The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors.
But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down.
The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped.
We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts.
Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy. A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.
And gender studies programs — to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies — were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.
Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea.
Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.
The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.
American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on transgender people, LGBTQ promotion, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgender ambassadors.
The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.
Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.
The White House manifesto called the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” offers a blueprint for how to massage nations abroad to accept our values that are increasingly at odds with much of the world’s.
Do Americans really believe that embracing drag-queen shows at military bases, abortion to the moment of birth, transgender men competing in women’s sports, and the promised effort to ban the internal combustion engine are effective ways to ensure good relations with the United States?
No wonder the Biden Administration’s new cultural imperialism is proving disastrous for a variety of reasons.
One, these imperialistic and chauvinistic agendas are pushed abroad at the very time the respect for the U.S. military is at an all-time low. It was humiliated in Afghanistan. It is now unable to recruit sufficient qualified soldiers. Its stocks of critical weapons are depleted.
The Pentagon leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, along with Joe Biden, do not radiate competence.
But they do exude woke pieties.
While we offend Middle East oil exporters and Central Europeans, China allies with Russia and Iran. India and Turkey triangulate away from the United States. Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.
Two, these warped standards are incoherent. Is an abortion-on-demand, totalitarian China therefore an ally? How could we damn supposedly non-woke Saudi Arabia as we begged it to pump more of its non-green oil before the 2022 midterms?
Some of our most loyal allies are in Eastern Europe — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania. These countries have experienced traumatic histories on the front lines against Islamic Ottoman expansionism, czarist and Soviet aggression, and German Nazi bullying and invasion.
They are democratic and pro-American. Yet they are now targeted by our woke imperialists because they remain steadfast as the most religious and traditional of our European allies.
Yet these nations would be more likely to dispatch credible forces for NATO’s defense than many of our left-wing, woke, and militarily less capable Western European nations.
Three, most of the 7.9 billion people in the world are not woke. They are aspiring to obtain a modicum of the luxury and affluence taken for granted in America.
The rest of the planet worries whether it will have enough food, energy, security, and shelter to live one more day. For most, the incessant, woke virtue-signaling from affluent Americans comes across as the whiny bullying of pampered, self-righteous — and increasingly neurotic — imperialists.
Four, traditionally the party that controls the State Department does not politically weaponize its embassies with wedge issues that have not won majority support among Americans.
Such abject politicalization rattles and alienates foreign nations. They do not want to be drawn into the American Left’s internal propaganda efforts that they know are bitterly controversial inside the United States.
How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried “American imperialism” are now proving the greatest imperialists of all.
( Hanson’s latest book is “The Dying Citizen” from Basic Books. Buy it in hardcover at a 36% discount! by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 40% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
Wokeism is Pagan revival in the (Roman) Western World. Of course, Paganism had inherent weaknesses in the ancient world; but even with these weaknesses, it was able to best the presumably “morally superior” Jews, as well as taking on all comers among other pagans (the Persians, Hindus, etc. — the Chinese were not even on the Western radar screen).
Ultimately, Christianity overshadowed both Judaism and Paganism, and Old Rome was overrun by barbarians. There is no reason to believe things will turn out differently, this time around. Xenobia and Parthia will not save Israel. Rome will triumph over all comers, by dint of sheer force. Then it will fall, just as it did before; and the kingdoms of the world will become the kingdoms of our God and of His Messiah.
Joe Biden is, in some ways, like Julian the Apostate, who tried to revive Roman Paganism after it fell in the Fourth Century AD. Julian came and went, a mere blip on history. Joe Biden Woke… = Joe… oke. = Jo…ke.
@Raphael: Thanks for your summary. With regard to your question, there are a number of answers that have been presented that none of us like: The New World Order, the World Economic Forum und the UNO Agenda 2030. All of the actions taken recently by an increasing number of countries around the world are directed by these institutions. The main problem is that the idiots who actually enforce these politics think that they will survive the coming world wide disaster.
America is a has-been power, in decline for decades.
Huge trade deficits, a national debt that is out of control,
morally and financially bankrupt, on life support by way of printing money, credit and run by kleptocrats.
A last ditch attempt at influencing the world through “woke
progressivism” as Hanson describes it is now taking place.
Ukraine is the Democrats’ attempt to push this agenda into Russia and then China. Not working out too well. Ukraine is paying the price.
Mr. Hanson states the problem with amazing clarity, but even more so does @EvRe1, in the comments below. He says:
and
Now that we know the what and the who, the one remaining mystery is WHY.
There is one reason that ties together everything we have witnessed in the past two decades:
1. The Biden Presidency
2. the Iran Nuclear Deal
3. The Ukrainian War
4. The Pandemic
5. The Afghanistan debacle
6. Ending fossil fuel production
7. Selling US Uranium to Russia
8. Selling a US port at Port Canaveral to an Islamic terrorist
9. Attempted government coup against Israel
10. The desire for regime change in Russia
11. Blowing up the Nordstream Pipeline
12. Millions of people invading the US through the border
13. Hilary Clinton making top secret documents available to the CCP
14. Trump impeachments and Russia Hoax
15. Election rigging and electoral fraud
16. 24/7 surveillance of all American citizens, i.e. a police state
17. Cultural Revolution indoctrination of schools, universities, the government, the military.
What underlies all of the above is the desire to destroy the US as a world power. That desire of Obama and all those with whom he works is to destroy the reputation of the US, destroy the energy independence of the US, destroy America’s allies, destroy our traditional values and culture of freedom and liberty, and replace America with Marxist crony capitalism.
No country voluntarily gives up its energy independence. If a country is taken over by another country due to war, and the energy resources are commandeered for another country, it happens, but never in history has a country given up its energy independence. That makes it crystal clear that this is all about one simple thing: destroying America. As Senator Kennedy would say, “all the rest is cottage cheese.”