Disclaimer: This is an English translation of an essay by Aude de Kerros, originally published in French here, in a French publication named "Conflicts". My intention is to have her sharp insights more widely known in the anglophone sphere, as no English translation of her books is currently available.
New Strategies in the Cultural War
The balance of power in the world has changed. Digital technology and the release of artificial intelligence in open source have stripped mass media of their monopoly over visibility. These developments have rendered largely obsolete the weapons of cultural warfare practiced between 1947 and 2025.
March 2025 – Donald Trump Changes Strategy and Cultural Weapons
In March 2025, Donald Trump eliminated all funding devoted to American soft power around the world. This includes, among other things, the end of funding for networks of influence—associative and institutional structures, NGOs, intellectual and artistic networks, and information outlets.
He implemented the same policy within the United States by cutting federal funding for culture, notably through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). His reasoning was that the manipulation methods deployed globally through American soft power had turned back—like a toxic gas—against the country that originally emitted them.
His policy represents a return to the traditional rules of American democracy and liberalism. According to the famous First Amendment, a source of great pride in American identity, no thought, conviction, or belief may be censored.
To preserve this principle, cultural, intellectual, and artistic activity belongs to the private sphere and should rely on patronage. The state should not finance it.
Faced with crisis, Donald Trump—shaped by commerce and entrepreneurship—has returned to solutions rooted in American liberalism: protecting competition and the market economy, which is expected to regulate itself. One of the measures adopted after the crisis of 1929 was the passage of anti-trust laws targeting monopolies and collusion.
By eliminating federal funding for soft power, Donald Trump has brought an end to three-quarters of a century of strategies that won two cultural wars whose goal was to establish America as the world’s cultural reference.
Their primary targets were intellectuals, artists, and cultivated elites. To control them, it was necessary—through co-optation—to deprive them of any other source of legitimacy based on public enthusiasm, peer recognition, or criteria of excellence that were understandable and shareable.
To achieve this, a specific profile and label had to be created: that of the “contemporary” artist or intellectual, designed to be as little seductive as possible.
They were therefore assigned a humanitarian mission: to critique society, to fulfill a “revolutionary” function, to disturb and humiliate the viewer and challenge their certainties.
At the same time, since all forms of identity were considered potential causes of war, their task became the deconstruction of civilization, heritage, and recognized artistic values.
During the era of cultural hegemony, a new, more moralistic mission—less negative in tone—was added: the defense of “societal values,” which ultimately focused on four themes: sex, gender, climate, and racism.
These strategies of influence through co-optation and corruption could operate because they were unimaginable to the uninitiated and therefore largely imperceptible. Many elites accepted them enthusiastically because of the rewards attached to them, while others submitted without understanding the mechanisms at work.
Cutting funding for this type of soft power effectively destroys it, because its authority derives from the institutional legitimacy granted to arts and ideas. Their value is not the result of open competition or comparison enabling choice. Instead, it is created through closed-network co-optation involving collaboration between public and private institutions.
Soft Power Replaced by “Deal Power”
The announcement of this financial suppression produced little media reaction, as if it had never happened. The question was not asked: what weapon replaced it?
The answer may lie in a document published by the U.S. administration in July 2025 that resembles a strategic roadmap: America’s AI Action Plan. The project seeks to harness the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence released as open source in November 2022.
Within it appear the principles of a new form of influence based on so-called open-source AI, made available free of charge and including code, data, and methods of reproduction, offered globally with minimal content censorship.
In this domain, America holds an advantage over competitors who offer AI systems in “open-weight” form—providing neither code nor reproducibility and applying content censorship necessary to protect their power.
Open source represents a calculated risk that not all powers can afford without endangering themselves. This differential forms the basis of the new strategy. It will remain viable as long as free access to digital tools and trust based on minimal censorship are maintained.
Donald Trump abandons the weapons of mass media and intermediary influence networks such as NGOs. Instead, he relies on the new digital tool, which acts just as discreetly and softly, but in a different way: it becomes the principal means of communication.
Its goal is to attract global talent back toward America, encourage competition, and draw in creative elites. In doing so, it abandons the former system of co-optation that rewarded intellectuals and artists for adopting progressive, deconstructive profiles.
America can afford this luxury as long as it maintains a competitive advantage globally. By offering open-source artificial intelligence, the United States proposes a “deal” to partners less powerful than itself.
