6 ms·

Thats what happens, when all you got to hold the band together is terror instead of soft power. Everyone just quits at the first sign of weakness.

qsort 4y ago
I was thinking about the same thing a few days ago. One of the most interesting takeaways from this war is how soft power is very underrated, and lack of any soft power whatsoever is one of the reasons behind Russia's problems.
- pk-protect-ai 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    I'm not saying you are wrong but why stop here? Why are the ruling guys stupid? Why do stupid guys get to rule? I also am not sure stupidity is binary or all encompassing. I think they must be doing something right to be rulers to a country. Why do russian citizen take it? Maybe that's where stupid is the final answer, but maybe not. As for international relations, I am more and more coming to the conclusion that everyone tries to project their own logic to others and being mostly wrong about it. russia does not work according to the logic that France and Germany want to project onto it. China does not work according to the logic US and Germany want to project onto it. US and EU don't work according to the logic China and russia want to project onto it. Ukraine does not work like EU, US and muscovy project their logic onto it. etc etc etc
    - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
      This seems to be a weakspot of alot of ideological groups in the west(left/right) but also in the east(ccp), the assumption that one can just "sing" a version of reality into beeing by loudness. What is usually archieved is a placation act, by which the lower status parties involved pretends to kotau, but then gets on with its own life in its own style, with the calmed priesthood. Its a very strange state of affairs. For objective, measurable scientific reality to be experienced, this process is completely orthogonal. Its better to know what is, even if unpleasant or stressfull, then only to find out at the breaking point?
      - krapp 4y ago
        If you have the power to force people to pretend a lie is the truth and behave accordingly, it doesn't matter if they accept it. A few weeks ago, millions of Americans believed their government was at war with alien spacecraft, or an invasion of Chinese balloons. That was reality. Now that reality has been flipped off like a light switch, and a new reality turned on. As Karl Rove once said "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too." People don't experience objective, measurable scientific reality, they experience a subjective hyperreality as the sum of signals from corporate media, pop culture and disinformation agents (including their own media and government.) This is what the whole "post truth" theory is about - not that objective reality can be manufactured, but that power comes from manipulating the perception of reality. And eventually, many people will believe it. Humans are not rational beings that consider truth by the most mathematically precise and logically sound methods available, we are emotional beings driven by the need to square the circles of our lives by any means necessary. That's how propaganda and great lies work. It's how innocent people can enter an interrogation and come out convinced of the narrative of their guilt, to the point of having fabricated memories of it.
    - sidlls 4y ago
      Russia has a nearly unbroken 150-200 year history of tyrannical government (sometimes in just the classical sense of power vested in a single individual, but often in the more modern sense where oppression is added to that). Sometimes there have been rebellions, but always the end result is the same in Russia: power resides in a single individual. Most other countries, east, west, and other, put up more resistance to the kinds of power structures Russia historically has had. It's not projecting to postulate that maybe, just maybe, Russians (in aggregate, individual exceptions likely exist) are just okay with that.
      - medo-bear 4y ago
        > It's not projecting to postulate that maybe, just maybe, Russians (in aggregate, individual exceptions likely exist) are just okay with that. just like germans were ok with nazis; italians, spanish, portuguese, with fascists; americans, brits, dutch, french, with slave owners i mean honnestly, is russia worst than the nato country turkey? not to mention the faithful western ally saudi arabia? is donbas really that different from kosovo? who are we kidding with this virtue hypocricy i fear that by the time people in large become sober about this hypocricy it will be too late and world will only become more polarized
        jnsaff2 4y ago
        https://snyder.substack.com/p/playing-the-victim https://snyder.substack.com/p/playing-the-victim
        medo-bear 4y ago
        how fitting as a response to what i just wrote to post a link to an anglo saxon lecturing slavs about their history and what "rusophobia" really means but maybe Snyder is right. maybe all these rusophobic, racist statements are made by russian state agents maskarading as hn readers to show russians that their imperial war against ukraine is justified and then again. shame on russia. US or UK never played the victim when pursuing their imperial ambissions
  - medo-bear 4y ago
    > Russian folk are the slaves to their rulers with a long history and indoctrinated brains racist much?
    - qaq 4y ago
      Well the power structure has never changed bar a short period after USSR colapse than people gladly elected another strong man who shifted back to the same arrangment that was in place for centuries. You have a figure head (Tsar, General Secretery etc.) who holds all the power and appoints regional managers to rule a particular area. The expansionist agenda is always the key to the ideology.
    - SSLy 4y ago
      At most culturalist.
      - medo-bear 4y ago
        at best idiotic
