019s book offers a brutal clarity: In the 21st century, who leads matters as much as what they lead. Maybe more.<\/p>\n

This puts democracy at both an advantage and a disadvantage. Democracies can elect charismatic leaders, but they can also elect Donald Trump. Autocracies can manufacture charisma through propaganda, but the artifice eventually shows. The question is which system can consistently produce leaders who understand that, in an age of celebrity, gravitas matters more than glitz, and that real charisma comes from genuine connection rather than manufactured spectacle.<\/p>\n

On this, Ohnesorge, drawing on Max Weber\u2019s century-old insights about charismatic authority, offers a sobering reminder: Charisma is morally neutral. It can serve democracy or destroy it. It worked for Churchill and for Hitler. For Kennedy and for Mussolini.<\/p>\n

In the long run, though, there is reason to hope democracies will always prove more charismatic. Gorbachev discovered too late that his Western-friendly persona couldn\u2019t save the Soviet Union because there was no substance beneath the style. The real lesson isn\u2019t that personality doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s that personality without policy is just performance art. And in the long run, audiences can tell the difference.<\/p>\n

The irony is that in trying to compete on charisma, authoritarians have already conceded the argument. They\u2019ve admitted that attraction beats coercion, that being liked matters more than being feared. That\u2019s a victory for soft power. The question is whether democracies can field leaders charismatic enough to actually win the competition they\u2019ve already theoretically won.<\/p>\n

In the charisma wars of the 21st century, everyone\u2019s a combatant. May the most authentic win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In November 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at his first summit with Ronald Reagan looking and sounding nothing at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,223,8649,18063,15571,3,1206,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-576520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-democracy","11":"tag-fp-weekend","12":"tag-leaders","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}