Tag: Soft power

China’s ‘Great Leap Backward’

     

A bipartisan strategic assessment underlies a widely-shared assumption about the likely direction of China’s development, notes a leading analyst. This was not the simplistic faith that if China became richer,… Read more »

Facing up to authoritarian influence-peddling

     

For 25 years, open societies saw themselves as the uncontested winners and expected that the remaining autocracies, with the help of western pro-democracy actors, would be relegated to the dustbin… Read more »

Kremlin-sponsored anti-Americanism a common denominator for Europe’s left and right

     

Over the past few years, anti-Americanism has become an integral part of any debate on foreign and domestic policy in Russia, notes Anton Barbashin, a managing editor at Intersection. You… Read more »

Autocrats using ‘toxic election’ to pour scorn on democracy

     

Russia, China and Iran are among several authoritarian regimes seeking to use the U.S. election as an opportunity to project soft power, to undermine the attractiveness of liberal democracy, and… Read more »

How to counter autocrats’ soft power

     

A new global “soft power” ranking recently reported that the democratic states of North America and Western Europe were the most successful at achieving their diplomatic objectives “through attraction and… Read more »

Putin ‘orchestrating’ Russian football hooligans for hybrid warfare

     

Is Vladimir Putin orchestrating Russian football hooligans as an instrument of hybrid warfare? Putin, not himself averse to machismo, has often empathized with Moscow ultras’ behavior, deliberately cultivating virility as a feature of an assertive… Read more »

Kremlin to fund patriotic ‘anti-extremist’ films

     

  Russia’s Ministry of Culture is looking to produce films to spread Russian values, celebrate the country’s history and tackle “crime, terrorism and extremism,” Newsweek’s Damien Sharkov writes: The Ministry… Read more »

Turkey ‘at the heart of the storm’

     

Reporters Without Borders placed Turkey – where more than 30 journalists are currently under arrest – 151st on a list of 180 countries in its new World Press Freedom Index,… Read more »

Isolation and propaganda: roots and instruments of Russia’s soft power

     

Russia’s fairly successful propaganda in the West shows that political pluralism and open societies have some significant vulnerabilities compared to authoritarian states, with regard to speed of decision-making and action,… Read more »