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      Being russian is not a race, just a passport type. They have a lot of blonde blue eyed people on the west (courtesy of vikings raping and killing those areas for centuries), brown, black haired, asian in the east (courtesy of mongols doing exactly the same), typical muslim visage on the south. Basically all mixtures apart from Africans. Also, being russian is sort of lifestyle and comes with certain mindset, as internet memes documented darn too well in past decades. As for OP's remark, its harsh but not incorrect, same happened to most enslaved nations. Unless freedom was won by bloody mass revolution and whole movememnt had some momentum, tribes and nations who suddenly gained freedom know very little what to actually do with it, and mess up quite a few things in transition. I've seen it first hand in eastern Europe, as soon as russians moved away from their decades long enslaving occupation.
      - medo-bear 4y ago
        lol this is so stupid. being russian is as much an ethnicity as it is a nationality. if you make derisive prejudicial comments about an ethnic group that is racism
  - worrycue 4y ago
    > Russia's problem is the total stupidity of the ruling guys More likely the result of the resource curse. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  Russia has spend billions to gain soft power by hosting the 2018 world cup, the winter Olympics etc. However the only "soft power" that has actually worked for Russia are their hundreds of thousands of social media disinfo sockpuppet accounts. They have convinced half of India, Nigeria, Hungary and Kentucky that Ukraine created COVID-19.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    Do their energy exports count as soft power? Arguably that was working quite well, until they further expanded in to Ukraine.
    - sdfghswe 4y ago
      I would count that as a different kind of power, distinction from soft and hard. Maybe "commercial power"? "Trading power"? To me soft power sounds more like culture - being appealing to other country's populations.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      I think they count as soft power, but on the energy front, everyone (even Europe itself) completely overestimated how strong it was. Russia very much expected that energy dependency would keep Europe out of the conflict, even if it would put them on a path towards breaking that dependency in the long term. No one seemed to truly expect that the reaction would be so strong that it'd take less than a year to mostly eliminate that dependency.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      In fact that went very poorly. They cut off gas to Europe in an attempt to freeze them and make them come to the bargaining table, but Europe responded very strongly and largely still supports Ukraine. The winter was even very mild. In cutting off the crutch, Russia forced Europe to go cold turkey instead of delaying it for a decade like they wanted to. Now Russia has to settle for selling the gas to other places at a steep discount, and Europe may never buy Russian gas again. There's even a fun parallel to draw with the floating LNG terminals off the coast and WWII floating harbors for Normandy
jnsaff2 4y ago
You are not alone in this observation https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1633012168038785024 https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1633012168038785024
throwaway4good 4y ago
I think it is a misunderstanding to think Russia holds no soft power in Kazakhstan.
- Paradigma11 4y ago
  True, but it seems that the Kazakh leadership is fed up with that power.
  - SXX 4y ago
    Kazakhstan is as authoritarian as Russia was before 2022. They'll pretend there is some conflict with Putin while still supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and serving as banking gateway to bypass financial sanctions.
nradov 4y ago
Yes, hopefully some of the federated republics will start civil wars to break away from the Russian empire. Continue the disintegration process that started in 1991.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Hoping that a nuclear power breaks apart is a nightmare. This is true for states like Pakistan but when you have a stockpile in the thousands and a nuclear logistical distribution like Russia it is nearly guarantee that we have several (terroristic) nuclear explosions over the next decades and probably half a dozen rogue states more. And do not assume that this is a peaceful transition. Putin is very much concerned about the integrity of Russia.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Concern does not equal the ability to prevent or master a situation. Putin was also concerned with aquiring ukraine. Between that dictator impersonating aparatschik, the ground is liquifying as we speak.
  - meh8881 4y ago
    Seems very unlikely to me. Between things like permissive action links, maintenance require to keep the bombs in working order, and expertise in how to use them, I would be dubious of rogue states getting them, wanting to use them, and actually being able to execute on them. Terrorists tend to have some sort of goal. Not just scary bad guys who want to blow stuff up. We typically see nukes are just used to establish legitimacy of authoritarian rulers via idle threats. using nukes is a losing move.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    This already happened once when the USSR broke up. The world got through that. I think in the end you can't dismiss how much it is in every state's self-interest to not start a nuclear exchange.
    - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
duxup 4y ago
Russia doesn’t seem very interested in soft power either. Under Putin they seem more interested in violence, helping some local insurgents, installing strong men. Even in Ukraine previously sympathetic Ukrainian officials in Ukraine reported getting cold calls from Russians telling them they better fall in line and threatened them. You would think it would be easier to throw them a bone / bribe… but nope. They don’t seem to understand much outside the bullying sphere.
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  It is not a coincidence that 2 out of 4 of Russia's "separatist commanders" in eastern Ukraine were killed because of "infighting" between 2014 and 2022.

