Middle Power’s Soft Engagement: Whether Hard Power Can Be a Tool of Soft Power?

This article is an attempt to shed light on all possible aspects of military soft power with reference to the case study of the Pakistani military. This study reveals the Pakistani state’s effective use of the military (hard power) as a soft power, which is the only available tool at its disposal due to its inability to use other soft power tools. Without such effective use of hard power as soft power, the Pakistani state would not have had such an impact on many countries of the world, especially the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular. Therefore, can the Pakistani influence be measured by the Pakistani flags all over Baku after the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, the economic help from the Gulf countries, the appraisal statements from Sri Lanka and Bosnia, the peacekeeping missions in many countries, and so on? Was this all possible because of Pakistan’s military soft power? Is it the latter that has saved the Pakistani state from a total economic collapse? This paper expands Nye’s soft power theory to the middle power’s use of hard power as a soft power using the qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. Moreover, it is of paramount importance to look into the possibility where hard power tools can be used as soft power (direct or indirect military actions) when it is the only option available due to the state’s inability to use other soft power tools.