‘Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles.’ Vladimir Putin’s ‘soft power’ and the American Right

Abstract

The crisis in Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea negatively affected Russia’s image in the United States and in Western Europe. At the same time, the dynamic of the Russian–U.S. relations during the crisis prodded several prominent American right-wing politicians and commentators to make statements about Vladimir Putin that reflected their own ‘desire for a tough leader who will dispense with niceties and embrace power’. This article explores the phenomenon of Vladimir Putin’s ‘popularity’ among the American conservatives through qualitative textual analysis of the coverage of his persona in several right-wing publications and blogs. The project engages with the concept of ‘soft power’ by raising the following conceptual question: can a leader who ‘wrestles bears and drills for oil’ leverage these characteristics as a type of ‘soft power’ when it comes to ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of certain international constituencies and under particular international circumstances?