When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive.

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Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

Our whole experiment is meaningless unless we are to make this a democracy in the fullest sense of the word, in the broadest as well as the highest and deepest significance of the word.  It must be made a democracy economically, as well as politically.

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Theodore Roosevelt

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A stronger economy means a stronger nation. With it comes the ability to defend freedom, uphold human rights, and project the kind of influence that draws others toward us rather than driving them away. A forward economy—one that shares wealth, reinvests in innovation, and restores a sense of purpose to capitalism—offers America not just prosperity at home, but a far more powerful form of persuasion abroad.

Economic strength feeds hard power. But as Harvard’s Joseph Nye has long argued, the deeper contest is not about coercion. It’s about attraction—the ability to make other nations want what you want. The world’s real struggle is between systems that seduce and systems that subjugate. America wins when others choose our path freely.

That’s why the forward model isn’t just an economic reform. It’s a geopolitical strategy. Forty to fifty percent faster growth—or more—translates into greater investment in defense, technology, and resilience. Yet those are only the tools. What matters more is the example we set and the system we embody.

Right now, that system is faltering.

Thirty-five million Americans live in poverty. Whole regions have been hollowed out. Drug use and despair mark the landscape. For millions, the promise of upward mobility has collapsed. And when the world looks at us through that lens, it doesn’t see a system to admire—it sees one to avoid.

The backward economy concentrates American wealth in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of society to fight over scraps. It delivers record profits to shareholders while suppressing wages, then wonders why cynicism spreads. No autocrat in Beijing or Moscow could design a better argument against democracy.

A forward economy flips the script. By sharing profits, reinvesting in communities, and tying prosperity directly to contribution, it broadens opportunity and rebuilds faith in the democratic project itself. When people see a system that works—for them, not just for those at the top, but for everyone—they stop looking for saviors and start believing again in representative self-government.

And that’s where soft power begins.

When a democracy delivers economic freedom as well as political freedom, it attracts allies naturally. People abroad don’t emulate governments that fail their citizens. They emulate systems that make life better.  Theodore Roosevelt warned more than a century ago that democracy without economic fairness cannot endure. He was right.

Political dysfunction is the inevitable by-product of economic division. For decades, America’s backward economy has split its citizens into owners and workers—two political tribes with conflicting interests and opposite media ecosystems. The result is gridlock and paralysis: fourteen government shutdowns, threats of default, a slow corrosion of trust.

It is within that chaos that demagogues thrive.

When millions feel excluded from prosperity, they become easy prey for those who promise revenge instead of reform.  The more Americans feel left behind, the easier it becomes for leaders who admire autocrats to convince them that democracy itself has failed.

That’s the real national security threat—not China, not Russia, but our own economic design. Because if we can’t deliver freedom and opportunity to our own people, the rest of the world will stop believing we can deliver them to anyone else.

Fixing this requires more than electing better leaders or voting for the right political party. It requires redesigning the system that keeps producing dysfunction. The forward economy is how we do it. By aligning capitalism with virtue—by making reinvestment and fairness the norm, not the exception—we make government more functional, citizens more unified, and democracy more stable.

Foreign observers won’t miss the change. Imagine a United States with shared prosperity, low taxes, small government, minimal debt, and fewer crises. A nation that governs effectively because its economy works for everyone. That’s a model others will line up to copy.

And there’s precedent for this kind of moral leadership.

After World War II, the United States made a strategic choice that still echoes today. Instead of exploiting its victory, it launched the Marshall Plan—investing the equivalent of $260 billion in today’s dollars to rebuild Europe and Japan. It wasn’t charity. It was brilliance. By helping others rise, America created partners, not dependents, and surrounded itself with prosperous democracies.

The same logic applies now. A forward economy gives us the means to launch a Marshall Plan 2.0—this time led not just by government, but by millions of forward enterprises and funds, all donated by individuals depending on what they care about. As these firms and workers direct part of their noble-cause contributions abroad, they’ll build schools, infrastructure, and industries across the developing world.

They won’t pursue development abroad to extract resources or secure contracts. They’ll do it because it aligns with their core belief system, borne of an innate human yearning to not only life ourselves up, but our neighbors, too. 

A forward economy doesn’t hoard; it builds, it multiplies. It channels human ambition toward creation, renewal, and prosperity rather than conquest.

The results will be profound. As new markets grow abroad, demand for American goods will rise. Shared prosperity will replace dependency. Immigration pressures will ease as opportunity expands where people live. And political extremism at home—both on the far right and far left—will lose its fuel in a society where the system itself feels fair.

Most important, our soft power will surge. People in developing nations won’t be told to admire America—they’ll want to. They’ll see a system that aligns freedom with prosperity, compassion with strength.

China and Russia, by contrast, will face growing pressure to change or collapse under their own contradictions. No regime can indefinitely suppress a population that sees freer, more prosperous neighbors thriving under a better model. The same dynamics that unraveled the Soviet Union will return, not through external force, but within the hearts of the people.

That’s the long game.

And it begins at home—with an economy designed to reward virtue, not greed; to expand wealth, not hoard it; to create believers, not cynics.

We don’t win this century by intimidation. We win it by inspiration.

And as Martin Brody said—we’re going to need a bigger boat. 

The question now is when we start in building it.

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