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June 29, 2021 - 7:00am
The US State Department’s rapid transformation from an organisation whose principal aim was to carry out diplomacy with foreign governments to one which acts as the ‘tip of the spear’ of an American-led liberal values crusade continues apace. In the months since US president Joseph R. Biden appointed his longtime aide Anthony Blinken as US Secretary of State, the department has issued a number of diktats that seek not to further State’s traditional role of serving as an interlocutor and negotiating partner with foreign allies and adversaries, but to act as a kind of cheerleader for liberal American values abroad.
In April, Blinken’s State Department granted a “blanket authorization” to embassies around the world to fly the rainbow LGBTQ+ Pride flag “for the duration of the 2021 Pride season.” A month later, the department authorised the raising of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) flag to mark the one year anniversary of the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. In a statement accompanying the decision, Blinken asserted that: “For the United States to be a credible force for human rights around the world, we have to face the realities of racism and hatred here at home.” How flying a BLM flag over the US embassy in Cambodia furthers that goal, Blinken did not say.
The American government’s proclivity to promote liberal values abroad in the furtherance of its foreign policy aims is not exactly new. For decades, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has, at the behest of Congress, released so-called human rights report cards on foreign counties that are, in its view, failing to measure up to the high standard it credulously seems to believe is set by the United States.
The decision to make US embassies and consulates abroad actors in what is after all a domestic culture war seems ill thought out at best. The decision by U.S. embassies to hoist the LGBGT+ Pride flag seems designed not so much to further diplomacy with the host governments, but is instead meant to send a message to those governed by social conservatives.
Indeed, the relatively recent liberal enthusiasm for designating foreign countries that are merely conservative or practice what U.S. elites perceive to be a less-than-enlightened politics as adversaries is a dangerous one. That is because it opens the door wide-open to neoconservative ideologues who need no encouragement whatsoever to add to their list of targets in their regime-change fantasies. In this way, liberal cultural imperialists like Blinken only serve to provoke the jingoism and militarism of the US foreign policy establishment.
The U.S. would be far better served if it abandoned its self-appointed role as a global values hall monitor and instead embraced a narrower, indeed humbler, conception of diplomacy. We might do well to recall the warning of the legendary scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan who once wrote that diplomats should avoid “the histrionics of moralism” by which he meant “the projection of attitudes, poses, and rhetoric that cause us to appear noble and altruistic in the mirror of our own vanity but lack substance when related to the realities of international life.”
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SubscribeMissionary zeal in its modern form. Teach those fuzzy wuzzies to become civilised. The trouble is, it’s the civilisers who are the barbarians.
Your post is 100% the sheep/Liberal/Lefty indoctrination jingoism camp. You are EXACTLY what this article is against, and your mindless up-voters do not even see it…Ignorance of history and mocking the Missionaries (and so the West historically), most of whom gave their lives to serve the poor around the globe.
Fuzzie wuzzies were the fallows of the Mahdi, and thus fanatical Muslims, the missionaries did not get sent to civilize them. Kipling wrote the poem which made that name famous, for their sheer bravery and determination – they ‘Broke The British Square’ with the meagerest of arms, something which only happened a couple times in British history.
“We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,
An’ some of ’em was brave an’ some was not:
The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.
We never got a ha’porth’s change of ‘im:
‘E squatted in the scrub an’ ‘ocked our ‘orses,”
“‘E cut our sentries up at Sua~kim~,
An’ ‘e played the cat an’ banjo with our forces.
So ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
We gives you your certificate, an’ if you want it signed
We’ll come an’ ‘ave a romp with you whenever you’re inclined.
We took our chanst among the Khyber ‘ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills,
An’ a Zulu ~impi~ dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We ‘eld our bloomin’ own, the papers say,
But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us ‘oller.
Then ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an’ the missis and the kid;
Our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’ did.
We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ‘ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.”
Indeed. Kipling was a saint.
The neoliberal global corporations spent $16Bn on the Biden campaign. The least he can do is fly their flag above that of the United States.
The Rainbow flag has become less a symbol of the gay community and is more the flag of a radicalised liberal humanism, that aspires to the same hegemonic position the church held in medieval Europe.
Its neoreligion. Same old stuff, different beliefs
And being pushed from the same direction towards today’s benighted heathen. In the sixteenth century it was conquistadors burning Aztecs as heathen, today it’s America telling someone else they’re heathen.
When looking for an excuse to bomb a country, homophobia and racism will do.
We fought the Russians in Afghanistan by proxie, with KSA money dollar for dollar, and Saudi with ISI created the Taliban in the process, with their Deobandi/(Salifast if I may) madrassas, the ones who then kicked out the mujahideen and re-enforced Pashtunwali, the code of the Pashtuns that requires the Bruqua and separation of women.
THEN we went into Afghanistan to kick out the Saudi Osama, and THEN we stayed to give the women and girls Western Liberalism. This is actually true – the Talib are not outward threats, but the press on the treatment of Afghani women was really the reasons we stayed – it was all the MSM, with Feminists, and Liberal bed-wetters who mired us in that disaster for 20 additional years, for the sake of bringing Liberalism to that land. How I could talk of this issue, Iraq……
The Irony of the entire Afghanistan war is breath taking.
“liberal cultural imperialists” – that sums it up succinctly.