When Culture Wars Go Global International Stability Is Undermined

The pursuit of identity politics the Western foreign policy establishment leads to geopolitical illiteracy

Geopolitical rivalries have become intertwined with conflicts of culture and in turn such struggles are expressed through the medium of a culture war.

To complicate matters unresolved cultural disputes that rage within western societies is externalised and exported to other parts of the globe. In this way the identity politics celebrated by the Western Cultural elites inform many foreign policy initiatives. The key themes that dominate the Culture Wars in the Anglosphere are continually channelled through diplomatic initiatives and international organisations to the rest of the world.

 For example, a report published by the Council of Europe titled The Gender Dimension Of Foreign Policy has as its focus the making of ‘gender and inclusion priorities in response to international crises’. It argues for ‘adopting an intersectional and inclusive approach, relevant representation of women and people from various background’. It boasts that ‘promoting this approach is at the heart of feminist foreign policies’[i]. The Biden- Harris administration in the United States is also sympathetic to the pursuit of a feminist foreign policy.

The project of globalising identity related obsessions through diplomatic channels and institutions comes across as the 21^st century version of the Wilsonian First World War rhetoric of ‘make the world safe for democracy’. In contrast to President Wilson, Biden wants to make the world safe for LGBTQI+ culture. He boasted of Washington’s commitment to ‘lead by the power of our example in the cause of advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world’[ii]. As far as the US State Department is concerned, the promotion of human rights, including the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons, remains central to U.S. foreign policy’[iii]. That is why American embassies throughout the world are in the forefront of encouraging local LGBTQI+ initiatives.

In comparison to Canada’s foreign policy, American diplomacy’s focus on gender politics comes across as positively restrained. The Canadian Government boasts that sexuality and gender constitute a central feature of its foreign policy. In June 2017, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). The FIAP takes an explicitly feminist approach to Canada’s foreign policy and international development[iv]. As observer noted, ‘climate, contraception and the queer-nexus’ represent ‘the face of Canada in the developing world’. [v]

The globalisation of America’s identity politics was already evident at the time of the Obama administration. In a 2011 speech, the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intoned, ‘Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights’, and she promised to ‘use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world’. Clinton’s boss President Obama echoed her sentiment at diplomatic gatherings throughout the world.

Indeed, President Obama continually promoted his geopolitical orientation through domestic Culture War themes. He pursued his relation to Russia through the prism of America’s culture war. His approach was spelt out in his address to the Youth of Europe Conference in Berlin in March 2014 In that speech, he linked his criticism of Russia’s occupation of Crimea with his opposition to certain, apparently ‘backward’ cultural values back home in the US. He celebrated the politics of identity and permissiveness and denounced what he characterised as the ‘older, more traditional view of power’. He said that ‘instead of targeting our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters’ – as Russia does – ‘we can use our laws to protect their rights’[vi]. For Obama his synthesis of globalist ideology and identity politics represented his enlightened ideological export to the world.

Anyone listening to his speech could have imagined that his preoccupation was just as much with the populist anti-woke deplorables in the US as with Russia’s occupation of Crimea. He consciously represented Russia as the moral equivalent of anti-globalist movements in Europe who were concerned about mass migration. Obama used the occasion of his speech on Crimea to praise the federalist ‘European project’ and the principles of the European Union.

It is evident that the oligarchy that runs the EU have bought into Obama’s playbook. For example, the EU Commission has adopted the policy of gender mainstreaming and frequently seeks to impose LGBTQ+ ideals on member states. It continually seeks to punish Hungary and other member states on the ground that it supposedly discriminates against LGBTQ minorities. The EU commission relies on coercion – financial blackmail to impose its views on recalcitrant member state.

At times the pursuit of globalising woke cultural values appears as a caricature of itself. Take the case of Sneha Nair, a recently hired expert in the US National Security Administration - the body in charge of maintaining the world’s largest nuclear arsenal[vii]. Back in June 2023, before she was hired by the Biden administration, she co-authored a lengthy essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled, ‘Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament’[viii]. Nair is an uncompromising advocate for the use of ‘queer theory’ in developing US nuclear-weapons policy. According to Nair and her co-author, ‘diversity and inclusion’ are ‘especially important’ for nuclear policy. This essay asserts that, ‘discrimination against queer people’ can ‘undermine nuclear security’ and increase the risk of nuclear war. They also attack the nuclear-security community for being largely ‘cis-heteronormative’. One is entitled to be truly worried, when people like Sneha Nair play an active role in America’s nuclear-security community.

In the eyes of the Western cultural and technical elites their foreign adversaries represent the values and attitudes of those citizens of their own country who they deplore as populist xenophobes who are on the ‘wrong side of history. They possess a globalist outlook that is not only opposed to the ideal of sovereignty and self-determination. Sections of the Foreign Policy Establishment is also opposed to the historical legacy of Western culture and the values associated with tradition, family and community. Many of them are determined to impose an American brand of identity politics and woke values on the rest of the world. This leads them to interpret major geopolitical events through the prism of the culture wars.

