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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie. Hey, Judy.
J. Twigg: Morning, Nia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm excellent because Judy Twigg is back with us and, you know I adore Judy.
J. Aughenbaugh: We both do.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. We're part of the Judy Twigg fan club. I mean, Bill's probably the president, I'm going to give him that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. We're contributing members. We pay dues every year. This is one of the reasons why Judy gets to go around the country listening to all kinds of musical acts. Listeners, you may not have known this, but both Judy Twigg and Chris Saladino are huge fans of what Saladino once referred to as music therapy. Yes.
J. Twigg: Live music therapy.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry?
J. Twigg: Live music therapy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Live music therapy. But anyways, listeners, Judy is with us today to conclude our series where we've looked at, if you will, various topics in international relations and comparative politics. Today's subject is one that's fascinated Nia and I for some time because we come across these two concepts in a lot of our reading. The two concepts are hard power versus soft power. To get us going here, and this is very much my teaching methodology, let's get a handle on the concepts. Nia is like, okay, I'm having flashbacks from when Aughie was my instructor. Judy, what's hard power versus soft power?
J. Twigg: Good intro question to this session, although I'm going to take us a little farther than just hard power and soft power in the conversation. Going back to international relations theory and discourse, literally, since the beginning of time, going back to the Greek international scholars.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wow. We're going back to the Greeks. Nia, I don't think we've ever gone back to the Greeks.
J. Twigg: International politics is conceptualized as first Greek city states for the last several hundred years, sovereign nation states around the world interacting with one another according to the primary principle that every actor, in our case countries or nation states, is trying to maximize its own power. What does that mean? What does it mean to maximize your own power? The traditional definition of that term is assumed to be hard power. For thousands of years, when scholar or anybody else talked about power in terms of international relations, they thought about what we conceptualize as hard power today, which is basically power accrued through things that you can touch and count and measure easily. My guess is that most of your listeners, when they think about power in terms of a country's power, the first thing they think of is military power. That really is the core of most conceptualizations of hard power. You're talking about things like tanks, bombers, aircraft, men, and women in uniform, supply chains. All things that are tangible, all things that you can count or all things that you can assign an economic value to in some way. That's intuitively obvious. The bigger your military, the more powerful you are. Over the last couple of hundred years, hard power has expanded also to include other elements of a country's power that fall into that category of things you can count things, you can touch things, you can measure. Economic power is the other subset of hard power that is intuitively obvious and assumed by everyone when you think about power. How big is your gross domestic product? How much stuff? What's the quantity of goods and services that your country can produce in a given year? I'll forget this point if I don't make it, Aughie. The most common nuance to that economic power thing is that we talk about it in terms of GDP, gross domestic product, or per capital divided by your population, rates equals. You can be a country that has a large GDP, and a relatively small population, and that's really impressive because you've got a relatively small number of people who are producing all these goods and services. You can be a country like China, which right now has, it flips back and forth between the United States and China, but has one of the two largest GDPs in the world, China and the United States, and yet we're doing it with a much smaller population than China is. Still impressive for China, but they've got many, many times more people churning out all of that stuff than we do. We're more productive than they are. Basically, that's hard power. In a nutshell, it's military and economic power. It's the hard stuff. It's the tangible stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: These are things that can be measured. This reminds me a lot of realism, this idea that you can go ahead and measure the weapons you have, the troops you have, in regards to economics. Judy, you just mentioned gross domestic product. This takes me back to graduate school. I remember having to read the former Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, Joseph Nye, his classic definition of hard power where he went ahead and talked about the military power, but he also talked about economics. He mentioned how economic sanctions are a tool of hard power because you can in many ways measure the impact of imposing a sanction on another actor. If you don't buy their wheat, this will do X to their economy.
