The Charisma Wars

The irony was rich. Here was the general secretary of the Communist Party—supposedly representing workers of the world—challenging, 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’t fully understand. The medium was becoming the message, and the messenger was becoming the medium.

Hendrik W. Ohnesorge’s magisterial new book, Soft Power and Charismatic Leadership in German-American Relations, arrives at precisely the right moment to explain what’s happened since. In roughly 850 densely researched pages, the University of Bonn political scientist does something remarkable: He takes Joseph Nye’s celebrated concept of “soft power”—the ability to attract rather than coerce—and demonstrates that in the 21st century, the personality of leaders has become the single most important variable in how that power operates.

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.

When Nye popularized the phrase “soft power” 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—think of John F. Kennedy, or Reagan—but 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.

This is why a dour Richard Nixon or a sanctimonious Jimmy Carter didn’t 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’s spectacular dullness couldn’t undermine Soviet soft power among true believers; the ideology carried the weight. It didn’t matter that the man was about as charismatic as a cement block.

But that world is gone. And Ohnesorge’s book—drawing on five centuries of German-U.S. relations but focusing intensively on Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—demonstrates why personality now matters more than ever.

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’s charisma became what Ohnesorge calls a “fourth resource” of soft power, joining Nye’s original trinity.

The Trump years confirmed the pattern in reverse. Between 2017 and 2021, every indicator of U.S. soft power toward Germany collapsed—United Nations voting coincidence, public approval—not because U.S. universities got worse or Hollywood stopped making movies, but because of one man’s spectacular unsuitability for global leadership. As Ohnesorge puts it with characteristic understatement, Trump’s presidency represents “a study in soft power squared”—meaning soft power loss squared, catastrophically multiplied.

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.

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’t need charismatic directors; they needed credible content.

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—and the smart ones very much like it. As Anders Wivel and Caroline Howard Gron argue in their pathbreaking work, Charismatic Leadership in Foreign Policy, modern leaders engage in constant “communicative practices” that make sense of “who ‘we’ are and where we are going.”

This isn’t optional anymore. It’s the job.

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

This creates a dangerous vulnerability that the Cold War’s institutional soft power didn’t 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 “soft power pendulum” swings wildly with each election: Clinton’s charm to Bush’s catastrophe to Obama’s restoration to Trump’s demolition. Four-year (or eight-year) cycles aren’t long enough to build anything sustainable. Allies can’t plan. Adversaries can wait it out.

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: Leaders’ 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.

The solution? There isn’t an easy one. We can’t uninvent social media or reverse the celebrity-fication of politics. What we can do is understand the game that’s being played. Ohnesorge’s book offers a brutal clarity: In the 21st century, who leads matters as much as what they lead. Maybe more.

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.

On this, Ohnesorge, drawing on Max Weber’s 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.

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’t save the Soviet Union because there was no substance beneath the style. The real lesson isn’t that personality doesn’t matter. It’s that personality without policy is just performance art. And in the long run, audiences can tell the difference.

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

In the charisma wars of the 21st century, everyone’s a combatant. May the most authentic win.