"Soft power" in international policy: peculiarities of national strategies

The contemporary world is still not stable and safe. The constant struggle of states for power, resources and other competitive advantages, having mostly violent nature, requires them to develop new and more dangerous weapons. As a result, the amount of accumulated weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear capability, put all the mankind to the brink of survival. In this context, in recent decades, the role of non-violent methods of influence on the international community of states substantially increases, new concepts and theories arise, they are devoted to these issues. Currently, this path has already got many industrialized countries. In this article «soft power» of national strategies in the foreign policy of some modern countries are considered, the main approaches, resources, goals and results of using the «soft power» by these states at present time have been analyzed. This allows us to evaluate in the future and retrospective the effectiveness of both some of its tools and total «soft capacity» of the states as well.