N. Rodgers: That's considered hard power, not soft. I think of soft power is diplomacy. This idea of, I know you're going to get to that, and you haven't gotten there yet. Hard power to me is not diplomatic. I have shown up at the Canadian border with all of my troops and we are taking Canada. That doesn't seem very diplomatic or nice, that seems pretty hard. I guess I thought of sanctions is more of a soft thing that you could do with your economy, but I guess you guys are saying it falls into the heart category because it's tangible, because you can measure the impact. Is that why it's considered hard
power because it's measurable via impact of when you do sanctions? When we stopped buying stuff from Cuba and Cuba basically fell apart for a while.
J. Twigg: Yeah. Tangible, measurable has to do with stuff.
N. Rodgers: Got you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I like that.
N. Rodgers: Stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: Judy just put it in terms that Nia and I could understand. It deals with stuff.
N. Rodgers: Then soft power.
J. Twigg: Now, let's get to soft power, and I get it right up by measuring Joseph Nye, the renowned international relations scholar from Harvard, who, I had to look up a year, back in 1982, wrote the seminal article saying, we need to think about power in more nuanced terms. It's not all just about hard power. Soft power matters too. Soft power are those elements of a country's power that are intangible, that are fuzzy, that can't be objectively measured. Here we're talking about the quality of a country's diplomacy, the quality of its grand strategy, the skill with which it implements that grand strategy. The pervasive power of a country's culture and the extent to which that culture is conveyed to others around the world and considered to be attractive, desirable by others around the world. The quality of a country's educational institutions and the extent to which others want to come and get their education after in your country. You could imagine how you could go on and on with this list. But all of the things that you can't see, quantify, measure, they're the intangibles, and yet they can have a tremendous influence on how much power a country exerts around the world.
N. Rodgers: Sorry.
N. Rodgers: Hip pop is an example of massive soft power then, in terms of South Korea, because I don't know anybody of a younger generation that doesn't have a favorite K-pop band of some kind. BTS is old news, I know who they are, but so I mean I'm not trying to be ugly and BTS is fine. They're a great band, but I mean they're up and coming all the time and that is pervasive. You go to any country anywhere and they know K-pop like it's a thing. They are highly supported by the government. The K-pop bands are. What you were talking about was strategy. That was one of their sort of strategies of cultural export.
J. Twigg: Quintessential example K-pop. How many young people in the United States do you think have ever or even thought or heard of South Korea? This matters, right? This puts South Korea on the map in meaningful ways with populations especially of young people around the world. Nia, you hit on an important point there. The South Korean government has been very smart about probably creating and certainly wielding this element of soft power for its country. But that is not a necessary condition of soft power. For example, while we're in the popular music area, Taylor Swift is a massive element of
American soft power and despite what some elements of the United political system might think, she is not a creation of the American government, nor is she an intelligence agent or a plot of the Pentagon. She is just an incredibly talented independent actor out there right now, touring all over East Asia and making huge strides for American power in the process. She's an agent of American soft power without the American government having been involved.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes [inaudible] .
N. Rodgers: So it could go either way.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the notion of soft power is and Judy, you touched upon this a few moments ago, correct me if I'm wrong, it's this idea that you're engaging in behaviors that you hope will be modeled by other people in other nation states. Judy mentioned a listener just a few moments ago, educational institutions. Nia, you and I participate in a program at VCU to encourage VCU students to get Fulbright scholarships to study abroad. But then we also attract students to come to our educational institutions. With some of those Fulbright opportunities, we get asked questions from the Fulbright folks. Will this particular student be a good representative of the United States?
N. Rodgers: In fact, the diplomacy question is one of the questions. Can you communicate American culture in a pleasant and appropriate way?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, non confrontational.
N. Rodgers: Can you bring back.
J. Aughenbaugh: What you learn.
N. Rodgers: Elements of culture and spread it in the United States like they want a two way. The State Department always says for Fulbright and for CLS that they want it to be a two way street. You're not just going there to learn the culture, you're also going there to be an American representative and what does that mean? Which is why they try to find a huge variety of folks to go rather than, oh we'll be just took the top 4.0 students of any school. You know what I mean like the whole application is, tell us who you are and what kind of representation of the United States you are.
