Joe Biden’s woke imperialism: Developing nations have had enough of the West’s lectures.

Although this crusade is framed in the language of human rights and democracy, it can best be understood as a 21st-century version of cultural imperialism. For the Biden White House, what matters are not the classical principles of democracy and freedom, but the woke values associated with the politics of identity. As NS Lyons explains in an excellent essay, ‘Intersectional Imperialism and the Woke Cold War’, when Biden uses terms like ‘democratic progress’ and ‘human rights’ he means something very different to what those words meant in the past. From Biden’s perspective, democracy and human rights mean taking the knee, celebrating transgender ideology and renouncing heteronormativity and masculinity.

As soon as Biden assumed office, he set in motion this crusade against what he characterises as the global forces of autocracy. At the February 2021 virtual Munich Security Conference, he announced that ‘America is back’. He was seeking to lay out a new Cold War narrative and return America to its activist global role. But unlike the first Cold War, which mobilised the West against Communism, Cold War 2.0 would direct its fire at movements and governments that the Biden administration deems to be autocratic.

Biden has constantly reiterated this theme ever since. In March 2021, he referred to America’s relationship with China and Russia as a ‘battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies’. At that point in time, Biden’s main focus was China. He warned that China was aggressively seeking to become the most powerful nation in the world.

This crusade against autocracy reached its culmination at the Summit for Democracy, a virtual jamboree hosted in Washington in December 2021. The explicit objective of the summit was to ‘renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad’. This exercise in propaganda, supported by 100 governments around the world and a veritable army of advocacy organisations and NGOs, provided an opportunity for interweaving the woke values pursued by the Biden administration at home with its foreign-policy objectives.

At the summit, the theme of ‘strengthening democracy and defending it against authoritarianism’ was linked with the promotion of ‘the human rights of activists, women and girls, youth, LGBTQI+ persons, persons with disabilities, and marginalised populations’. The Biden administration has consciously externalised America’s culture war, projecting it on to the global stage, while at the same time presenting the threat posed by Beijing and Moscow as analogous to the threat posed by the Trumpist hordes at home.