qsort 4y ago

I was thinking about the same thing a few days ago. One of the most interesting takeaways from this war is how soft power is very underrated, and lack of any soft power whatsoever is one of the reasons behind Russia's problems.

pk-protect-ai 4y ago
[flagged]
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  I'm not saying you are wrong but why stop here? Why are the ruling guys stupid? Why do stupid guys get to rule? I also am not sure stupidity is binary or all encompassing. I think they must be doing something right to be rulers to a country. Why do russian citizen take it? Maybe that's where stupid is the final answer, but maybe not. As for international relations, I am more and more coming to the conclusion that everyone tries to project their own logic to others and being mostly wrong about it. russia does not work according to the logic that France and Germany want to project onto it. China does not work according to the logic US and Germany want to project onto it. US and EU don't work according to the logic China and russia want to project onto it. Ukraine does not work like EU, US and muscovy project their logic onto it. etc etc etc
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    This seems to be a weakspot of alot of ideological groups in the west(left/right) but also in the east(ccp), the assumption that one can just "sing" a version of reality into beeing by loudness. What is usually archieved is a placation act, by which the lower status parties involved pretends to kotau, but then gets on with its own life in its own style, with the calmed priesthood. Its a very strange state of affairs. For objective, measurable scientific reality to be experienced, this process is completely orthogonal. Its better to know what is, even if unpleasant or stressfull, then only to find out at the breaking point?
    - krapp 4y ago
      If you have the power to force people to pretend a lie is the truth and behave accordingly, it doesn't matter if they accept it. A few weeks ago, millions of Americans believed their government was at war with alien spacecraft, or an invasion of Chinese balloons. That was reality. Now that reality has been flipped off like a light switch, and a new reality turned on. As Karl Rove once said "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too." People don't experience objective, measurable scientific reality, they experience a subjective hyperreality as the sum of signals from corporate media, pop culture and disinformation agents (including their own media and government.) This is what the whole "post truth" theory is about - not that objective reality can be manufactured, but that power comes from manipulating the perception of reality. And eventually, many people will believe it. Humans are not rational beings that consider truth by the most mathematically precise and logically sound methods available, we are emotional beings driven by the need to square the circles of our lives by any means necessary. That's how propaganda and great lies work. It's how innocent people can enter an interrogation and come out convinced of the narrative of their guilt, to the point of having fabricated memories of it.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    Russia has a nearly unbroken 150-200 year history of tyrannical government (sometimes in just the classical sense of power vested in a single individual, but often in the more modern sense where oppression is added to that). Sometimes there have been rebellions, but always the end result is the same in Russia: power resides in a single individual. Most other countries, east, west, and other, put up more resistance to the kinds of power structures Russia historically has had. It's not projecting to postulate that maybe, just maybe, Russians (in aggregate, individual exceptions likely exist) are just okay with that.
    - medo-bear 4y ago
      > It's not projecting to postulate that maybe, just maybe, Russians (in aggregate, individual exceptions likely exist) are just okay with that. just like germans were ok with nazis; italians, spanish, portuguese, with fascists; americans, brits, dutch, french, with slave owners i mean honnestly, is russia worst than the nato country turkey? not to mention the faithful western ally saudi arabia? is donbas really that different from kosovo? who are we kidding with this virtue hypocricy i fear that by the time people in large become sober about this hypocricy it will be too late and world will only become more polarized
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        https://snyder.substack.com/p/playing-the-victim https://snyder.substack.com/p/playing-the-victim
        medo-bear 4y ago
        how fitting as a response to what i just wrote to post a link to an anglo saxon lecturing slavs about their history and what "rusophobia" really means but maybe Snyder is right. maybe all these rusophobic, racist statements are made by russian state agents maskarading as hn readers to show russians that their imperial war against ukraine is justified and then again. shame on russia. US or UK never played the victim when pursuing their imperial ambissions
- medo-bear 4y ago
  > Russian folk are the slaves to their rulers with a long history and indoctrinated brains racist much?
  - qaq 4y ago
    Well the power structure has never changed bar a short period after USSR colapse than people gladly elected another strong man who shifted back to the same arrangment that was in place for centuries. You have a figure head (Tsar, General Secretery etc.) who holds all the power and appoints regional managers to rule a particular area. The expansionist agenda is always the key to the ideology.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    At most culturalist.
    - medo-bear 4y ago
      at best idiotic
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Being russian is not a race, just a passport type. They have a lot of blonde blue eyed people on the west (courtesy of vikings raping and killing those areas for centuries), brown, black haired, asian in the east (courtesy of mongols doing exactly the same), typical muslim visage on the south. Basically all mixtures apart from Africans. Also, being russian is sort of lifestyle and comes with certain mindset, as internet memes documented darn too well in past decades. As for OP's remark, its harsh but not incorrect, same happened to most enslaved nations. Unless freedom was won by bloody mass revolution and whole movememnt had some momentum, tribes and nations who suddenly gained freedom know very little what to actually do with it, and mess up quite a few things in transition. I've seen it first hand in eastern Europe, as soon as russians moved away from their decades long enslaving occupation.
    - medo-bear 4y ago
      lol this is so stupid. being russian is as much an ethnicity as it is a nationality. if you make derisive prejudicial comments about an ethnic group that is racism
- worrycue 4y ago
  > Russia's problem is the total stupidity of the ruling guys More likely the result of the resource curse. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
0xDEF 4y ago
Russia has spend billions to gain soft power by hosting the 2018 world cup, the winter Olympics etc. However the only "soft power" that has actually worked for Russia are their hundreds of thousands of social media disinfo sockpuppet accounts. They have convinced half of India, Nigeria, Hungary and Kentucky that Ukraine created COVID-19.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Do their energy exports count as soft power? Arguably that was working quite well, until they further expanded in to Ukraine.
  - sdfghswe 4y ago
    I would count that as a different kind of power, distinction from soft and hard. Maybe "commercial power"? "Trading power"? To me soft power sounds more like culture - being appealing to other country's populations.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    I think they count as soft power, but on the energy front, everyone (even Europe itself) completely overestimated how strong it was. Russia very much expected that energy dependency would keep Europe out of the conflict, even if it would put them on a path towards breaking that dependency in the long term. No one seemed to truly expect that the reaction would be so strong that it'd take less than a year to mostly eliminate that dependency.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    In fact that went very poorly. They cut off gas to Europe in an attempt to freeze them and make them come to the bargaining table, but Europe responded very strongly and largely still supports Ukraine. The winter was even very mild. In cutting off the crutch, Russia forced Europe to go cold turkey instead of delaying it for a decade like they wanted to. Now Russia has to settle for selling the gas to other places at a steep discount, and Europe may never buy Russian gas again. There's even a fun parallel to draw with the floating LNG terminals off the coast and WWII floating harbors for Normandy

