In the corridors of power from Washington to Tokyo, policymakers obsess over military capabilities and trade balances while missing the most consequential battlefield of the 21st century: the battle for narrative control.
As Sanae Takaichi enters office as the first female prime minister of Japan and U.S. President Donald Trump navigates his 10th month back in the White House, both leaders confront an adversary more insidious than any missile system — the systematic campaign by authoritarian states to rewrite reality itself through investing in “discourse power.”
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who first theorized discourse power, understood what today’s democratic leaders struggle to grasp: that power and knowledge are co-constitutive, each producing and reinforcing the other through discourse. In our hyper-connected world, this insight has been weaponized. Beijing and Moscow aren’t just building militaries; they’re constructing alternative realities about history, legitimacy and the international order itself. Their targets aren’t just the Global South but the citizens of democratic nations worldwide.
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