The U.S. military carried out strikes against two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and groups it backs, the Pentagon said on Thursday, in response to a spate of attacks against U.S. forces in both Iraq and Syria.
Soft power is dead because the two most recent Presidents of the US are completely incompetent at it.
China and Russia and India are happily projecting soft power even as the US seems to have forgot how.
I think it's actually due to the decline of the US as a stable partner. Not just Presidents, but the whole government is seemingly unable to function.