Dubai’s Chocolate-Based Propaganda Push
For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.
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Dubai’s Chocolate-Based Propaganda Push
For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.
4 min read
In a modern, globalised, digitally-connected world, geopolitics consists of more than simply who has the biggest military. Increasingly, diplomatic influence utilises cultural and economic forces, what the Harvard political science professor Joseph Nye called soft power. “The ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion or payment”, as he put it.
Countries build soft power in numerous ways. They can influence other nations directly, in the form of foreign aid or investments, or indirectly through their cultural output in the form of film or music industries, or with their national cuisine. The continued cultural dominance of Hollywood is one example, as is how the government of Thailand helped establish thousands of Thai restaurants around the world during the early 2000s. The goal was to boost its “export and tourism revenues, as well as its prominence on the cultural and diplomatic stages”, as Myles Karp wrote for Vice in 2018.
Soft power is a thing in coffee too. I’ve written previously about how, as the United States has turned increasingly isolationist and hostile under the Trump administration, China has stepped in to fill the vacuum. It has funded infrastructure projects around the world and stepped up its purchases of coffee from Africa in particular.
Coffee’s Soft Power Shift
The United States has long been at the centre of the global coffee industry. But as policies shift under the Trump administration, that dominance is under threat.
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The United Arab Emirates is also adept at this kind of diplomacy, consistently placing highly on lists of soft power rankings and even publishing its own soft power strategy. Government-owned companies like the airlines Emirates and Etihad sponsor sporting events and teams, Abu Dhabi is building a Disney theme park, and Dubai hosted the COP28 climate change conference in 2023. As I wrote last week, the Specialty Coffee Association’s World of Coffee Dubai trade show can also be seen as part of its soft power-building.
One of the emirate’s most recent forays into the world of soft power was also unexpected: the social media-driven Dubai chocolate trend of the past few years. Much like its push to become a major player in coffee, the emirate’s chocolate-themed propaganda push serves to boost its global reputation while disguising its misdeeds. Now, the two trends are beginning to merge.
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