Le Trahison des Experts and The Weaponization of Soft Power

On October 24, 2014 Vladimir Putin met with some of the world’s leading experts in Sochi for the latest Valdai Club Conference. For over an hour Putin used the opportunity to blame the US for the world’s ills, spread disinformation about Russia’s need to annex Crimea because of threats to the Russian language population— while simultaneously proclaiming his commitment to legal norms and democratic values. It was an absurd performance, topped off with a “question” to Putin from a host on the Kremlin international news channel RT which described the Russian president as the “most popular person in modern history,” a “sort of savior.” Yet the world’s leading policy experts sat listening with straight faces and nodding sagely. What were they doing there? How does the Kremlin play some of the world’s cleverest people for its own ends? And what does it tell us about the systemic crisis in the international “expert community” and think tanks?

Set up in 2004 to, in the words of Executive Director Pavel Andreev, “showcase Russia and explain to the West in what direction Russia was heading,” the Valdai Forum is an annual gathering which brings experts from across the world for a unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials. Initially it seemed part of Russia’s general “soft power” push, coming at the same time as the hiring of international PR companies like Ketchum to improve Russia’s image abroad, and the first attempts to set up a rolling international news channel, Russia Today. However Russia’s belief in classic soft power, usually defined as making oneself more attractive to foreign publics, soured after the 2008 Georgian war when Russia continued to be perceived in what the Kremlin thought a negative light. Increasingly, a more aggressive tone was struck by the Russian military establishment, arguing that the West used everything from NGOs through to experts and CNN to wage an “information war” against Russia. In 2010, Rear Admiral (retired) Vadimir Pirumov, former head of the Directorate for Electronic Warfare of the Main Naval Staff, wrote in Information Confrontation that “information war consists in securing national policy objectives both in war time and in peace time through means and techniques of influencing the information resources of the opposing side…and includes influences on an enemy’s information system and psychic condition.”

Putin’s own first reference to “soft power” came in 2012 when he described it as “a matrix of tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence.” While Putin accepted that “the civilized work of non-governmental humanitarian and charity organizations deserves every support,” he said darkly that “the activities of ‘pseudo-NGOs’ and other agencies that try to destabilize other countries with outside support are unacceptable.” This vision is somewhat different to the Western conceptualization of soft power as described by Joseph Nye and others. “If the Western vision is based on building attractiveness,” argues Alexander Dolinsky, a partner at Capstone Connections consultancy specializing on public policy and public diplomacy, “the Kremlin believes soft power to be a set of tools for manipulation. A sort of weapon.”

Critics of Valdai see this theory in action behind the soft power façade.“The experts who go to Valdai pull their punches when writing about Putin,” says Lilia Shevtsova, until recently of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center and now at Brookings Institution. “Experts who go want to be close to power and are afraid of losing their access. Some might believe that they can use Valdai as a platform for criticism, but in reality their mere presence at the event means they are already helping legitimize the Kremlin.”“You end up being a puppet in the Kremlin’s theater,” agrees Luke Harding of the Guardian, “there to make Putin look good.” This makes it less of a soft power implement to communicate Russia’s message, and more of a decoy to foster an illusion.

Valdai can be seen as part of a greater process of Western experts becoming co-opted into the Kremlin’s “weaponization” of soft power. In Germany, for example, Putin’s hagiographer Alexander Rahr is one of the most prominent Russian analysts, and frequently takes a pro-Kremlin position, with no context given as to his relationship with the Valdai Club or his work as a paid communications consultant for Russian-owned energy companies. But financial lures are only the simpler type of mechanism the Kremlin uses. Slower, more patient work is employed to co-opt experts over many years. “From a very early stage in your work in Russia you are surrounded by people, experts and media executives, you think they are giving you objective insight — and only realize much later they have an agenda and are spinning you a line,” says Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. Judah spent a year studying at Moscow State University and the foreign policy elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and worked for the European Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on Russia, before committing to journalism. “The idea that there ‘is no alternative to Putin,’ that Putin is some sort of staunch moral conservative, that dissidents like Pussy Riot are ‘projects’ or extreme fascists, or that Putin is ‘going mad’ and therefore the West needs to placate him—these have all been convenient myths spread by the Kremlin and readily taken up by Western experts and media.”

