Putting the “Diplo” in Diplomacy: Music as Soft Power

By Jonathan Wynn

This summer, I’ve been obsessing over Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast Wind of Change, about the CIA’s possible involvement in the titular 1990s global megahit by the German rock band The Scorpions. The story unravels the sometimes-shadowy threads between music and foreign policy and gets us to think about how culture is used.

I absolutely remembered “Wind of Change” but didn’t think it was as big a hit as “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” a song U.S. readers might recognize from a commercial. But “Wind of Change” was a theme song for the revolutions behind the Iron Curtain, which culminated in the end of the Cold War, and I was shocked to learn that it is the fifteenth most purchased song in history, outranking any Beatles song. The podcast is a fantastic journey into how the U.S. government has secretly used American music, from jazz to hard rock, to further its own interests overseas.

This is what we call soft power: nurturing (particularly in terms of foreign policy) sympathies and preferences through the less tangible means of culture, art, language, and values. By contrast, hard power has to do with economic and military force. Soft power is coercive and can be a more subtle approach to persuasion. As political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. wrote in 2004: “American popular culture, embodied in products and communications, has widespread appeal. . . . Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.” (Find more, via video, here.)

Based on this little-known rumor of American soft power, the hypothesis of Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast is that the CIA wrote the lyrics to “Wind of Change” and organized a massive hard rock festival behind the Iron Curtain to sow the seeds of dissent among disaffected youth in Russia. (Disclaimer: Diplo is a DJ and producer, and the inclusion of his name in the title of this blog post is strictly for the pun, not an implication that he’s associated with the CIA in any way!)

The CIA’s song hit its pinnacle, perhaps, at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, in 1989, which was according to Rolling Stone, “the Soviet Union’s first unfiltered experience of the freedom and abandon of rock & roll.” Or so the story goes, anyway. One thing that we do know is that music has been used for political gain for decades. (And not just music: There’s a great story about the novel Dr. Zhivago, and the story behind Argo is a dramatization of a real CIA operation.)

Predating the hard rock festival by twenty-four years, the U.S. government had global superstar Louis Armstrong tour behind the Iron Curtain in 1965. Armstrong, for what it’s worth, had a challenging relationship with requests from the U.S. government to play overseas: On the one hand, he wanted to spread American jazz across the globe, and yet on the other hand, he was uncomfortable doing it on behalf of a country that was deeply invested in Jim Crow segregation. Armstrong and Dave Brubeck collaborated on The Real Ambassadors—a critique of the experience. (Read more here.) Other musicians were also used by the U.S. government to wield soft power and didn’t realize it, including Nina Simone—who was highly critical of the United States, eventually .

In a blog post from 2019, I noted how surprised I was that sports figures were far exceeding the music world when it came to influence in national politics. Who is our contemporary Woody Guthrie? (It could be Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, who recently made news when some listener was disappointed to learn that his songs were, ahem, a little political—Morello studied political science at Harvard.) So I’ve been interested in how music is used by fans and everyday folk, but less so in how music can be used by our government.

This isn’t a thing of the past, either. Sociologist Timothy Gill discovered—through Freedom of Information Act requests—that the National Endowment for Democracy (a soft power foundation) funded ten bands in 2011 to write songs critical of Hugo Chavez’s leadership in Venezuela. Likewise, the Guardian found that USAID (a U.S. development aid organization) attempted to secretly fund acts in Cuba’s underground hip-hop community in order to rouse a youth movement against Raul Castro’s government, only to undermine the subcultural scene in the process.

Americans aren’t the only ones who use culture as soft power, of course. The Winds of Change podcast describes a rock club owned by the Russian KGB. And take, for another example, the rise of Korean pop (K-Pop) music. (See Teen Vogue’s “K-Pop Beginner’s Guide” here.) K-Pop is a carefully crafted brand of music that has been, according to John Walsh, a “government construct” that has carefully crafted economic and cultural policy “used to promote Korea and Korean society in a friendly and non-threatening manner.”

Youjeong Oh’s book Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place offers additional details on the marketing and promotion of Seoul. (Here’s another deep dive into Hallyu.) There is some good research being done on the collaborations between Korean industrial megagroups (called chaebols) and the onetime president Park Geun-hye’s Creative Economy Policy Enforcement Process. Has K-Pop shaped Korea’s foreign policy? Well, one headline read: “Rising number of [North Korean] defectors are citing music as one factor in their disillusionment with their government.”

But while on the production side, K-Pop is carefully crafted to be inoffensive and saccharine soft culture, fans can do with it what they want. For example, South Koreans have gone against their government’s wishes and sent flash drives with Korean soap operas and K-Pop to North Korea in an effort to undermine Kim Jong-Un’s authoritarian regime. (Apparently, soft power is only acceptable when the state does it.)

K-Pop fans successfully pranked President Trump’s Tulsa rally on June 20, 2020, by registering to attend with no intent to actually attend, leaving Trump to address a stadium only a third full. K-Pop fans have also joined with Black Lives Matter. And then, when White supremacists sought to promote #whiteoutwednesday in response to #blackouttuesday, K-Pop fans began flooding the hashtag with K-Pop music to ruin their effort. (This prompted a glorious meme placing K-Pop fans as part of The Avengers.) They also spammed a Dallas Police Department app that asked citizens to upload videos of illegal activity. K-Pop fans’ effort to donate over $1 million to BLM reminded me of how country music fans would raise money for causes at the annual Country Music Association festival, until the association started to marshal all the funds into music education.

So, when thinking about how culture works, it is quite instructive to think about how it is produced, but also about the different kinds of actors who use music. It is not, apparently, just for listening!

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Soft power is a coercive and can be a more subtle approach to persuasion.