America can take the risk of such generosity, but it must do so transparently and realistically. While it is no longer hegemonic and now faces competition, it retains the power to propose a deal—one that will certainly be asymmetrical in its favor, but which must also benefit its partners.
Through this approach, America aims to restore international trust in its leadership.
The open-source offer thus positions it as a relatively positive power, grounded in a clear and realistic balance of power between partners. To achieve this, it returns to the roots of its identity: liberalism based on competition, rejection of monopolies and wars, fidelity to multiculturalism, and opposition to cultural globalism.
The Strategic Advantages of AI
The advantages the United States derives from this new weapon and strategy are considerable, even if not immediately visible.
Artificial intelligence, present in the phones carried in pockets and handbags across the world, connects directly with a public of diverse identities. It is therefore no longer necessary to rely on the costly intermediaries of influence used before 2025: NGOs, institutions, mass media, and similar organizations.
In return for its free services, it collects an extraordinary wealth of information—valuable data that feeds its economy.
For creators, entrepreneurs, researchers, artists, and intellectuals, AI represents a powerful resource. Free access to archives saves time and accelerates exploration and research that would otherwise remain confined to the closed circles of an institutional intelligentsia often detached from any real audience.
Today, the sharing of knowledge and intellectual debate is essential for anyone engaged in thought, action, or creation—whether in military, economic, artistic, technical, or scientific fields.
The challenge is to understand rapidly, adapt, and find solutions across borders.
The Digital Battlefield
The digital world is becoming a battlefield where competing powers confront one another.
Digital tools can be used in many ways. The power of algorithms—so useful for research, collaboration, and the exchange of skills—can also provide an arsenal of methods for cognitive confusion, disinformation, semantic manipulation, and other forms of influence.
Some powers will choose political control. Others will rely on attraction. These tools can be used either to conquer or to defend, depending on each nation’s means.
Most will undoubtedly use both approaches simultaneously, but in very different proportions.
A New Choice of Power: Open Networks or Closed Networks?
The distinctive power offered by digital technology lies in networks. This power has been multiplied by the release of open-source AI.
Suddenly, unprecedented confrontations have emerged and expanded rapidly. Open networks have placed public and private sectors, local identities and international systems, and established institutions and smaller, more flexible networks into direct competition.
These open networks are the novelty made possible by open digital systems. They grant access to singular talents that are now visible worldwide and capable of collaboration across borders.
People assemble within them through affinity, complementarity, and shared commitment to the common good.
They function only under three principles: transparency, trust, and freedom.
Through these mechanisms, supply and demand meet naturally.
However, open networks also possess a weakness: they are informal, and the freedom of their participants means solidarity can dissolve at any moment.
Closed networks do not suffer from this fragility. Entry into them often depends not on talent but on profile, making members dependent and necessarily loyal.
Their pillars are hierarchy, secrecy, and shared interest. Their cohesion may stem from birth, power, wealth, knowledge—or even crime.
Yet their weakness lies elsewhere: creativity, talent, and the pursuit of the common good often come after the preservation of the network itself. This leads to slower action and adaptation in a world where new communication technologies demand immediate responses.
One might compare the difference to that between a drone and a fighter jet.
On the subject of open and closed networks, Christophe Assens describes this emerging battlefield clearly in his recent book Networks of Influence and French Sovereignty.
An Uncertain Outcome
Only six months after Donald Trump eliminated funding for cultural soft power, it remains difficult to measure the consequences.
Nor can we yet evaluate the effectiveness of the new strategy of “deal power.” It is ambitious: it accepts risk, rests on shared realism with partners, and depends on the trust required to respect freedom.
What proportion will future strategies allocate between positive “deal” strategies and the older soft-power strategies of manipulation, which are now better understood and therefore less effective?
Will America be able to maintain free access, transparency, and open-source sharing of data with minimal censorship?
Some signs can nevertheless be observed.
In July 2025, the head of Google declared that the censorship strategy practiced during the COVID-19 crisis would not be repeated. After observing the negative effects of banning debate about vaccines, he acknowledged that such policies had favored particular interests rather than the common good.
In October 2025, Elon Musk announced the creation of a competitor to Wikipedia. Multiple viewpoints will thus be available on the same subjects—a positive development for intellectual, scientific, and artistic life, which depends on competition among sources of information, ideas, and knowledge.
