@sickburnbro Just to restate one of your points: soft power is cheap, hard power is expensive. Soft power is failing (as you detail) and a wide-spread implementation of hard power is unworkable in the GAE proper.

(China can be a decent example in this case as hard power there works only because 100 years (or more) of political chaos has made people very gun-shy about any anti-system talk in their (largely) mono-ethnic, highly capable country).