Qhaysh is soft power.
Just, you know. The "we have nukes" sort of soft power.
As a political science major, that is NOT what soft power means. What you describe is what is colloquially known as gunboat diplomacy.
Soft power is subtly affecting the amicability of other countries (usually via art affecting the culture, e.g. Hollywood, but any non coercive method is technically soft power) so that they become more amenable to your way of doing things.
Using threats, even soft and understated threats, even threats you do not bring to the table for moral reason but which are nevertheless known to others can never be considered soft power because it is inherently coercive.
For what it's worth, and to expand on my thinking I'm theorizing that
Qhaysh is soft power in the philosophy of wielding it, rather than the result of any given spell. Though I do think hold that any kind of magic user would tend to naturally, though not
inevitably, produce results colored by the philosophy of that magic. For simple reason that you may not
just have a hammer in your mental toolkit, but you do very definitely
have a hammer, and are quite good with it to boot.
But to really get started, I since putting
Qhaysh in opposition to that "
Dhar as Hard Power/Coercion/Force" is the hallmark of this. Since we we don't exactly see BoneyM's personal interpretation High Magic directly in this quest much, but we have seen quite a bit of
Dhar, and this theory is based on the idea of there being a duality there.
So...
Dhar:
Hard power is quick, it's easy to conceptualize how to use it, and it gets immediate results, but it has a cost. Much as how we see
Dhar portrayed. Hold a spear to someone's throat and they'll probably do what you want and fast, but only for so long as that spear remains at their throat, and their resulting opinion of you, as well as anything they try to do afterwords, will be
distinctly colored by how you went about influencing them.
More than that, it's also cyclical. If you get your power from holding the use of force over people's heads you're going to have much more need to do so in the future. Spiraling down until something, inevitably, breaks. Looked at that way,
of course someone who had that kind of philosophy shoved into their soul a bit at a time would slowly turn to violence, deceit, megalomania, and so on as their primary answer to everything.
It even follows when it comes to advanced use, where we read the Libre Mortis and saw how it talked about how it's possible to make something more stable. If you can patiently weave the system to restrain itself, to perpetually coerce itself per the theory, you can get much more lasting results. Likewise, we do see that you get systems of coercion and abuse that perpetuate themselves like that even in real life, often taking the form of hierarchies, though concrete examples are probably a bit too politically charged for this discussion.
Qhyash, meanwhile...
By contrast, soft power often takes decades to take proper effect, you are basically committing to changing people's minds or dealing with them as they are without taking any shortcuts after all, but once it does those effects are proportionally longer lasting. Compare High Magic taking decades or centuries to learn properly, but being extremely potent once it has finally been learned.
For an example of what we have seen of high magic is Waystones, and BoneyM's take on Waystones seem to me like a in universe example of soft power: Everyone who has a waystone on the network benefits, but they benefit the most from
theirs. Similarly, if one is damaged, the whole world suffers, but the one who lost, and those in close proximity to them, suffer
most.
The interests off all involved are, at least in principle, aligned to look out for themselves and each other alike. It's not always sufficient to override everything else, see the War of the Ancients, but in principle those who have the network have a vested interest in seeing it maintained and grow, and making allies to help do so. Even when there's an update that has folks saying "Of course Ulthuan is using all that magic
for something, they'd be stupid not to," there's also the unspoken "Yeah, and we benefit too, so that's okay."
You can see the logic that must have been at play both in the elves paying the dwarves in their own sub-network and in how that network must have gone up in dwarven internal politics alike: The elves must have felt that the addition would only add to the potency of the greater network, even if it empowered the dwarves more than it did themselves, and perhaps some of the more charitable of them felt that the dwarven network might also add resiliency as well if anything ever happened to Ulthuan.
Likewise, assuming it was not as secret as it is now to begin with, the Runesmith clan of each dwarven hold understands that they're getting a method to clear the area around them of the winds of magic. With the ancestor works involved, perhaps those that set up the hold waystones also thought to benefit by asking for a give and take in what those waystones would
power, in exchange for their work in installing them. Certainly I would expect a debate like that if both news got out and we started doing things like installing a waystone in Karak Hirn.
Importantly, I think we see this dynamic repeated in whatever is going on in Altdorf: The colleges are largely individual, but there's clearly some interaction going on, just from the way it affects the city as a whole. At a guess, I would expect the broad structure of the spell in the city reflects the same philosophy present in the waystone network.
The colleges and their campuses alike are largely independent but they're interconnected feed on one another and so, if one ever came to suffer, it would behoove the others to come to their assistance. Not only out of charity, but because the failure or weakening of the spell/their fellow colleges as institutions would affect them too, even if it affected that one college first and foremost. (And so, likewise, might the ambitious see that the strengthening of their fellow colleges would also serve to strengthen themselves.)
So yeah, All things together, I think we need
a lot more encounters with High Magic (and thus text to interrogate) to understand if it
really operates by something that can be considered analogous to soft power, but I think there's enough text so far between what little we've seen, the way
Dhar seems to work, and in the traditional contrast between the two and the poetry of "harmony vs force" to at least broach the theory to begin with.
