This draft paper updates a RAND report we wrote twenty years ago proposing noöpolitik as a new approach for American information strategy. According to our argument, strategists will have to rethink the concept of “information” more broadly and see that a new realm is emerging — the noosphere, a global “realm of the mind” that will profoundly affect statecraft. The information age will continue to undermine the conditions for realpolitik strategies based on material “hard power,” and lead to new strategies based on noopolitik and its preference for ideational “soft power.” A rethinking is needed because the decisive factor in the new global wars of ideas will be “whose story wins” — the essence of noöpolitik. In this update, we provide a deeper analysis of the origins and implications of the noosphere concept, along with a new analysis about how America’s state and non-state adversaries are now using dark forms of noopolitik against us, quite effectively. We also observe that the future of the noosphere and noopolitik may depend on what happens with/to the “global commons” — a construct that has received major support in civilian environmental and social-activist circles as well as in military strategy circles for decades, but that is now viewed dismissively in some high-level policymaking circles.
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