Anheuser-Busch’s mistake in making ties with “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney was not knowing, or at least not respecting, its market. The United States is making the same mistake on the geopolitical stage, pushing the “trans” and other woke agendas on a world either wholly uninterested, or actually disgusted, by what Uncle Sam is selling.
And, quite predictably, America is bleeding world support the way Bud Light is customers, as our allies take their “business” elsewhere — such as to the Chinese.
Anheuser-Busch’s response is to try to deftly walk back its support for the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda. Our government’s response is different: It’s quadrupling down (it doubled down long ago).
This is all happening at a time, too, in which respect for the American military is cratering. And as history professor Victor Davis Hanson put it Thursday, “Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.”
In his piece “The New Ugly Americans,” Hanson mentions that some would once lament the old supposed “American cultural imperialism,” which amounted to corporations such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola becoming prominent in foreign markets. But one may as well complain about Asian cars being common in the U.S. Love ’em or hate ’em, these businesses have captured foreign markets via economic democracy: Foreign people decided they liked what the corporations were selling.
But new cultural imperialism is imposed top down. Hanson paints a striking picture:
When exiting Afghanistan with our tail between our legs in 2021, we left billions in military equipment behind, which the Taliban could get rich selling. Also left, of course, was Bagram Airbase’s hundreds of millions’ worth of infrastructure. But we left some other things, too.
Upon our departure, an “LGBT” flag still flew above our new Kabul embassy, and a George Floyd mural was displayed on city streets. We’d also spent $787 million instituting “gender studies” programs at Kabul University. It’s a good bet the latter didn’t survive Taliban pedagogical review and that the sexual flag and Saint Floyd will get the Buddha statue treatment.
The “LGBT” flag was there, by the way, because in 2021 Joe Biden reversed a Trump policy banning the practice. Such a flag, along with Black Lives Matter banners, have also hung from our embassy in South Korea, Hanson points out.
In fact, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in March that “LGBTQ+ rights are … a core part of our foreign policy,” formally announcing, in essence, that America has become a sexual-devolutionary “imperialist project.”
“Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first,” noted Hanson. He then continued:
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?
Note, too, that this is just the intensification of long-standing American policy that had only somewhat of a pause during Trump’s administration. In 2011 already, for example, then-president Barack Obama used U.S. foreign aid as a cudgel to try to pressure African nations into embracing the homosexuality agenda. African officials described the effort as “abhorrent” and the agenda as “anathema” to most of their continent.
It wasn’t always like this — and “imposing values” can be valid. There was a time when we made receipt of foreign aid contingent upon being pro-American (entirely rational). Earlier in history, the Portuguese, Dutch, and British outlawed sati (widow-burning) in India. The West also introduced Christianity to a once-savage world and eliminated cannibalism, human sacrifice, and, where it could, slavery.
Most people will ultimately accept the suppression of profound objective evil, too.
They also may recoil at its promotion.
And as American Thinker put it in March, a “good portion of the world [now] sees America as an immoral hegemon.” Why, our troops were even told to ignore the ritualized sexual abuse of boys in Afghanistan (bacha bazi), something whose elimination many Afghans would’ve have appreciated. That was what our government decided to be “culturally sensitive” about. But it’s congruent: That behavior was just close enough to the perverse agenda we were pushing.
The result of all this (and other factors) is a foreign policy train wreck. Increasingly, the world is “de-dollarizing,” with countries such as Russia, China, Brazil, and Kenya and Southeast Asian nations engaging in types of trade with alternative currencies. Allies such as France have joined Russia and Iran in moving toward China, while Beijing, more concerned with profits than cultural imperialism, happily makes inroads into Africa.
Eastern European lands such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic had perhaps hoped the bullying was over after centuries of aggression from enemies such as the Ottomans, Nazis, and Soviets. But now these nations, which could be our best allies, have woke Washington condemning them. And while Uganda’s Parliament had in 2010 tabled a bill that included capital punishment for “aggravated homosexuality” — likely under pressure from the U.S. — it now has just made such a bill law.
Increasingly, the world doesn’t care what the U.S. thinks, seeing us as weak, morally corrupt, bizarre, sex-switching aliens who are channeling Caligula. Unlike Anheuser-Busch, we’re not struggling to reverse course and repair our image, for our pseudo-elites are determined. They’ll die with their pink boots on — and take American power, prestige, and prosperity with them.