J. Twigg: This is all, I mean you've heard these terms. Educational diplomacy, cultural diplomacy. All of this falls into that soft power category. With the Fulbrights a lot of that kind of thinking goes back to President John F. Kennedy and the inauguration of the Peace Corps, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
J. Twigg: The program after program, where we do this deliberately, and there are hundreds, thousands of programs that the United States government runs that we've never heard of. That do exactly on a smaller scale. This is not a small scale enterprise by the American government, and it's not a small scale enterprise by other governments either. There are Chinese cultural centers all over the world, there are
Russian cultural centers all over the world. Big powers do this because they recognize how important it can be. That raises the next question. Why is it important, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
J. Twigg: How does soft power work? Why does anybody care? There are the obvious links to hard power. Let's go back to the K-pop example because it's such a great one. You've got all these young people in the United States who are obsessed with K-pop. They have their sort of introduction to Korea through those channels probably makes them more likely when they buy their first car to look at Hyundai and Kia, when they buy their first televisions and washing machines to look at Samsungs and LG's. It's an entryway into the hard power category of things. Positively predisposed toward my culture. You're more likely to buy my stuff and contribute to my hard power down the line. That's one reason that it's important. But there's another important channel of influence for this kind of cultural diplomacy, this promulgation of soft power. That's just good foreign policy. If you build that kind of positive image with another country, that's likely to create pressure among the public for positive diplomatic relations with another country. It's been around for a very long time as a tool to try to influence public opinion in other countries positively toward yours because that's going to benefit you in your foreign policy, in your diplomatic relations with those other countries.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to take this back to another international relations theory. Judy, what you just described sort of strikes, and again I'm tapping into stuff that I learned decades ago when I was getting my master's degree in political science at Virginia Tech. But what you just described sounds a lot like liberalism, because one of the core ideas of liberalism is this idea that if you use soft power effectively, you will create in other nation states, less of a willingness to ever use hard power against you. Because you have created a codependency to where if you use hard power there will be significant costs. I'm trying to use a metaphor here, in listeners please forgive me because my daughter just turned 12. I'm thinking about this in terms of raising a child. If I raise my daughter well, I'm not going to have to use hard power to go ahead and get her to do things. If I use soft power well, and this will take longer to play out because I don't know if I use soft power well with my daughter, she will inculcate certain values and expectations about what is or is not appropriate behavior and therefore, hard power won't have to be used to get her to do things when she gets older.
N. Rodgers: When you're very old, she will take care of you, rather than having to be paid to take care of you. She will take care of you out of a sense of goodness. Rather than you having to bring hard power into it and pay her to do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or even if it's just obligation. Because again, with soft power, one of the things that you want to inculcate is this idea of we are dependent on one another. You have an obligation to the other nation states to behave appropriately.
N. Rodgers: But isn't that society? I mean, society works that way, we don't just murder people who irritate us on the highway. What I mean is if everybody did that, there'd be one of us left.
J. Twigg: You have tapped into that the fundamental principle of international relations. I mean, day one of international relations is the difference between a domestic political system and the international political system. In a domestic political system, we don't think about things the same way because we have authority with enforcement power, so you don't steal from other people, you don't hurt other people. Because there is a system of law enforcement and courts, and rules of the road that tell you how you should behave. Make it clear what the penalties will be for misbehavior and a track record of enforcing those penalties. There are institutions that have legitimate authority to channel everyone's behavior, things that we have all agreed are correct and productive.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way listeners, Judy was working really hard to go ahead and pick a diplomatic verb there to channel our behavior. Well done Judy.
J. Aughenbaugh: See, this is one of the downsides of recording a podcast without a visual. Because I was watching Judy look for that word, that very diplomatic verb. But in contrast Judy, international relations.