Yet the Kremlin’s manipulation of the expert field would not be possible without a systemic crisis taking part in the West’s own expert community, with an increasingly blurred line between “think tanks” and “lobbying,” “influencers” and “experts.” A front page New York Times article in September 2014, titled “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Thanks,” highlighted this issue, arguing that think tanks “have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities,” with big money “increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington.”

Soon after, however, the Times itself found itself at the center of a similar story—though this time it was the subject of controversy. The investigative spadework done by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s Robert Coalson forced the New York Times to append an editorial note to the bottom of an op-ed written by Brenda Shaffer entitled “Russia’s Next Land Grab”—she meant Nagorno-Karabakh—explaining that Shaffer had worked as an advisor in “strategic affairs” for Rovnag Abdullayev, the president of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan. “Like other Op-Ed contributors,” the Times’ editors admitted, “the writer, Brenda Shaffer, signed a contract obliging her to disclose conflicts of interest, actual or potential. Had editors been aware of her ties to the company, they would have insisted on disclosure.”In a letter to the paper Transparify’s Till Bruckner argued that “the NYT may be unwittingly aiding and abetting the very manipulations of public opinion and government policies that it publicly deplores.” The Times has promised to be more rigorous in exploring the interests of its contributors.

In testimony to the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations a senior academic stated: “Policies should be enacted that would remove the non-profit status of groups that collaborate with Russia, and legislation similar to one that combats terror financing should bar European organizations from receiving funds from Moscow that are intended to promote Russia’s foreign and security policy aims.”The fact that the academic who made this statement is the aforementioned Professor Brenda Schaffer is perhaps indicative of an environment in which the lack of transparency leads to an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and circular accusations. According to Hans Gutbrod ofTransparify,“think tanks should thrive on transparency—they live on research. But in this industry, which is worth a billion dollars, only a handful of organizations is entirely transparent themselves, and too many remain opaque about who funds their work.”“The think tank and expert community has been compromised by the lack of clarity about funding and motivations,” says Ben Judah, “who is trying to get close to curry favor with the Kremlin? Who is working with companies that have vested interests? We can no longer talk of an intellectual space of pure research, where ‘expert’ findings can be taken at face value.”

The joint pressure of the Kremlin’s “weaponization of soft power” and the West’s own expert crisis means we are reaching a point where the public’s faith in think tank and expert work risks being broken. What can be done about it?

To counter the challenges posed by Valdai there needs to be a broad gathering that brings together think tanks, experts and policymakers to help reinvigorate the debate about the implications of Russian policy for both regional and global issues: one which is not co-opted by the Kremlin. This “Valdai Alternative” would mainstream experts, policymakers and think tanks from countries in Russia’s“near-abroad,” including Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, so that their voices are central to the debate about Russia. Current initiatives can by-pass these relatively smaller countries. In late August 2014, experts from Kissinger Associates and Carnegie Moscow, working together with Russian counterparts, met on a Finnish island to hammer out a “24-step plan” to “resolve the Ukrainian crisis.” Known as the Boisto group (named for the island), this initiative contained no Ukrainians to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine: the absence of Ukrainians was enough to draw a published denunciation of the Boisto group, signed by dozens of academics, think tankers, NGO heads, editors and former ambassadors. Of course any peace initiative is to be welcomed: but Russia’s neighbors ought to be mainstreamed into the conversation. Along with the near abroad the anti-Valdai would engage with “swing states” such as the BRICs and others in the Middle East, Asia and South America which are being courted by the Kremlin to join its new anti-Western Internationale.

More broadly, self-disclosure of funding by think tanks, and a charter indicating clear red lines between funders and research, would be a first step in helping the sector regulate itself and re-establish faith in its output.