Very Interesting Russian "Soft Power" Strategic View

Matt Armstrong has found a gem of an article. I do not jest when I suggest in the hands of someone clever this article could fuel talk radio shows on either side of the political isle for a month. This is a really interesting Russian analysis of how to attack the United States with soft power.

I will ask up front that you please not be the asshole in the comments who suggests this Russian analysis is targeting just liberals or conservatives, because if you read it in full you will learn it is very thorough in exploiting the political tendencies of both sides of the political spectrum.

This is a short summary of the post by Paul Goble on Window of Eurasia regarding the article.

Having discovered that economic power does not immediately translate into political influence and may in fact alienate those it is supposed to attract, the Russian government needs to identify new ways to influence the West but finding that its options are not nearly as good as many in Moscow had thought, according to a Russian analyst.

And the most effective way to do that, Andrey Pronin writes in an essay posted today on a Moscow State University portal that has often served as a source of foreign policy ideas for the Russian government, is for Russia to deploy what he calls its "soft force" against American "soft power".

"In the 1940s and 1950s," the Moscow analyst continues, "a significant part of the most respectable Western intelligentsia held leftist views and openly sympathized with the USSR, and English aristocrats worked for Soviet intelligence services on the basis of their convictions in this regard."

Today, he says, Russia needs to find "allies interested in itself within America" and to "form a pro-Russian lobby, a circle of influential people who respect and support Russia and who will exert an ever greater pressure on the political establishment of the United States" on behalf of Moscow. ...

Moscow needs allies, and the two most obvious ones are India and China, neither of whom Pronin suggests is comfortable with American-style globalization. If such a "union of the three giants" is formed, he concludes, Russia will occupy the leading role of a scientific and innovative center and the developer of humanitarian technologies and standards."

There are some money quotes in Andrey Pronin's paper. This paragraph is just a sample.

The situation in American society favors the implementation of these plans. In many ways the United States today is reminiscent of the Soviet Union period of stagnation under Brezhnev. Militarism, foreign adventures, attacks on freedom of speech and human rights, censorship, the presence of the official ideology are evident. Multinational and multiracial American society does not have a common history and defines itself in terms of ideology, which is a more fragile foundation of national unity, rather than a common culture and history that binds cultures. If you choose to continue the comparison, the U.S., as in the Soviet Union, should be a peaceful ideological and cultural revolution. The challenge for Russia is to give impetus and direction to the process. Russia should contribute to the U.S. situation in a way similar to how the US promoted the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, namely by injecting quarrel into the most creative layer of Soviet intellectuals with Brezhnev nomenclature. Russia needs to formulate such a cultural project that, first, develops influence over American intellectuals, and secondly, leverages against the American political system that is out of balance, and split the American artistic and intellectual elite in power.

In other words:

• Exploit the worlds global perception of America against America
  
• Exploit sympathy within American intellectual and artistic communities
• Exploit diversity as an unbinding individualism rather than binding common interest
  
• Exploit the ideological partisan political divide to create a disenfranchised American political culture

The paper goes on to form a high level strategy of building an environment in Russia favorable to American intellectuals by exploiting the ideological divides in the American education system. One such example cited is the education divisions found between human science and religion, but another divide is how creativity is becoming more limited in US education due to how education leaders are exercising ideological control along partisan political divisions in creative debate. The aim appears to be to court the elites who dominate education to help shape the information studied by younger generations while dividing the elites and religious Americans. Russia sees religion as a source of weakness in America, and is looking for allies among Americans who believe this as to promote further divisions between religious Americans and non-religious American elites and artists.

The paper suggests building a unified "soft force" strategy with India and China so together the three nations can beat back what is labeled a failed western neo-liberal globalization economic model, so a new model can be reinvented in a form more favorable to Russia.

I believe the paper qualifies as a must read, and I admit doing it an injustice by not translating the whole thing. There is already a bit of intellectual commentary on the paper among Russian bloggers and elites, much of which is interesting as well. Hopefully, someone will translate the whole thing into English, because it deserves study and further intellectual discussion.