J. Twigg: In contrast to domestic political systems, where you fuck around and find out. In the international political system, there is no authority. There is no world government. We have the United Nations, I can hear your listeners saying, ''What about the United Nations?''.
J. Aughenbaugh: The ICJ?
J. Twigg: What about the International Court of Justice? The response to that is yes, because of the liberalism type impulses that have cropped up, especially since the beginning of the 20th century and World War I, World War II. We tried to create institutions that channel our bad behavior into more productive ways and find ways to resolve differences peacefully rather than through armed conflict. But where's the enforcement power?
J. Aughenbaugh: It's self willing. You accept enforcement because you're willing to do that as part of an international system of getting along. But the minute you don't like what's happening, you're like piece out. I'm not accepting whatever this punishment. Heck with you, the ICJ or the UN or whatever.
J. Twigg: Who has the ability to say, ''I don't like this piece out. I'm not going to abide by whatever these international organizations are telling me to do.'' It's not the small, less powerful states. It's the big, more powerful ones. In terms of hard power, so here's where we run into cold hard realism again. Push comes to shove because there is no world government, because there is no institution that has real enforcement authority over everyone, including the most powerful countries in the international system. What we have in the international system is still with some nice fluff around the edges because of international law and the UN and all that. But we still have a might right, makes right international system where the big kids on the block get to do what they want. The big kids on the block most of the time play along with the UN, and the ICJ and all of those other institutions because it's in their interest to do so. Basically because the most powerful countries in the world wrote the rules of these organizations and they wrote the rules in a way that benefit them. Therefore, it's in their interest to continue to abide by those rules when it doesn't impinge on their interests too starkly. We've gone away quite a bit from hard power and soft power here. But you get how this fits in. At the end of the day, it
tends to come back to hard power. Soft power plays more into the more liberal characterizations of trying to create the channels of interdependence. I love how you both used that word because that's really the key word in this conversation. To create the channels, the networks of interdependence at all levels from government institutions, private sector, all the way down to individuals feeling ties to cultural figures, educational institutions in other countries. That interdependence makes us more inclined to try to continue to find soft power eques channels to resolve conflict rather than resort to the guns and bullets of hard power.
N. Rodgers: Can we talk about tackiness for a second?
J. Aughenbaugh: Tackiness?
N. Rodgers: Tackiness. It seems to me, because I'm from the South and the worst thing in the South that you can be is tacky by the way. You can murder somebody, But as long as you don't do it in a tacky way, we'll probably forgive you. But tacky is bad. I think that Saudi Arabia buying a golf tour was tacky. That's why I think a lot of people in the United States reacted so poorly. Not because Saudi Arabia shouldn't have a tour, if it wants to have a PGA tour or whatever, or have its own tour. I think it's not actually part of the PGA, it's something separate. But it was done in the super obvious. I'm trying to create a thing way and I can't remember the Prince's initials in Saudi Arabia though. It's not MSB. That's not right. MBS? No.
J. Twigg: The guy who murdered the Washington Post journalist?
N. Rodgers: Yes. Again, tacky but separate from murder. His soft diplomacy seems to be super tacky. It's out there. I'm going to buy a tournament and then you will love me because we play golf here in Saudi Arabia. Even though I suspect people don't really play all that much golf in Saudi Arabia, since it's probably more of a soccer country. I think there's this weird thing in diplomacy where if you're too obvious about what you're trying to do, then the rest of the world is tacky. Is that just my perception or is there actually a thing there?
