> You have both US governments and US oligarchs openly pushing and directly promoting fascist and extremist political parties, while at the same time threatening with annexation and military interventions.

I think the first part of this is political alignment right? What are "fascist and extremist political parties" is not politics with a very different alignment?

I think your second point is a really good one though, the Barack Obama and J D Vance examples are both soft power usage. But in the case of Vance, it comes alongside a state using military force to bully its way through issues, that's a very significant context difference I didn't really acknowledge earlier.