Thus, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was and continues to be viewed by globalists as a distant expression of conflicts closer to home. Some went so far as to associate Russia’s actions with populist movements and anti-woke supporters of national sovereignty. Writing in this vein in the Guardian, Thomas Zimmer warned that ‘America’s culture war is spilling into actual war-war’[ix]. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman treated Putin as a proxy for everything he hated about Trump, Brexit, respect for tradition and other supposedly populist causes. ‘[The West’s] vulnerability comes not from the decline of traditional family values’, he wrote, ‘but from the decline of traditional democratic values, such as a belief in the rule of law and a willingness to accept the results of elections that don’t go your way’.

The Globalisation of the Culture Wars

The Culture Wars have become internationalized, and disputes about lifestyle, family life, sexual orientation or the nature of community life are no longer confined to the domestic sphere. Internationally, culture has become politicized around issues such the role of multiculturalism, mass migration into the continent, the nature of borders, the challenge posed by radical Islamists groups, the nature of marriage and family life, and sexuality. Muslim jihadists are not just fighting with bombs: they are directly questioning Western liberal values and denouncing them as immoral. Radical Muslim websites attacks the West for its materialism, consumerism, and sinful behaviour. In turn, supporters of Western post-traditional values criticize societies in the Middle East for the way they treat women and homosexuals. At times it seems that the principal argument used by the West to attack Iran is Tehran’s treatment of women. Even Russia has been pulled into the frame, frequently denounced by Western commentators for its conservative and traditional attitude towards women and homosexuality. This obsession with the politics of gender and sexuality invariably distracts from the pursuit of realpolitik.

In response to the anti-traditionalist values celebrated in the United States and the West, Vladamir Putin, the President of Russia, has sought to assume the posture of the global leader fighting for traditionalism and a Christian way of life. There is little doubt that the government of Russia is a willing participant in what it regards as a war over moral values and beliefs. Since early 2012 President Putin has explicitly expressed his conviction that ‘cultural self-awareness, spiritual and moral values, codes of values are an area of intense competition’. Putin has stated that the struggle ‘to influence the worldviews of entire ethnic groups, the desire to subject them to one’s will, to force one’s system of values and beliefs upon them is an absolute reality, just like the fight for mineral resources that many nations, ours included experience’[x]

Putin self-consciously cultivates the image of Russia as a moral crusader fighting for the survival of human civilization. In his annual State of the Nation speech in 2013, Putin responded to Western criticisms of Russia’s attitude to homosexuality by lamenting the decline of morality in the West and drawing attention to what he perceived as the morally disorienting consequences of Western social engineering. ‘This destruction of traditional values from above not only entails negative consequences for society but is also inherently anti-democratic because it is based on an abstract notion and runs counter to the will of the majority of people’, he claimed, arguing that traditional family values were the only effective defence against ‘so-called tolerance – genderless and infertile’.

Although directed at the Russian public, Putin’s denunciation of ‘genderless and infertile’ lifestyles was also messaged for a global audience. Just a few days before the delivery of this speech, an influential Kremlin-linked think-tank published a report titled ‘Putin: World Conservatism’s New Leader’. The report claimed that ordinary people throughout the world yearn for the stability and security offered by traditional values and argued that people believe in the traditional family and regard multiculturalism with suspicion. Dmitry Abzalov, a spokesman, told the press that ‘it is important for most people to preserve their way of life, their lifestyle, their traditions’ and because of that they ‘tend toward conservatism’[xi].

In contrast to their global enemies, today’s Western elites feel politically and culturally estranged from their own national institutions. This can make them inconsistent in pursuit of their own national interests, even doubtful about them.

They regard patriotism as parochial affliction. That is why in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, British based Remainer policymakers and politicians openly caucused with their EU colleagues and did their best to undermine and humiliate their Brexiteer compatriots. In numerous commentaries and statements, they have indicated that they have more in common with their co-thinkers in Europe than the supposed Little Englanders and xenophobes that voted for Brexit. Some have even gone so far as to threaten to leave the United Kingdom after Brexit and settle in one of the ‘enlightened’ EU affiliated states.

The divisions exposed over Brexit and cultural politics highlight one rarely discussed but dramatic political development, which is the de-nationalisation and potentially the de-territorialisation of significant sections of the western political class.