J. Twigg: That's actually a nice segue into the two follow on elements of power that I wanted to add in this conversation. Too hard and soft power and that is, smart power, which started to be a part of the international relations conversation a couple of decades ago. But the idea there is that you can have elements of hard power in your country. You can have elements of soft power in your country. But if you don't wield those in a clever way, you're not maximizing the extent to which you're using the tools that are in your toolkit. Smart power just brought into the conversation the idea that you need to be really good at deploying all of the things that you have at your disposal, both hard and soft power elements, to maximize your influence around the world. There Saudi Arabia being clumsy. Not exercising smart power in an effective way. Let me come up with a good smart power. Going to the part of the world, I specialize in Russia and Ukraine. Back in late '21 and early 2022, when it was clear that Russia was building up massive military forces along the border with Belarus, and Russia, and Ukraine. Most countries in Europe we're saying, ''They're just bluffing. It's just a military exercise. They're not really going to invade Ukraine. How stupid would that be?'' The United States had the intelligence to incontrovertibly demonstrate that, no this was the real thing and invasion was coming. We deployed
that element of power that really it's a soft power thing that we had in our tool kit. That intelligence that we had at our disposal, we went over to European capitals and to Ukraine to try to convince them as well. We rapidly declassified boards of intelligence so that we could share it with our allies to demonstrate to them that this was a real threat. That invasion was coming. Smart power. We are intelligently deploying this asset that we have, this information in order to persuade our allies that they need to step up and be ready, in the immediate sense, to defend what was going on. One example maybe a little clunky, but you get the idea that you need to [inaudible].
J. Aughenbaugh: Because Nia, you used the example of using sports. Saladino and I are teaching a course this semester, Politics and Sport and Judy, Chris actually used that expression. We were talking about mega events in sports like the Olympics or FIFA, the World Cup etc. The example that Saladino gave, was China was extremely clumsy with the Beijing Olympics. Because it was quite obvious that what they were trying to do was to show the world, ''Though we might be a communist regime with authoritarian elements were just like every other nation state who is put on the modern Olympics.'' But in the process, generated so many protests around the world that even though compared to most modern Olympics, it came off without a hitch. It just looked clumsy because it was so obvious what the Chinese government was trying to do.
N. Rodgers: Sorry Aughie. Does a country's soft power or smart power rather wax and win? Are you smart sometimes, and then sometimes you're a total Dorcas who just can't. You basically step on your own shirt tail trying to get up out of a chair. You just can't get it right no matter what you do?
J. Twigg: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Is that a normal waxing and waning?
J. Twigg: All of these types of power wax and wane in different countries over time. Empires rise and fall, so the length of the cycle might be different, but country's hard power goes up and down. Country's soft power can go up and down and certainly probably on a tighter time frame, a country's smart power wax and wane depending on the quality of its leadership, on its diplomats, on its intelligence professionals, on its cultural figures.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because one of the difficulties here, and I imagine Judy, we're going to touch upon this is a nation, state's got to decide whether to use hard power versus soft power. I mean, there isn't like a check sheet.
N. Rodgers: This is a soft power situation that would make diplomacy a lot easier.
J. Twigg: It is like a tandem, a combination of the two. But you need to figure out what the right mix is in any given circumstance. In any given time. Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I mean because previously we talked about Bush 41, in Bush 41's, response to the Soviet empire crumbling. Now we can all three of us can imagine if a different president was in office when the Soviet empire fell, they may have viewed that as an opportunity to use hard power. But
correct me if I'm wrong, Judy. He by and large went the diplomatic route. I mean, he did almost anything he could, to go ahead and prop up Gorbachev so that the empire would fall and that the empire wouldn't fall in such a way that it left this huge gap in what used to be an empire. But again, that's difficult. I mean, because all three of us can imagine, if we had a different president, they may have viewed this as an opportunity to use hard power. Hey, they're down. Let's put our foot on their neck and make sure they never get back up.
N. Rodgers: I mean, take it back at administration. Right. Let's give some credit to President Reagan here because it was very clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out during the Reagan second term, and instead of seeing that again as a window of opportunity for the United States to exercise dominance, possibly probably leading to World War Three, as a declining, desperate power would have fought back, as the Soviet Union would have in its final throes. President Reagan instead said, "no, we're going to work with this guy, we're going to work with Gorbachev." Impressive. Smart power.
