One of America's leading policy intellectuals, who coined the term "Soft Power", looks at what has happened to American power from the time of Kennedy to the present day. In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power in the US was expressed in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, numbers of men under arms, and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe. By 2010, none of these factors confer power in the same way: industrial capacity seems an almost a Victorian virtue, and cyber threats are wielded by non-state actors.