The Rise of ‘Woke’ Foreign Policy

United States embassy to the Vatican, June 2022

The following essay is based on James Carden’s contribution to the Symposium on Realism and Legitimacy organized by the Simone Weil Center in Washington, D.C. on October 7, 2022.   His presentation, which was an audience favorite, raises an interesting question as to cause and effect.  Have ‘protected minorities’ transformed the American foreign policy establishment, or, as Matthew Crawford has suggested, have American elites in the foreign policy establishment themselves made use of ‘protected minorities’ for their own purposes of accumulating power without limit? Of course, the causality could also work both ways — and very likely does.  – The Editors

How did we arrive at a point where our governing and media elites insist (and, frighteningly, actually believe) that war is preferable to peace and that diplomacy and negotiations are the equivalent of treason? Put another way, how did we get to the point where US foreign policy is no longer principally concerned with traditional concepts of security but is instead embarked on a global crusade to spread whatever the political and financial and technological elites deem to be ‘progressive values’?

In order to understand that we need to understand the long march certain “rights” movements had made through American institutions over the past half century.

If you had told the leaders of the Stonewall Riot of 1969 that one day -- perhaps within their lifetimes -- the Rainbow flag would fly alongside the American flag over US embassies worldwide as a symbol of what is best and right about America -- they would not have believed you. 

What was back in 1969 an understandable and indeed, given the abuse of police power against that community in those days, just movement for equal protection under the law, has over the past decade or so, transformed, with the eager help of the commercial interests in this country, into one that seeks a hegemonic place in American society. 

The marriage of woke ideology to American corporate power (neither of which have a decent respect for any kind of limits) was succinctly outlined after the 2016 election by the political philosopher Nancy Fraser. According to Fraser, Trump’s election was a rejection of what she termed progressive neoliberalism which she defined as:

….an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization.  

This makes sense; after all, woke-ism and American finance capitalism have much in common, including zero respect for borders, traditions or even representative democracy. Indeed, as Fraser shows, they are made for each other. 

The ramifications of this for US foreign policy are clear enough. Having achieved a hegemonic position (or nearly so) in the American political, media and yes, military elite, ‘the woke’ have gone on to capture and remake American foreign policy to reflect their domestic priorities. 

The transformation of movements that sought equal protection under the US Constitution into movements that now seek to impose their agenda worldwide through the force of American arms lies at the heart of most of our current trouble: The quest for a hegemonic position in American society lends itself to a rejection of pluralism, and this in turn has led to a rejection of the concept of multipolarity among the US governing class.

Woke ideology, in other words, prevents our leaders from simply acknowledging what is true: That we live in a multipolar world and have to, as best we can, make workable arrangements with different civilizations that have different values than the ones America’s elites now espouse.  

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These so-called values could not have become as ubiquitous as they are were it not for the -- in many ways deeply unfortunate -- technological revolution we have all been forced to live through beginning in the late 1990s. The radical change of the past several decades rivals and in certain ways surpasses the period of years famously chronicled by Henry Adams in his Education.

Recall that Adams was born into Antebellum America and died at the dawn of the Nuclear age; Albert Einstein published his expanded theory of special relativity in 1915, Adams died in 1918.  The triumph of the ‘dynamo’ (a term Adams used to represent the technological revolution of his time) over the older values of the Virgin was of course a special focus of Adams in his later years.

The American society I was born into during the American bicentennial year has likewise become unrecognizable, thanks to a different form of technological progress. And it is one that works insidiously and quite differently from the dynamos of Adams’ day. Today’s technology isn't simply replacing the mule with the engine. It is transforming, in deeply puzzling and profoundly anti-human ways, both the experience and meaning of what it is to be human.

Technology in Adams’ day changed how people did what they did. Today, technology shapes what people believe, how they communicate and even what or who they think they are. And this helps to explain woke ideology’s easy triumph over more traditional ways of thinking. 

The state now requires us to disbelieve and indeed distrust -- our judgement, our experience, our traditions -- indeed, what is plain to see with our own eyes. ‘Woke-ism’ entails, indeed requires, an outright rejection of the concept of multipolarity; the idea of a multipolar world in which different civilizations can coexist and even thrive, is anathema.

Yet to deny the value of different civilizations by believing they ought to and can be changed by an American-led values crusade is to live in a state of unreality. And, sadly, the ramifications of this line of thinking are becoming plain for all to see.