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Proverb: Speak softly and carry a big stick
There are many ways for a country to project power and influence what happens globally.
Sabre-rattling like North Korea is one way.
Using Panda Diplomacy to project soft power is another.
Then we have a third way, preferred by the United States of America.
It’s often referred to as big stick ideology, big stick diplomacy, or big stick policy.
In the first decade of the 20th century, United States President Theodore Roosevelt devised an interesting foreign policy. His policy followed the theory that if you “…speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.”
In many ways, the Americans still follow the big stick policy today.
It’s often better, more productive and less damaging to allow your soft power to do its work slowly.
If things are not going the way you want them to, you can always allude to the fact you have the ability to carry out acts of great violence against them.
This fact often helps add some lubrication to any negotiation.
The threat of violence is not always the key to achieving a nation’s aims.
In the 1980s, Japanese manufacturing prowess informed the world that it was a nation to be reckoned with.
Now China fills that role.
Japan did speak softly and carry a big stick, though.
It used its economic might and manufacturing know-how to penetrate the North American market and eventually dominate the world automobile industry.
Although Japan never carried a big military stick, its strong economy served the same purpose.
Vladimir Putin likes to talk threateningly and brandish a big stick.
Right now, the Ukrainians seem to be whittling sticks into toothpicks.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 9th-grade education (age 15).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 59.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.