What non-violent ways do nations use to try to influence each other and bring each other down

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The list of ways is endless, is there a book or website about this I could look at?

I’m thinking of things like the following:

  • Giving funds (legal and illegal) to politicians who support your agenda
  • Flooding a nation with drugs
  • Promoting propaganda on social media
  • Manipulating a nation into being deep in debt to you, then using that as leverage
  • Imposing sanctions
  • Funding extremist groups in their nation (this would technically be violent, but it can be non-violent too)
  • Cutting a nation off from advanced technology (like the US is doing to China with silicon chips)
  • Hacking their elections
  • Trying to influence their non-violent protests
  • Manipulating their currency
2
  • Tariffs
  • Travel restrictions for their citizens

You cast a wide net in the OP. Are travel restrictions a sanction? Isn’t everything a “sanction?”

3

Are you thinking of any particular countries?

4

Does cyberwarfare count as violent? It’s right on the fence, a grey area. Sometimes it does lead to tangible/physical damage, such as the Stuxnet worm damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges by making them spin out of control.

5

Exiling criminals by mixing them in with otherwise legitimate immigrants in a humanitarian boat lift like Castro did.

6

Your examples are almost entirely belligerent, but there are many other ways. Looking up the terms “soft power” and “hard power” will get you started.

7

Has that ever actually been done? There are plenty of instances of intelligence agencies, or entire regimes, using drugs as a convenient revenue source while in the process attempting to destabilize other regimes. Has there actually been proven cases where the drugs themselves were a delibrate part of the process of destabilization?

8
9

Britain didn’t flood China with opium so that it could control China. It went to war with China so that it could continue to sell opium.

10

You can control access to water, like in the Nile water conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia et al., and other key natural resources. Also shipping, transport, airspace, pipelines, and the like.

11

You might check out the book, War by Other Means:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c84cr7

12

Promotion of propaganda has been going on since long before social media was a thing. If this 2006 essay is to be believed, it wasn’t just about influencing elections, it was about corrupting western culture to render it ineffectual and self-defeating:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

13

Yes, the list of ways is endless, and I view it as World War Three in progress. Because of the level of personal freedom in this nation and the latitude of behavior that is allowed because of it, I believe we losing that war. A lot of these methodologies are far more difficult to implement in a totalitarian state than they are here in the United States.