National Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently made some interesting statements from the White House rostrum.
“LGBTQ+ rights are there. . . is a fundamental a part of our foreign policy,” Kirby said last week.
What does that mean exactly?
Sex hormones and sex operations for your kids, won’t you get foreign aid?
It will conquer hearts and minds all around the world.
A couple of days later, Kirby warned that the US “will have to take a look at” imposing economic sanctions on predominantly Christian Uganda if the anti-LGBTQ identity bill, which had just been passed by their parliament, passed.
That will be “really unlucky,” Kirby admitted, since most U.S. aid to Uganda is for health care, especially AIDS.
Meanwhile, Samantha Power hangs around socially conservative Hungary, causing problems with intersex activists over a law banning gender studies and depicting LGBTQ content to minors.
Flying the rainbow flag outside our embassies in Kabul and the Holy See is one thing.
It is kind of one other matter to impose American social mores on traditionally Christian or Islamic countries.
this type of awakened imperialism in our names won’t end well for anyone.
american values
In Ecuador, for example, this yr the State Department is funding “drag shows,” which it calls “a public diplomacy program. . . promote diversity and inclusion.
The grant summary says that the goal is to support “the goals and objectives of U.S. foreign policy, furthering national interests, and enhancing national security.”
It just isn’t clear how our national security will be strengthened by exporting “Drag Queen Story Hour” to a predominantly Christian country, when it’s already a divisive issue at home.
In Hungary, Power also boasted during her trip last month that her agency, USAID, spends taxpayer money to “help independent media grow and reach latest audiences.”
It will possibly be assumed that these “independent media” will only go a technique – against conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom President Biden called a totalitarian “bandit” despite the fact that Orbán won the fourth consecutive election with essentially the most votes in Hungarian history last yr.
Hungary is a parliamentary republic, a member of NATO and the EU, has a powerful free press and a structure that explicitly protects human rights.
Hungarians are simply not big fans of American wakeism or gender ideology.
For this thoughtcrime, Biden decided to poke them in the attention last yr with a provocative appointment as Hungarian ambassador: David Pressman, a gay human rights lawyer at law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who helped guide the Obama administration’s international LGBT rights strategy, which our president has now armed himself with .
Described by the Recent York Times his arrival thus: “The US ambassador is on hostile ground. . . Pressman arrived in Hungary along with her husband and two children to take up a latest job in September because the US ambassador to Europe, a self-proclaimed citadel of traditional Christian values and a friend of the Kremlin.
Politico praised Pressman for “his willingness to summon – and even troll” the Orbán government.
In October, for example, his embassy Twitter account posted a video quiz featuring anonymous quotes and asking people to guess “Who said that?”
Was it a high-ranking official of the Hungarian government or Vladimir Putin?
Not one of the quotes got here from Putin, suggesting that Orban’s government is just as much an enemy.
Unnecessarily alienating a pro-American ally is neither diplomatic nor prudent, especially in times of world threat.
The foreign policy implications of attempting to force countries to adopt the Biden administration’s extreme liberal social agenda may very well be “catastrophic,” John Ratcliffe, the previous director of national intelligence, warned last yr.
But “converting the awakening ideology,” as Ratcliffe put it, is what Biden is committed to.
Inside two weeks of taking office, the president signed an executive order directing all “diplomacy and foreign aid.” [to] promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people all over the world [and combat] intolerance.”
Conservative places
Nonetheless laudable our tolerance of minority rights could also be, it was not only a nice affirmation of American values.
It was a threat: any foreign government that creates a “climate of intolerance,” nonetheless defined by ultra-liberal State Department officials, will be punished with “a full range of diplomatic and aid tools and, where appropriate, financial sanctions, visa restrictions and other measures.”
This may occasionally be difficult for self-absorbed Swamp dwellers to grasp, however the alarm clock is unpopular in lots of foreign societies, including much of Africa, China, Russia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
They regard gender ideology and the LGBT agenda as cultural imperialism that undermines their religious and family values – and who’re we to inform them otherwise?
Once we add to this the behind-the-scenes climate plans of John Kerry, world-traveling climate czar Biden, the American bully tactics grow to be increasingly more suicidal.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Sunday that “Kerry does lots of foreign policy,” so climate change has truncated American security in the case of the Chinese Communist Party.
Doing no good
Removed from protecting our national security, a foreign policy that prioritizes such boutique issues is prone to backfire in creating opposition to the values it seeks to advertise.
For instance, an try and impose gender quotas on Afghanistan’s government and military has not gone thoroughly, writes Christopher Mott in an article titled “Woke Imperium” for the nonpartisan Institute for Peace & Diplomacy think tank last yr.
The policy “caused difficulties with Afghan recruits and value the USA at the very least $110 million before the inclusive aspect of this system was abandoned.”
Just as Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban in 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul celebrated Pride Month by hoisting the rainbow flag. The symbolism of the defeated rainbow empire was inevitable.
Mott says that diplomacy has been forgotten “in the frenzy to make foreign policy an extension of internal culture wars.”
“Attempts to reshape foreign cultures in accordance with the mores of American (and to a lesser extent European) haute bourgeois cosmopolitanism of the twenty first century” are a type of “cultural eugenics,” he said.
“A latest awakening empire [requires] complete cultural subservience – which over time may result in further radicalization of the countries of the Global South against “us” – he said.
All we’re doing with this empty virtue signaling is foment resentment against the US in parts of the world where China is already invading.
China doesn’t care in regards to the sexual mores of the countries they co-opt. Neither should we.