J. Twigg: The smart power, does it fall under smart power when you know for a fact you're not going to use hard power in any given situation for instance, my favorite example is Canada. Even though I talk about invading Canada when I'm president, the reality is we're never going to invade Canada unless circumstances pushed us into a place where the world was very different than it is now. Like you just don't do that because one longest unprotected border in the world. That's a valuable thing by itself, but also that way lies enemies, not allies. Are there places where you just know that no hard power is going to get used?
N. Rodgers: Of course, yeah. I mean smart power starts with good situational awareness. You know who your friends are, you know where your common interests are, you know what the places are. You don't need to worry about that. That having been said, I guarantee there are plans in the Pentagon for the invasion of Canada. You need to be prepared for every single worst case scenario. It's governance malpractice if you don't have all those plans sitting there, but we never deploy them. But okay, so here's some smart power though. Speaking of Canada, we think of Canada as peaceful country. One of the reasons that we never think we'd go to war to Canada is that Canada clearly doesn't think of going to war with anybody ever. You're saying, you know, they drink beer, they play hockey, they chill.
J. Twigg: All within about 50 miles of the American border mostly. Like the 98% of their population lives.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Twigg: Basically in the United States.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: For our Canadian listeners, every time Nia goes ahead and mentions about us crossing the border and going to war with you all, I just want to go ahead and point out that there is another member of this podcast who thinks you all pursue very, very important life goals. You're in hockey. Okay. But nevertheless, we are distracting Judy from her example.
J. Twigg: A couple of days ago in the conversation about Russia and Ukraine, and to be blunt right now, the military war is not going very well for Ukraine, and there's talk about how it is that we're going to get our act together and support Ukraine more thoroughly. As you know, the party line for all the Western Allies from the very beginning of this war has been American troops. Nato troops do not go into this war. We're not going to expend American blood on this war, we're not going to risk triggering an escalation of war with Russia. We've said we'll support Ukraine, but it is Ukraine's fight. In a very clever deployment of smart power, the president of France and the Prime Minister of Canada in the last few days have hinted, well maybe. In very subtle ways, but have just placed the idea that maybe the Western involvement could get ratcheted up a notch or two with contribution of more advisors, troops not in combat. Maybe in the rear, a really extraordinary set of hint dropping to Russia and to Ukraine, a set of signaling to Ukraine. That was exquisite deployment.
J. Aughenbaugh: But let me ask you this. Then, almost immediately, Putin went ahead and warned that if Nato has direct involvement in the Ukraine, he might consider nukes. Was the West baiting him to go ahead and have him display quite obviously, that he would use hard power as a way to go ahead and remind the Western coalition that has been supportive of Ukraine. Hey guys, remember who the enemy is here, right? We can't go ahead and dilly dally in regards to giving support to Ukraine because this is the enemy. His reaction to us merely talking out loud, that we might consider placing military advisers into Ukraine. His reaction was to go from 0 to 60 just like that. Is that what you're talking about? Because in some ways it was almost designed to go ahead and remind the populations of the West. Remember who we're dealing with here. Yes, it's been.
N. Rodgers: The West really likes to push his buttons. But is this candy like button right here push, push, push, and he goes [inaudible] because he really does not like to have his buttons pushed.
J. Twigg: Smart power. Good diplomacy knows how to dangle bait effectively. It knows how to think two or three or four steps ahead in the game.
N. Rodgers: Well, we're recording this and it's not going to come out for about a month, a little bit longer than that. If we end up backing this up, we're going to ask you to come back and do it in the news, where we can follow up on that. What's the other power? Because I don't want all the power, Judy. I need hard, I need soft, I need smart, and I need to know what the other one is.
J. Aughenbaugh: I thought Judy was going to say dumb power, and then go ahead and say, see for example, my colleague Aughie.
N. Rodgers: Judy would never do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other kind of power here is what Judy.
