When a country's culture includes universal values and its policies
promote values and interests that others share, it increases the
probability of obtaining its desired outcomes because of the relationships
of attraction and duty that it creates. Narrow values and
parochial cultures are less likely to produce soft power. The United
States benefits from a universalistic culture. The German editor
Josef Joffe once argued that America's soft power was even larger
than its economic and military assets. "U.S. culture, low-brow or
high, radiates outward with an intensity last seen in the days of the
Roman Empire-but with a novel twist. Rome's and Soviet Russia's
cultural sway stopped exactly at their military borders. America's soft
power, though, rules over an empire on which the sun never sets.