Obama's Speech In The Language Of Soft Power

Some critics (Palmar, 2010; Lagon, 2011) dislike Barak Obama’s policy decisions. They argue that Obama mostly was using hard power politics. Their arguments include: 1) increased amount of US troops in Afghanistan by 35000 soldiers, 2) unmanned drones used against terrorists, 3) failure to close Guantánamo, and 4) killing Osama bin Laden. For this reason, critics point out that even if Obama speaks in the language of soft power, his actions are of hard power (Hallams, 2011). As a counterargument to this statement, it is worth analyzing President’s speech at Oslo in 2009, where Obama mentioned that soft power and diplomacy are crucially important but not everything may be solved or achieved through them. So here are the limits of soft power.