J. Twigg: Sharp Power.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry.
J. Twigg: Sharp. Sharp power, actually, what it describes is not as intuitively obvious as hard, soft, smart. Sharp power is a term that's been around for about 15 years and it refers to the use of technology, the internet, social media, deliberately to try to destabilize other countries.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't know anybody who's doing that.
J. Twigg: There it is and it's an house of tool of international warfare. It's still in its infancy. We haven't even begun to see what this fight is.
N. Rodgers: Does AI gets better and defects get better, and holy cow.
J. Twigg: But Russia's interference with our presidential elections, that's sharp power. Russia's anti Vax messaging around the world to try to destabilize our population health.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chinese hackers affecting key industrial sectors, not only in the United States, but in other western countries. The US media in some ways is very keen on looking at how that might occur in the United States, but it is happening in other countries.
N. Rodgers: Can I though ask you guys, because we're talking about other countries. Surely the United States does it too. We've just painted a brush of lots of other of our friends.
J. Aughenbaugh: Our hands aren't clean here Nia.
N. Rodgers: We're doing this too.
J. Twigg: We're exporting to destabilize other countries political systems.
N. Rodgers: We've never gone into another country and been like sack the president. We'll put a new one in.
J. Twigg: I'm shocked that you would suggest that.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. That there is gambling in this establishment.
J. Aughenbaugh: Any podcast episode where we throw a reference to Casablanca, this is a great episode listeners.
N. Rodgers: Already.
J. Aughenbaugh: Already.
N. Rodgers: The sharp thing is interesting to me in that not only are you promoting your country and denigrating other people's stuff, but you can also throw blame on other countries. Like we didn't do that, Canada sent that message or whatever. It's becoming harder and harder and I'm sorry I keep
picking on Canada, I love Canada. I've been there several times, it's wonderful. That seems to be incredibly dangerous to me. This idea that you could basically frame somebody else and have a war start with those people. Between those two people that benefits you in some way. That seems to me the most dangerous thing that we're looking at in the future. It's not so much. I'm not trying to be ugly, but tanks are easy to deal with, you either get killed or you don't get killed. I'm not saying war is easy, but I'm saying that it's straightforward, I shouldn't say easy, I should say straightforward. But this idea of having a third party set up a war between two other parties, and I know that that's happened in spy stuff in the past with individuals, but now it can be done at nation levels. That's just terrifying, this idea of, you know who said that? Russia said that, you should be mad at them or whoever. Does that seem dangerous to anybody else or am I just paranoid?
J. Twigg: No. If you're absolutely right, the whole point of sharp power is to pollute the information space so that nobody is exactly sure what's going on and who is responsible. Just to take your great point one step further, Nia, not only does it create this vast uncertainty about what's going on and who's to blame, but it also, I think more insidiously exploits fault lines and weaknesses in the target countries more than the exercise of any other power does. For example, going to the thing that I spend my time thinking about and doing research on, the anti-vaccine propaganda coming primarily from Russia, China does some of it too, but it's mostly of Russian origin. Anti-vaccine propaganda can't work if there isn't so much of your population that's stupid to begin with, that is vulnerable to those kind of anti-science, anti-logic, anti-rationality messaging. The kind of messaging that Russia sends to the United States on social media trying to exploit racial fault lines and trying to basically gin up racial warfare in the United States. They can't do that if we don't already have pre-established issues with structural racism and racial discrimination. The Russians are brilliant at this, they do their homework to figure out exactly where our social and political vulnerabilities are, and they target exactly those things through social media.
N. Rodgers: I was just about to ask you that. Building racial animus or encouraging racial animus would not work in a heterogeneous nation like say, Sweden, where the population is 99.95% white. You can only do that in a nation where there is a mixture of folks and where there has been a history of stressors in that mix. They look at a country and they say, yes, but Sweden with their fish, and they do something about fish, because it affects the entire population of Sweden or whatever. I see.
J. Twigg: Although now Sweden with its immigrants, becomes more vulnerable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Now you're getting anti-immigration propaganda?
