The U.S. Public Diplomacy and Cultural Imperialism in Cyberspace

Public diplomacy is of great important in today’s world which has found a new structure based on globalized information. Meanwhile, the revolution which has taken place in the field of information and cyber technologies has made world nationsincluding the Americans employ modern cyber technologies along with conventional public diplomacy strategies in order to fulfill their foreign policies more successfully because in the 21st century, which is named cyber era, countries compete with each other in a network warfare arena and public diplomacy has found a novel nature, tools, techniques and methods. Furthermore, the U.S. follows the objectives of cultural imperialism under the cover of public diplomacy and employs cyber warfare techniques to overthrow governments. In fact, cyber warfare serves as a modern public diplomacy mechanism of the U.S. which is utilized to impair the legitimacy of political systems and the unity, integrity and confidence of nations. Following this strategy and disrupting the vital and cyber infrastructures of the target nations, they can decrease people’s satisfaction with the efficacy of the political systems and creating legitimacy crisis for them, they can pave the way for overthrowing them without resorting to military strategies. Therefore, we can say that, today, cyber warfare, as one of the modern public diplomacy strategies, is utilized to manipulate the minds and hearts of the target audiences in line with the U.S. foreign policies. In this context, the present paper seeks to answer the following main question: How has the information and cyber revolution served the U.S. public diplomacy and cultural imperialism to overthrow the rival governments? To answer this question, besides drawing on the theories dealing with the U.S. public diplomacy and its relationship with cultural imperialism, it has been hypothesized that using public diplomacy strategies in cyberspace and disrupting the vital infrastructures of nations, the U.S. targets vision, insight, understanding, trust and satisfaction of people and the legitimacy of the political system by making use of persuasion techniques.