The man who coined the term "soft power" recently died. It’s ironic that Joseph Nye taught at Harvard University, the institution that's in the eye of the storm of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students. A court has now stopped the US government from banning foreign student enrolment at the country's most elite university, but more suspensions of federal funding are in the works.

Now comes a broader move. The US State Department is pausing visa applications for the country's more than 1 million foreign students, this "in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting". In a land that prides itself on its First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing free speech, who decides when posting a picture of a Palestinian flag constitutes a national security threat?

Are we seeing a passing fancy or the true decline of US soft power? As Europeans try to lure students and researchers to migrate to these shores, as the UK moves towards rejoining the Erasmus foreign student exchange programme that the pro-Brexit Conservatives quit, we ask what the pushback against foreign students and the use of social media posts as evidence for the prosecution say about our times and the free flow of ideas and information.

Produced by François Picard, Rebecca Gniganti, Juliette Laffont, Ilayda Habip, Alessandro Xenos.