Tag Archives: Soft power

Russia’s Greatest Weapon is not a Weapon, by Dmitry Orlov

Russia is what many people around the world still consider normal, and that gives it a big advantage. From Dmitry Orlov at lewrockwell.com:

An ultimately very healthy but in the meantime very unpleasant realization is gradually dawning in West—an insight that is simply shocking, that fundamentally alters their picture of the world: that the stronger becomes the hurricane of woke transformations that is raging there, the more attractive Russia becomes for hundreds of millions of Europeans and Americans. What is Russia’s most powerful weapon? Is it nuclear? Is it hypersonic (or “hydrosonic,” as per Trump)? Cybermagic, perhaps? No, Russia’s most powerful weapon is its values. And it grows stronger and more dangerous every day, in direct proportion to the intensifying fire of multiculturalism and political correctness that is raging in Europe and in America.

A recent article in The National Interest summarized various American authors who claim that the Kremlin is gradually developing its strategy of soft power and using it to successfully fight the West, splitting it and undermining it from within. What is the cause of their paranoid hysteria? Could it be that they have accidentally discovered who their true enemy is, and that it is… they themselves?

The simplest and most effective way to knock a geopolitical adversary out of the game is to impose on it a system of values ​​that will split its society and lead the most active part of its population to occupy public buildings, to erect barricades and to support a pretender to the throne that is immediately given support and recognition by the country’s enemies. This is how all color revolutions of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries have been done: broadcast some propaganda, recruit some activists, help them to organize, provide some clandestine financial support, and then at some point this human mass, confident in their strength and their righteousness, surges through the police barriers and goes on to create history by overthrowing some faux-democrat petty tyrant, clearing the path for the next faux-democrat petty tyrant to be installed, with the country growing weaker, poorer and more disordered with each iteration. The process starts with the conversion of some significant part of the target population to “universal human values” with secular proselytizing of the “one true democratic faith.”

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The West Is Losing Its Soft Power, by Patrick Armstrong

The West, particularly the United States, has lost a lot of its appeal to the rest of the world. From Patrick Armstrong at strategic-culture.org:

“Soft power” is a useful concept whose invention is attributed to Joseph Nye in the 1980s. “Hard power” is easy enough to understand: it’s the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay or Marshal Zhukov in Berlin. But soft power is more subtle: in Nye’s words: “many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive.” There are two commonly used ranking lists: Portland – Soft Power 30 – and Brand – Global Soft Power Index. Portland’s top ten in 2019 were France, UK, Germany, Sweden, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Australia and Netherlands. Brand’s in 2020 were USA, Germany, UK, Japan, China, France, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and Russia. The first rating is very Eurocentric, the other includes Russia and China. Another difference is the position of the United States, but that doesn’t really make much difference to the point of my essay which is about soft power then, now and in the near future.

The Second World War brought the true flowering of the USA’s soft power; from the cargo cults of Melanesia to the cargo cults of Europe, GIs brought the dream to everyone. The USA won the war in a way that no other power did – it emerged immensely stronger and richer into a world in which its natural competitors had been impoverished. At Bretton Woods and San Francisco it shaped the new world to a degree that no other power could. And, understandably, it shaped it to its own benefit, quite convinced that it had every right to do so as the victor and exemplar of the better future. Only the USSR and its sphere grumpily disagreed.

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