J. Twigg: Exactly.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about it in the United States, it's not a huge shock that Russia provided so much disinformation in the 2016 to 2020 presidential elections because of the United States history of elections being difficult, I mean, for allegedly free democracy. There are populations in the United States
that are extremely distrustful even before the disinformation about whether or not election results are accurate, fair, et cetera.
N. Rodgers: Well, and you have the 2000 election being decided by the Supreme Court, which I'm sure was an opening to that question of, well then what good or election.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's why listeners, when you hear political scientists talk about how losing faith in institutions is really problematic for a democratic regime, when you throw in what Judy just described in regards to sharp power, those are the kinds of fault lines that sharp power tends to target. That's why we, political scientists are oftentimes saying, we can't be destroying institutions for short-term political gain. Because when we have populations in our country lose faith in the institutions, that's when sharp power can become very effective.
N. Rodgers: Because they become vulnerable to these ideas. The better these ideas are presented. It used to be that it was clumsy. You could see things in the newspaper and you're like, wow, that seems like a spy wrote that or whatever. You know what I mean. But now it's messages coming from people you know, it's messages coming from institutions that you think would never lie to you, and it's tailored language-wise so carefully to, this is the way my people talk about something, meaning my part of the political world, whoever that is, and it's terrifying, all of this is very scary.
J. Twigg: It is very scary.
N. Rodgers: Judy, really to wrap up what you've done is you've basically said be scared of everything. I'm here with you, I'm scared of everything. I'm not scared of all the kinds of power and how they can be abused.
J. Twigg: Let's go back to the point that Aughie just made about institutions. Over the last 8-10 years, American political institutions, the credibility of those institutions has been under assault in a way that is unprecedented. Those institutions have held. I walk away from this concerned obviously, but also impressed by the robustness of what we have built.
J. Aughenbaugh: To Judy's point there Nia, you've heard me say this in a number of different forums, I say to my students all the time. For all the foibles, errors, whether real or imaginary, the reality is, our government institutions are still delivering on the work that they're supposed to be doing every single day. That's rather remarkable with some of the stuff that's gone on in the last 8, 10, 12, 14 years. You could even go back, you mentioned the 2000 presidential election or the 911 attacks in 2001. Even still, the institutions have responded in ways that if otherwise you would be like, they're going to fail, but they haven't. They may not have responded as well as we may have wanted, but they still do their job . We're still teaching kids, we still have safe communities, our borders are safe. We do have elections every two, four, six years. The institution I study the Supreme Court. They're still hearing cases, they're still issuing rulings, that's what they do.
J. Twigg: We still have robust free media institutions that checks on all of this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. For an economic system that according to both political parties, is not performing all that well or could be performing better, you look at how the United States has recovered from the pandemic compared to many nations. There's something very unusual going on in our economy. That's a really good point, Judy, I'm glad you mentioned that at the end. Nia, I know you sometimes get a little worried and it keeps you up at night. But I think to Judy's point. This discussion of power should not be keeping you up at night.
N. Rodgers: Well, but what this discussion of power has given me, and I appreciate it, Judy, is a new perspective on when a country does something, I'm going to find myself saying, is that an example of this or is that an example of this? It'll help me think through why a country is doing what it's doing and what the ultimate goal to achieve is. Because I'm assuming that countries are generally looking at how the Russians used to say they have a five year plan for everything. That they're looking outward into where is that going to take us in the future. Maybe that's something that people should keep in mind when they see international actors, when they see the countries doing stuff. What's their ultimate goal? Is their ultimate goal here to expand beyond their borders? Is their ultimate goal just which is hard power basically is their ultimate goal to do something soft power-wise and this sharp power thing is totally fascinating. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that perspective.
J. Twigg: You're quite welcome. It's always a pleasure to talk with you guys.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks, Judy.
J. Twigg: Have a good one. Thanks.
N. Rodgers: Thank you.
J. Twigg: Bye.
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