| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the transatlantic alliance of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Andreas Kluth says the Trump administration is serving one of America's most precious assets to the Kremlin on a silver platter: soft power. The concept was born out of the Cold War era. To steal a quote from scholar Joseph Nye, soft power is the ability of one nation to get others to "want what it wants." That may sound vague, but Andreas says it applies to all manner of situations. Take education, for instance. The US "has some of the best universities, so that many leaders of foreign countries learned how to think about the world as students in the US," he writes. Or Silicon Valley: "It designs much of the technology they use in daily life." And, of course, Hollywood: "It makes many of the movies that feed the dreams of people in democracies and dictatorships alike." Case in point? Sunday night at the 97th Academy Awards, director Sean Baker took home a record four Oscars for his independent film Anora. The Best Picture winner is a rags-to-riches tale of a smart-mouthed sex worker who gets enmeshed with the son of a Russian oligarch. The irony of that plot dominating the awards show was not lost on Conan O'Brien:  While I adored Mikey Madison's performance in the film, the sweep wasn't without controversy. Anora features one of Russia's biggest international heartthrobs, Yura Borisov. Prior to the Ukraine war, his jawline appeared in a number of pro-Russian films, including a Kremlin-sponsored movie about Soviet tankers and a biopic about Mikhail Kalashnikov, a Soviet general and the father of Russia's automatic rifle. Although Borisov has since strayed from such subject matters, he's stayed silent on Putin's misadventure in Ukraine, seemingly straddling the lines of the war. The fact that Hollywood, one of the last remaining bastions of America's soft power, is cozying up to the "Russian Ryan Gosling" shows how the tides of cultural influence are turning in Putin's favor. Though it's not as if the Russian president needs Hollywood to get the job done: "Putin, as a tyrant, has plenty to offer to wannabe emulators," Andreas notes. "By messing with minds so deviously, Putin has exerted soft power not so much over foreign populations or countries as over international copycats such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, who, in turn, became role models for other strongmen (in Israel, Turkey, Brazil, India and elsewhere). And most notably, for Trump." The losers in this situation? Ukraine, obviously. And Europe more broadly: It "ought to recognize the leverage it does have to shape the endgame, as well as the urgent need to develop more," Bloomberg's Editorial Board writes. One way to do that? Phone a friend. Mihir Sharma says the EU is so desperate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are rekindling trade relations. With Trump's embrace of Putin — and the dismantling of the transatlantic alliance — Rosa Prince says we're witnessing a great reshuffling of the international order. I wouldn't be surprised if Vice President JD Vance actually did end up in Russia for his next ski trip. Winning Awards and Alienating Others | Elsewhere in Oscar controversies, Zoe Saldaña took home a trophy for Emilia Pérez, a film that a) was not enjoyable in the slightest and b) was wildly offensive to the transgender community and the entire country of Mexico, the film's primary subjects. It's a head-scratcher by all accounts, and Saldaña further muddied the waters when accepting her award. By sticking to platitudes about immigrant dreams, Alex Zaragoza says she "ignored the widespread criticism from LGBTQ+ writers and organizations for the film's retrograde portrayal of trans people; the general denouncement from Mexican filmmakers and writers over its damaging, inauthentic depiction of Mexicans; the fact that only one person from Mexico appeared to have been involved in its making, and so much more." Alex calls these omissions "especially egregious" in light of the Trump's administration's ongoing war against migrants and trans people. With the latter, Lisa Jarvis says the president "seems determined to erase the very existence of transgender people," especially teens. "His campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on ads meant to reinforce the hysteria he was fomenting about transgender people," she writes, and "once in office, Trump unleashed a barrage of directives targeting transgender Americans." Lisa spoke to an 18-year-old transgender college student who initially lost access to care: "It's just been hard feeling like I'm less of a person every day," they told her, "less of somebody who has dreams and aspirations — and more of a statistic." Migrant children can relate to that feeling. "As immigrants have become a focus of demagogy and propaganda — the president and vice president of the US both promoted flagrant lies last year about Haitian immigrants eating pets — good faith is frequently absent. Many proposals seek not to help unaccompanied children so much as make them disappear," Francis Wilkinson writes.  Last month, the Trump administration sent a memo to an organization that helps roughly 26,000 children telling them and their subcontractors to stop providing services. Although the order was abruptly reversed thee days later, Francis says, "No one knows what comes next." The first administration's family-separation policy offers a depressing clue: "The goal was to make transit to the US so terrifying — risking the loss of children — that migrants wouldn't attempt it. But desperate people sometimes take desperate gambles. More than 5,000 children were separated from their parents in what was effectively a campaign of state kidnapping …. More than 1,000 families were never reunited." |
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