Concept of Reputational Security in the U.S. Public Diplomacy After 2022

This article aims to analyze the concept of ‘reputational security’, recently introduced by N. Cull. The author focuses on the application of the concept to the information war that escalated between the U.S. and Russia after 2022. The article considers the theory behind the concept as well as the preconditions for its formulation. The main goal of this research is to test reputational security as a tool for the analysis of the current trends in the U.S. public diplomacy, connected to the changes that occurred in the world system and in American-Russian relations. In order to achieve this goal the author choses the case-study method, focusing on the use of popular culture as an instrument of American public diplomacy. The author studies the ways in which the U.S. public diplomacy has historically used popular culture, particularly motion picture, for its purposes. Several movies and one TV show, which were released after 2022 by American and European studios and are thematically connected to Russia, were analyzed within the framework of the reputational security concept. Article highlights that the ways in which they portray Russia, those audiovisual products demonstrate some important distinctions from the films of the Cold War period, as well as from those released in 2000–2010s. Article concludes that the materials chosen for the case-study demonstrate how the concept of reputational security is being applied to the modern American public diplomacy, in terms of focusing its efforts on undermining the reputation of an adversary. The author, however, pinpoints the risks of the approach chosen by the U.S. to lead an information war with Russia, namely the fact that excessive efforts aimed at undermining the adversary’s reputation might have detrimental effects on the ability of a state to defend its own reputation because of a psychological mechanism known as a ‘stereotype’s flip’.