Even if you are not on TikTok, you probably know one of the 170 million monthly users in the United States or the 1.2 billion around the world.

After the Supreme Court upheld Congress’ ban on the app based on U.S. national security concerns, TikTok went dark in the United States over the weekend.

But TikTok came back online as incoming President Donald Trump signaled he would give the social media giant a reprieve to find an American buyer for the Chinese-owned company. He followed through on that vow on Inauguration Day, issuing an executive order to delay enforcement of the ban for 75 days.

Analysts are scrambling to understand the ramifications of Trump’s decision — whether he can legally and politically manage to hold off on enforcing the law that demands TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sell the app to a non-Chinese company or be banned.

But if you think this drama is just about TikTok, you are missing the larger point.

TikTok is just one piece of a wider story about the importance of cultural intelligence, without which any nation suffers, especially ours.

Social media is one more form of soft power — the ability to influence people through means other than military might.

Soft power, as Harvard professor Joseph Nye describes it, “is the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment.” It is based on a country’s ability to leverage its cultural resources to shape the world and persuade foreign audiences to advance U.S. foreign policy.

That is how TikTok and RedNote, another Chinese app that TikTok fans have migrated to since the ban took effect, works.

This approach is predicated on building trust and credibility with foreign populations through more direct people-to-people and business-to-business exchanges and reinforcing the importance of shared cultural and ideological experiences.

Historically, this area of foreign policy has been hard to define and difficult for Congress to build consensus around, much less measure or provision adequately within the context of U.S. foreign policy appropriations.

When it comes to soft power, American leadership and innovation are stuck. Despite a dangerous, even unprecedented increase in global challenges of a multi-dimensional nature, our soft power foreign policy toolbox is woefully outdated. Old ideas and methods designed for a different era have not given way to innovative, imaginative and effective strategies that enable America to exercise greater power and influence globally.

This moment demands new, non-kinetic options to address short and long-term foreign policy challenges — and the ability to shape the global cultural, social and political landscape before our adversaries do.

TikTok should force us to think about China in a different way. China is often the focus of U.S. foreign policy, but rather than just craft policies around trade, tariffs and technology, we should be looking at the Chinese “cultural revolution” that enables TikTok and other Chinese-owned services to flourish and cross boundaries. China is positioning itself as a cultural soft power leader while it builds up its nuclear arsenal. They know how to do both.

America needs its own response to the cultural challenges by China. In addition to military planning, economic strategizing, intelligence-gathering and other traditions forms of influence, we need a coherent, coordinated plan to better understand the ideas, behaviors and trends in human cultural interaction.

As we do so, we will have to focus more on artificial intelligence, with its power to exponentially increase outreach to billions of people, making soft power even more critical.

With the benefit of artificial intelligence, the United States can leverage lessons from the exercise of soft power in the past as well as use data to strengthen and redefine its global influence, particularly with respect to global stakeholder populations below the age of 40 who use social media.

Now is the time to drive innovation by taking cultural intelligence data, use it with AI power, and redesign our soft power in U.S. foreign policy strategy.

Such engagement requires a more serious, inter-agency approach to leverage U.S. soft power and pursue a deeper dive into our culture, values and ideas.

We should explore a new framework and find ways to organize ourselves to be more effective. We can do this initially by interviewing former and current diplomats to isolate examples of successful interventions and the reasons for their success. Then, we can use these data sets to inform AI platforms and enable them to learn iteratively and refine their ability to help us project soft power more effectively.

Yes, we must be concerned about the national security implications and address the data concerns of Chinese ownership, particularly for the U.S. government. But that is not an excuse to avoid the responsibility to craft a strategic plan to leverage technology to reach a large swath of people with cultural intelligence to project our values and interests at home and overseas.

While policy decisions are critical to leveraging U.S. soft power, so are the everyday Americans who define America and what we stand for on a day-to-day basis. Our entertainment and news media influence global audiences 24/7. Our athletes and movie creators thrill billions every year around the world. Our values are reflected in thousands of ways daily in different sectors and industries.

Let’s ask the right questions: How do we know which channels work and which ideas to advance? Who does the advancing? What does a whole-of-society approach look like in leveraging U.S. soft power? How do U.S. policymakers and lawmakers ensure that our policies, priorities, messaging and engagement with the rest of the world reflect the American people and not just a government’s representation of the American people?

Our adversaries (most notably Russia and China) and friends are taking soft power seriously by co-opting a key element of soft power — our public diplomacy playbook — and they are using online content generators like TikTok to influence real-world events. We better get smart about this — fast.

Farah Pandith is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the former special representative to Muslim communities at the U.S. Department of State, and author of “How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat.” Tara Sonenshine is a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She served as U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama administration.