By Tom Plate

Perhaps it should not be so surprising that the world's king of software should so well evidence an understanding of the deft efficacy of "soft power." That's the term coined by Joseph Nye Jr., Harvard's brilliant dean of the Kennedy School of Government, to explain that America's global influence derives not only from its military might but also from the power of its values and institutions.

In America, private charity, for example, is as deeply embedded as baseball and cookouts. So when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled, on a swing through India recently, an initial grant of $100 million to help that country cope with its AIDS problem, the world was witnessing the exercise of soft power — and America's charitable instincts — at its best.

For the mammoth aid project could well wind up saving more Indians from death than anything short of averting nuclear war with Pakistan. The grant is designed to spread information, education and preventive techniques. The experience in the United States has been that AIDS does not simply go away by sweeping the problem under the rug because of the disease's off-putting social stigma.

AIDS is a hot-button issue in India. Religious conservatives, appalled by the promiscuous sexual and homosexual behavior that fuels the infection's spread, would prefer to keep the crisis under the covers. But with the window of opportunity proffered by the Gates grant, India can be spared the public-health horror that has befallen some countries in Africa infected by the twin plagues of the AIDS epidemic and government incompetence.

A growing Indian economy offers U.S. businesses not only a fantastic market but also provides a splendidly bilingual workforce that can do everything from creating new software programs to answering the questions of U.S. credit-card customers via the Internet or satellite telephone links. So, sure, Gates did not act simply out of humanitarianism: India hosts Microsoft's only research center outside the United States.

But Gates' Microsoft also represents more potential business for India — a thriving Asian software colossus — than anything this side of "Bollywood," that perennially thriving Indian film industry. India's people deserve better politicians than those who would throw sand at Gates. Moreover, the grant is also a recognition, albeit by a private U.S. entity, of the towering importance of India to America's future.

Lately, that reality has been obscured by the Bush administration's need to break bread with Pakistan, neighbor to Afghanistan and sometimes-home to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. But at some point, proportionality will return to U.S. relations with South Asia and America will re-tilt toward India. For in the grand geopolitical scheme of things, the world's second most populated nation is to Pakistan as Hertz is to Dollar Rent-a-Car.

"From the standpoint of U.S. interests," explains David Karl, an expert at the West Coast-based Pacific Council on International Relations, "Pakistan is important tactically, but India's value is strategic."

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration made no bones of its plan to pump up relations with New Delhi, no matter the reaction in Islamabad. Sept. 11 put that plan — and so many others — on hold. But the U.S. strategy — to help India grow in heft so as to serve as a geopolitical balance to China on the latter's southern flank — is still the plan.

The Gates gift also demonstrates an increasingly potent phenomenon of globalization: the intimate interconnectedness between what is important locally and what is important globally. All along the West Coast of the United States — from Seattle, where Microsoft is headquartered, to Silicone Valley in northern California, where Indian CEOs and programmers are nearly as common as ZIP-drives, to Southern California, where Indian programming geniuses lie behind Hollywood's increasingly computerized movies — Indians dominate the software spotlight of the American computer world.

A further thought: Note that in India last week the world's richest man was practically accorded all the trappings of office normally reserved for a visiting head of state. When Americans in their private capacity comport themselves less like parochial neo-colonial pariahs and more like true statesmen of the world, they demonstrate American soft power at its best.

Last week, Mr. Microsoft ran the soft-power program without a bug.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.