jnsaff2 4y ago

You are not alone in this observation https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1633012168038785024 https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1633012168038785024

throwaway4good 4y ago

I think it is a misunderstanding to think Russia holds no soft power in Kazakhstan.

Paradigma11 4y ago
True, but it seems that the Kazakh leadership is fed up with that power.
- SXX 4y ago
  Kazakhstan is as authoritarian as Russia was before 2022. They'll pretend there is some conflict with Putin while still supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and serving as banking gateway to bypass financial sanctions.

nradov 4y ago

Yes, hopefully some of the federated republics will start civil wars to break away from the Russian empire. Continue the disintegration process that started in 1991.

oaiey 4y ago
Hoping that a nuclear power breaks apart is a nightmare. This is true for states like Pakistan but when you have a stockpile in the thousands and a nuclear logistical distribution like Russia it is nearly guarantee that we have several (terroristic) nuclear explosions over the next decades and probably half a dozen rogue states more. And do not assume that this is a peaceful transition. Putin is very much concerned about the integrity of Russia.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Concern does not equal the ability to prevent or master a situation. Putin was also concerned with aquiring ukraine. Between that dictator impersonating aparatschik, the ground is liquifying as we speak.
- meh8881 4y ago
  Seems very unlikely to me. Between things like permissive action links, maintenance require to keep the bombs in working order, and expertise in how to use them, I would be dubious of rogue states getting them, wanting to use them, and actually being able to execute on them. Terrorists tend to have some sort of goal. Not just scary bad guys who want to blow stuff up. We typically see nukes are just used to establish legitimacy of authoritarian rulers via idle threats. using nukes is a losing move.
- ben7799 4y ago
  This already happened once when the USSR broke up. The world got through that. I think in the end you can't dismiss how much it is in every state's self-interest to not start a nuclear exchange.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

duxup 4y ago

Russia doesn’t seem very interested in soft power either. Under Putin they seem more interested in violence, helping some local insurgents, installing strong men. Even in Ukraine previously sympathetic Ukrainian officials in Ukraine reported getting cold calls from Russians telling them they better fall in line and threatened them. You would think it would be easier to throw them a bone / bribe… but nope. They don’t seem to understand much outside the bullying sphere.

0xDEF 4y ago
It is not a coincidence that 2 out of 4 of Russia's "separatist commanders" in eastern Ukraine were killed because of "infighting" between 2014 and 2022.