White House’s push for woke foreign policy will backfire with our conservative allies

Miranda Devine

opinion

To Miranda Devine

March 26, 2023 | 10:03 PM

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently made an interesting statement from the White House podium.

“LGBTQ+ rights…are a core part of our foreign policy,” Kirby said last week.

What does that mean?

Cross-Sex Hormone and Gender Surgery for Your Child, or Would You Take Foreign Aid?

It will win hearts all over the world.

Days later, Kirby warned that the United States “should consider” imposing economic sanctions on predominantly Christian Uganda if the anti-LGBTQ identity laws that had just passed Congress were enacted.

Kirby conceded that this was “a real shame” as most US aid to Uganda is for medical care, especially AIDS.

Meanwhile, Samantha Power has stalked socially conservative Hungary, causing trouble with an intersex activist over a law banning gender studies and the depiction of LGBTQ content to minors.

It’s one thing to hang a rainbow flag outside Kabul’s embassy and the Holy See.

Imposing American social conventions on a traditionally Christian or Muslim country is a whole other story.

This kind of awakened imperialism, in our name, does not do anyone any good.

American values

For example, this year Ecuador is funding a “drug theater performance” that the State Department calls a “public diplomacy program.” . Promote diversity and inclusion. ”

The grant outline states that the purpose is to “support the foreign policy goals and objectives of the United States, advance national interests, and enhance national security.”

It’s not clear how exporting Drag Queen Story Hour to a predominantly Christian country would boost national security.

In Hungary, Power boasted during a visit last month that USAID, the agency she leads, uses taxpayer money to “help independent media flourish and reach new audiences.”

That “independent media” can bet against conservative Prime Minister Victor Orban, whom President Biden calls a totalitarian “thug,” that it will only go one way. in Hungarian history.

Hungary is a parliamentary republic, a member of NATO and the EU, with a strong press freedom and a constitution that clearly protects human rights.

Hungarians are not big fans of American arousalism or gender ideology.

For that thoughtcrime, Biden decided to poke their eyes last year with a provocative appointment as ambassador to Hungary. David Pressman to lead Obama administration’s international LGBT rights strategy is a gay rights attorney with the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm who helped the president now weaponize.

The New York Times explained He arrived as follows. Pressman arrived in Hungary with her husband and her two children, and in September she described herself as a friend of the Kremlin with traditional Christian values. I got a new job as US ambassador to European fortresses. ”

Politico praises Pressman For his willingness to “call out and even ravage” the Orban government.

For example, in October his embassy Twitter account posted a video quiz with anonymous quotes asking him to guess “who said it?”

Hungarian government official or Vladimir Putin?

None of the quotes are from Putin, which implies that Orban’s government is indeed the enemy.

Unnecessarily alienating pro-US allies is neither diplomatic nor wise, especially in times of global crisis.

The foreign policy implications of trying to get countries to embrace the Biden administration’s extreme liberal social agenda could be “catastrophic,” last year former Director of the National Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe said. I warned you that there is.

But, as Ratcliffe put it, “an awakened ideological conversion” is what Biden is determined to do.

Within 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 around the world [and combat] Intolerant. ”

conservative place

As admirable as our tolerance for minority rights was, this was not simply a comfortable affirmation of American values.

It was a threat. Foreign governments that create a “climate of intolerance” are defined by ultraliberal State Department officials as “all kinds of diplomatic and aid tools and, where appropriate, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other action.”

The Swamp-obsessed denizens may not understand, but in many foreign societies, including those in Africa, China, Russia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, vodkary is not popular.

They see gender ideology and the LGBT agenda as cultural imperialism that undermines their religious and familial values.

Add in Biden’s globe-trotting climate change tsar, John Kerry’s backroom climate scheme, and America’s bully tactics become increasingly self-defeating.

“Kerry runs a lot of foreign policy,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Sunday.

useless

A foreign policy that prioritizes such boutique concerns, rather than protecting our national security, could have the adverse effect of creating a backlash against the very values ​​it seeks to spread.

Attempts to impose gender quotas on Afghanistan’s government and military, for example, have been largely unsuccessful, Christopher Mott wrote last year in the nonpartisan Institute for Peace and Diplomacy think tank Woke Imperium.

The policy “created difficulties for Afghan recruits and cost the United States at least $110 million before the inclusive aspect of the program was removed.”

Just as Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban in 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul celebrated Pride Month with a rainbow flag. The symbol of a vanquished rainbow empire was inevitable.

Mott says diplomacy has been forgotten, “in a rush to make foreign policy an extension of the domestic culture wars.”

“The attempt to remake foreign cultures according to the conventions of 21st-century American (and, to a lesser extent, European) haute bourgeoisie cosmopolitanism” is a form of “cultural eugenics.”

“Arrival of the Empire’s New Wakeists [requires] Total cultural submissiveness — over time countries in the global South may become more radicalized against us,” he said.

All we are doing with this empty signal of virtue is to stir up anti-American sentiment in parts of the world where China is already invading.

China doesn’t care about the sexual conventions of the countries it buys. Neither should we.