The Colossus of Code
How games are finding their post-colonial soft touch.
The year is 1948, and the United States emerges from World War II as the world’s mightiest military and economic power. The U.S. will spend the coming years wielding this vast power to achieve its goals through military means: invading foreign nations; stockpiling obscene amounts of super-destructive weapons; threatening and coercing its enemies.
However, the U.S. will also utilize a more subtle sort of power with the Marshall Plan, which gives Western Europe a tremendous amount of aid to rebuild its shattered economy—ensuring that Western Europe remains a capitalist counterweight to its Cold War enemies to the East. The United States—for better or worse—realizes a specific geopolitical order not only through blunt force, but through the cooperation of allies who share its values. This was a successful use of “soft power,” a concept defined by renowned international relations theorist Joseph Nye.
