The Cold War was fought and won with soft power rather than hard power. Discussion. Soft power is anything but the use of force. It includes manipulating economic and cultural influence for persuasive reasoning in politics, providing international aid for the purpose of allying one group of countries against another, giving speeches to rally people and attract them to an ideology, building relationships and so on, all of it to achieve a goal. There are also extreme uses of soft power, such as that used by imperialist powers in the seventeenth century, to defeat their enemies by bringing disease to the colonies. The term "soft power" is sometimes loosely described. Not all aspects of non-hard power are soft power. The two Great Wars of the 20th century were fought using hard power (use of infantry and weapons, bombings, raids, force, sanctions) versus soft power. But there was another war in the second half of the twentieth century, which was fought primarily using soft power versus using hard power. But the use of soft power didn't end there. Until now, America and China use culture and their strong economic status to influence ordinary people towards them. For example, in American films, the bad guys are always Russian or Chinese, mafia or whatever. These films and other types of media propaganda were sent inside the Iron Curtain to undermine the communist way of life. Despite the fact that the theory of "soft power" was coined at the end of the twentieth century, the idea was used diligently by politicians, fifty years earlier, during the Cold War, hence the name. Joseph Nye wrote a book that describes soft power in depth. It divided power into three… halves of paper… the idea that to avoid a hot war, the two superpowers turned to the use of soft power, without actually knowing the term. All the leaders of the two countries made sure to avoid a hot war at any cost, knowing the consequences. The speeches, telegrams, letters, summits etc. they guaranteed that a nuclear war would not take place. It is widely believed that the United States of America won the Cold War, somehow because its main rival collapsed. In any case, also because the Americans did not send troops directly to Soviet-controlled areas in Eastern Europe, but used force in areas where they could not let countries succumb to communism, such as Korea and Vietnam. The Cold War was fought primarily using soft power rather than hard power and this is why we live in times where the world is not being destroyed by nuclear weapons.