The Strange Case of Strategic Influence

Abstract

In American governmental parlance, the phrase ‘strategic influence’ has been assigned a relatively narrow meaning, even though its ambition is wide: the use of informational channels to affect others’ thinking and actions, and thus to serve strategy. It even became the name of a new department attached to the Pentagon, the Office of Strategic Influence, for a very short period in 2001–02, before Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced in a typical fashion that he was dropping the name and the office, although he planned to continue its activities. More broadly, however, strategic influence can denote the overall capability of a country to influence others in the service of its national strategies, and, viewed from the outside, the overall extent to which a country and its actions are taken into account in the strategies of others. (Those are the senses adopted in this essay.) In either case, though we cannot in any practical sense measure strategic influence, we plainly know it when we see it. The inability to measure strategic influence is frustrating: why cannot there be an IISS publication called The Strategic Balance, just as there is The Military Balance, complete with entries for each country enumerating financial and economic strengths, military forces and capabilities, soft-power assets, and so on? Two principles, or at least old sayings, from economClosing Argument