Superficially, the trend towards the de-nationalisation of the elites appears to be the outcome of the process of globalisation. Numerous commentators have argued that as global networks displace national ones, supra-national institutions attract the best brains. Entrepreneurs, scientists and academics begin to think more and more globally and adopt a casual orientation towards their national affiliation. However the de-nationalisation of the elites is not simply driven by globalisation. Politically and culturally they feel estranged from their own national institutions and affiliations.. Before Brexit, many English MEPs felt they have more in common with a French colleague than with the voters who elected them. Back home, the cultural elites live a life that is detached from those of less fortunate citizens. One of the first commentator to draw attention to the trend towards the denationalisation of the elites was the American political philosopher, Christopher Lasch. He wrote in 1995:

‘Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coast, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues’[xii].

Lasch noted that in contrast to their lack of enthusiasm for patriotism, they readily embraced multiculturalism and diversity.

The globalist imagination is spontaneously drawn towards an outlook that looks down on national culture and its traditional values. That is why members of the globalist elite and their institution have played such a central war in the current Culture Wars. At the same time through the medium of the culture wars, the detachment of the elites from the life of a nation has become intensified. From this perspective they feel closer to their transnational friends than to fellow citizens ‘who do not think like us’.

Since the 1990s the psychic distance between the elite outlook and national sensibilities have widened. Drawn towards multiculturalism and the sacralisation of diversity they have become heavily invested in the promotion of identity politics. This sentiment is systematically promoted by the Great Reset doctrine promoted by the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset envisaged a post-pandemic world where LGBTQ+ identity politics displaces the old normal. It claimed that ‘LGBT+ inclusion is the secret to cities’ post-pandemic success’[xiii]. It bizarrely suggested that a ‘strong positive correlation exists between LGBT+ inclusion and economic resilience’. Evidently flying the rainbow flag has become integral to the identity of Davos Man.

The one identity that the globalist elite dispise is that of their nation. Those charged with the conduct of international affairs and foreign policy often share the cultural outlook of their anti-sovereigntist peers in the political establishment Since their sensibility is more sympathetic to the transnational than the national and the regional, their behaviour as geopolitical actors is often unpredictable and confused. The tragic consequence of half-baked humanitarian interventions in Syria and Afghanistan serves as testimony to the mess created by a diplomacy that finds it difficult to distinguish between transnational cultural rhetoric and national interest. In many instances diplomacy has become subordinated to the dictates of virtue signalling. That is why western diplomats so easily revert to the classical neo-colonial stance of lecturing foreign nations about their cultural values.

When diplomacy and geopolitics become entwined with cultural politics and identity affiliations the outcome is always unpredictable. The polarised political landscape created by cultural conflict within the domestic sphere is bad enough. But when it becomes internationalised and draws in foreign actors its consequences can be far more explosive.

The interweaving of the politics of cultural identity with geopolitical calculations invariably leads to confusions and a loss of clarity about the conduct of diplomatic affairs. It appears that diversity and inclusion compete with defence and national security as the overriding goals of woke foreign policy. As David Brooks, a commentator with The New York Times intoned,

‘How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today’[xiv].

Cultural disputes over lifestyles and values, are extremely difficult to resolve because they are intimately linked to basic moral questions about right and wrong. Such conflicts are rarely susceptible to pragmatic solutions and can easily spiral out of control. Finding a way back to the practice of geopolitics that openly avows national interests is our best hope of avoiding unnecessary conflict. But for that we need political leaders that see themselves as patriotic leaders of their nations.

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[i] chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://assembly.coe.int/LifeRay/EGA/WomenFFViolence/BrochureGenderDimension-EN.pdf

[ii] https://www.state.gov/lgbtqi-human-rights/

[iii] chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Fact-Sheet-Implementation-of-the-Presidential-Memorandum-on-Advancing-the-Human-Rights-of-LGBTQI-Persons-Around-the-World-2023.pdf .

[iv] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canada-s-feminist-foreign-policy

[v] https://c2cjournal.ca/2024/06/canadas-coercive-diplomacy-how-the-liberals-impose-the-woke-agenda-on-developing-countries/

[vi] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/26/remarks-president-address-european-youth

[vii] https://nypost.com/2024/08/22/us-news/biden-admin-energy-hire-called-for-queering-nuclear-weapons-as-part-of-us-policy/

[viii] https://thebulletin.org/2023/06/queering-nuclear-weapons-how-lgbtq-inclusion-strengthens-security-and-reshapes-disarmament/

[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/americas-culture-war-is-spilling-into-actual-war-war

[x] Cited in Neil Robinson ‘The Political Origins of Russia’s Culture Wars” https://www.academia.edu/6902059/The_Political_Origins_of_Russias_Culture_Wars

[xi] See http://www.rferl.org/content/vladimir-ilyich-putin-the-conservative-lenin/25206293.html

[xii] Lasch, C. (1995)

Revolt of the Elites: And The Betrayal of Democracy, WW Norton ; New York.

[xiii] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/lgbt-inclusion-cities-post-covid-reset-recovery/

[xiv] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opinion/globalization-global-culture-war.html