By Victor Davis Hanson | Townhall.com
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.
