From a contributed op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post, Joseph Nye (Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) writes:
Soft power is the ability to get what we want by attracting others rather than by threatening or paying them...Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square with a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many of our values, such as democracy, human rights and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.
From the prior paragraph:
After the war in Iraq, I spoke about soft power to a conference co-sponsored by the Army. One of the speakers was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. When someone in the audience asked Rumsfeld for his opinion on soft power, he replied, "I don't know what it means." That is part of our problem.
Complete article here.