My conversation with Peter Pomerantsev: on soft power in hard times

Welcome to my newsletter, Soft Power in Hard Times.

Here, I will write regularly about my research on soft power, propaganda, and the emerging world order.

My name is Martin Gelin, and I am a journalist and author, based in Paris, where I cover foreign affairs for international media, including The Guardian and Dagens Nyheter.

I have spent the past six years working on a book about soft power and propaganda, which will be published internationally next year.

In times of conflict and war, it's a common mistake to think that soft power doesn't matter anymore. On the contrary, history reveals that soft power matters the most in hard times.

“Pitting hard power against soft power is a false dichotomy. On the contrary, it is precisely when we see authoritarian threats that we need to increase soft power efforts. If the whole world was peaceful and harmonious, we wouldn't need cultural and diplomatic initiatives,” the researcher Eliza Easton, one of many brilliant British thinkers on soft power, told me in a recent interview.

This is also the premise of my book. I recently told my editor that finishing the draft this spring feels a bit like trying to finish a book about the Cold War in the autumn of 1989. We are living through historic times, but this newsletter will be my own attempt to document our current political shifts, and to draw a new atlas of soft power, as America deliberately destroys its own reputation.

This probably explains why the interest in soft power exploded in recent months. I wrote a long essay (in Swedish) about Trump's deliberate destruction of American soft power, and countless similar essays have appeared internationally: Joseph Nye, who coined the term, wrote about it for FT, and dozens of other experienced thinkers weighed in on the topic elsewhere. Last month, the UK consultancy Brand Finance also presented their annual ranking, The Global Soft Power Index, where America came first. Will they remain on top next year?

My conversation with Peter Pomeranstev

Last week, I went to London to host a conversation with the British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, one of the smartest thinkers and writers on geopolitics and propaganda today. 

I've done a number of interviews and public talks with Pomerantsev over the years, and we last met in London in October, just a few weeks before the American election. It was a meeting that left me deeply worried about the direction of the world.  I was already concerned that Ukraine’s future existence could hinge on the outcome of the election, but it was a gut punch to hear this said explicitly, by Pomerantsev: “If Trump wins, Ukraine could collapse,” he told me.

We also talked about Atlanticism, which for him is not just an idea, but a lived experience: “I am equally at home in Odessa and in Little Odessa,” as he puts it (Little Odessa is the Ukrainian neighborhood in South Brooklyn.)

So can Atlanticism survive Trump? Will Europe be able to sustain meaningful ties to America, in this new world order?

This was the premise of our conversation in London, at the Swedish Embassy, where we were joined by guests and diplomats from at least a dozen countries. Despite the terrifying direction of American democracy, the conversation had moments of cautious optimism. Pomeranstev expressed the hope, or as he put it, ”a prayer” that our dark era of democratic backsliding could potentially spark an energized reawakening of pro-democracy values and European unity, as we are already seeing in vibrant discussions on pan-European security and independence.

I think we may be several years away from any significant strengthening of democratic values globally, but the failure of Elon Musk’s cynical attempt to buy votes for the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, and the fact that rule of law, so far, has prevailed in France in the case against Le Pen’s embezzlement of public money, are both small signs of hope. These events question what I call the inevitability narrative – the media fallacy where it's quietly assumed that authoritarians will just win all elections, everywhere, eventually, by some vague natural law.

I suggested that Europe can sustain ties to American pro-democracy institutions, and Pomerantsev agreed that it’s actually crucial to build these alliances now. Perhaps it’s even necessary to direct educational initiatives and pro-democracy efforts towards America, in a kind of reverse Marshall Plan, where Europe supports American dissidents and activists.

Peter Pomeranstev also talked about the emerging alliance between Trump and Putin. The fact that the two are getting along so well is not because Moscow is holding Trump hostage with some kind of dark secret on Trump. At this point, there is literally nothing that could jeopardize the loyalty of Trump voters. The worse the news is, the more frantically they will attack the messenger (As recently proven when Signalgate led only to attacks on The Atlantic.)

But the real reason that Trump seems so eager to align with Putin is simply that they share an ideology. “They want to destroy Europe" Pomerantsev told me.

This is not meant to paralyze us with fear, but to wake Europeans up to a new reality where we need to be extremely vigilant about avoiding the escalation of authoritarianism that has already happened in America. I think it's particularly important to protect the public sphere from the perfect storm of lies, misinformation, dark propaganda and extremist content from nationalist outlets, that make it so hard for millions of Americans to find decent news reporting today.

The misinformation landscape explains why Trump, while winning with only a tiny margin nationally, won a landslide in ”news deserts”, the parts of America where you can no longer find reliable local news. His victory margin was 1.5 points nationwide, but 54 points on average in news deserts. This is also why so many Trump voters thought that egg prices and inflation would fall dramatically if he was elected, despite the countless economists warning us that his actual policies would have the opposite effect.

Whenever I have public lectures or panel discussions on this topic, someone in the audience inevitably asks: So, what can we do about this?

Pomeranstev recently wrote a list of five actions that Europe can take to safeguard its security and democratic institutions. In London, we also discussed more specific measures to protect a healthy news ecosystem, where serious journalism can still reach citizens, despite the cesspool of propaganda, lies and antiscientific rubbish currently poisoning our digital commons.

Here are the four general measures to temper the threats of authoritarian disinformation and propaganda:

1. Regulation. Europe must hold firm on regulation of tech platforms and not use them for bartering in the trade war. Avoiding an Americanization of our news environment, where voters can no longer tell truth from lies, is an existential issue for Europe, so this issue can’t simply be reduced to leverage in the trade war negotiations. It's a good sign that the European Commission's Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera said this week that the EU isn’t likely to back down on tech regulations.

2. Design. Put pressure on platforms to design less harmful products, and build and support alternative platforms. We have a golden opportunity now in Europe to create tech platforms that are not run by nihilists and careless people.

3. Competition. As Pomeranstev describes so eloquently in his latest book, How to win an information war, democratic countries and institutions can’t just complain about toxic propaganda and mean despots – they must also fight the information wars, by all means necessary, including covert operations.

4. Education. It is easy to become cynical about the limited success of media literacy initiatives, fact-checking, and all the virtuos work of democratic institutions and legacy media. But even if this work is not enough on its own to temper authoritarians, it’s a crucial part of it. As Pomerantsev said in a closing statement: "fact checkers are like monks in in the dark ages, carrying the flame of of truth through dark times. I think that's very important. I just don't think that's enough to win."

Perhaps it's no coincidence that I spent the winter returning to Stephen Greenblatt's classic The Swerve, about Poggio Bracciolini, the early Renaissance humanist who saved so many classical Latin manuscripts from dusty monastic libraries across Europe in the early 15th century, with the help of monks ”carrying the flame of truth”. If we created a Poggio Bracciolini Award, Pomerantsev might be a worthy recipient.