Just had a fascinating discussion with my good friend @DanielDumbrill around my latest Horizons article on geopolitical gravity. We notably discussed the outsized importance of "soft power" 👇 during the unipolar moment, which we argue was a major strategic mistake for the West. It's a point I keep repeating, and frankly one of the key reasons why I originally started being vocal around China on social media. The West mistook moral posturing for strategy: it's the famous Karl Rove sentence - "we're an empire now, we create our own reality" - they thought controlling the narrative was the same as controlling reality. Except it wasn't. In fact as I argue in the video, ironically anti-China narratives probably mostly benefited China: 1) It pushed the West - the U.S. first and foremost - to base their actions on a cartoonish understanding of China, with little resemblance to reality. And when you don't base your actions on truth, you're obviously bound to make mistakes. 2) Lies eventually work against you because they get found out, undermining trust. And without trust, you have no mandate to govern. You can't ask citizens to make sacrifices for a cause they don't believe in. 3) Lastly it encouraged what I had called in my article a "care bears" logic where complacent moral posturing substituted for strategy. Why compete when you're convinced you're the "good guys" who do everything right? Why understand others when you can simply condemn them? We also get into how China's approach to influence is fundamentally different - not narrative-based at all - plus the Yin-Yang theory applied to geopolitics and what the latest National Security Strategy reveals about the US's new thinking. The full video is here: - we get into the discussion in the second half, after Daniel's reading of my article.