American Soft Power Benefits the United States and Our Global Partners

Last month, I had the privilege of presenting to a group of Southeast Asian political and policy leaders visiting the U.S. as part of a delegation from the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL) and the Young Southeast Asian Leadership Initiative (YSEALI) Professional Fellows. The participants, their nations, and the United States reap invaluable rewards from the YSEALI Program, and YSEALI and other similar programs make the United States stronger, safer, and more prosperous.

Global respect for the United States derives not just from our military strength but from our standing in the international community. Other nations look to us and our founding documents for how to structure their governments. Our national ideals – freedom and rule of law, chief among them – are respected and emulated by democracies and republics around the world. This idea was articulated in an ALEC article Our Constitutional Principles – America’s Greatest Export.

Programs like YSEALI share those values with southeast Asian nations helping them to bolster their governing structures, thus creating a network of likeminded nations that promote trade with the US and seek to ally themselves with us strategically.

Launched in 2013, YSEALI is a U.S. government initiative that aims to propel leadership development and networking in Southeast Asia. Through a variety of programs and exchanges, YSEALI builds the leadership capabilities of youth in the region, strengthens ties between the United States and Southeast Asian countries, and supports the ASEAN community. YSEALI focuses on critical topics identified by area youth, including:

• Civic Engagement
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Natural Resources
• Society and Governance

My introduction to YSEALI dates to spring 2017, when ALEC hosted a YSEALI Fellow from the Philippines. That exchange of ideas continued as she put together an agenda in Manila that allowed me to discuss federalism and provided me with a more comprehensive understanding of the erosion of democratic norms in that nation than news articles could. I met heroic people working tirelessly to strengthen the rule of law in the Philippines who were trying to put a stop to their president’s extrajudicial killings.

ALEC’s The Power of the Purse: President Rodrigo Duterte Effectively Defunded the Philippine Commission on Human Rights details some of the excesses of the Duterte regime. The preponderance of leaders in the Philippines engaged in righting the country’s path were graduates of the YSEALI Program and exemplified the best of American governing traditions. This March, the Filipino government surrendered Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court, which has charged him with crimes against humanity that include murder, rape, and torture.

ALEC hosted a YSEALI Fellow from Laos, a country still under Communist rule. The staff showed him free political expression in action while making sure that he could remain anonymous, as he feared reprisals from his own government. He traveled to the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives and witnessed that legislative chamber vote to approve a bill commemorating Nov. 7 as Victims of Communism Day, an event that he confided later moved him and hopefully informed reforms he might try to initiate in his home country one day. The ALEC model Victims of Communism Memorial Day Resolution can be found here.

A question that has stayed with me since last month’s meeting came from a Fellow who asked how her nation could develop a closer relationship with the U.S. because countries in Southeast Asia view ties with America as a way to counter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) encroachment and coercion. Given current Sino-U.S. tensions, no region is more important for America’s safety than southeast Asia which desperately wants an alternative to partnering with the PRC.

While the United States is powerful, we are even stronger when working together with our allies, and organizations like YSEALI are ally-force multipliers. The U.S. public intuitively understands this and supports our international leadership. According to a 2024 poll, 80% of the American people want the United States to lead or play a major role on the world stage.

Programs like YSEALI are effective American soft power assets, exposing countries around the world to our greatest export – the governing principles and structures that underpin the rule of law. As then Secretary of Defense General James Mattis observed in 2018, “We lead with ideas, we lead with the example of our country, and we work with like-minded nations.”

U.S. soft power helps to develop like-minded nations. Forums where policy and political leaders can gain strength from each other and exchange ideas on governmental best practices – American best practices – provide the United States with what is essentially a non-military strategic footprint in vital regions around the globe. These relationships facilitate deals on naval bases in the Philippines and rare and critical minerals deals with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Used wisely, America’s soft power assets create the global partners that help to make the United States safer, more prosperous, and stronger.