Postmodern open "Soft Power" vs Modern secret "Hard Power"

The old - "Modern" - world was organized around hard power's secrecy and monopoly .

In this world, one person only - the American President - had his finger on the red button that simply said "Bombs Away !"

Our new world - "Postmodern" - is organized around the public openness of soft power.

Now seven billion fingers hover above a nation's "Friend Me" button and collectively we all decide its cultural and moral status and hence its soft power.

In the old world, the key cultural artifact was the spy and detective novel with their single sheet 'formula' , stolen from some safe , that all alone by itself could save or entirely destroy all our world for all time.

For Modernity's science saw all Reality has having only one perfect, permanent , normal form, one that was both knowable and concealable.

In our postmodern world, soft power is not physical but mental, intangible, virtual.

And dynamic and fleeting.

One minute - for reasons obscure - Nordic culture is so so hot, the next minute as dead as Myspace.

Yellowcake diplomacy , Pax Urania ,  the American A-bomb monopoly , was hard power : physical and a secret monopoly.

Yellowmagic diplomacy, Pax Penicillia , the global goodwill generated by selfless American penicillin flown all over the world , was soft power : intangible and fleeting unless sincere and sustained.

The antibiotic Lady or the atomic Tiger ?

Unfortunately for the world - but even more so for the soul of America - in 1945 the Behind-The-Beltway acolytes chose the six trillion dollar Pax Urania door , instead of the six hundred million dollar Pax Penicillia door ....