The U.S. is stronger when it defends liberty abroad. Especially in a geopolitical competition with authoritarian powers such as Russia and China, being perceived as a protector of liberty is a valuable asset. Nations that are violated by brutal regimes look to America for support and are often eager to emulate our political institutions and culture.
They are natural allies for the U.S., but the Biden administration is squandering this strategic advantage, despite its claim to be restoring human rights as the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. The administration has not only failed to promote basic rights where it could (e.g., in Afghanistan) but is pushing an avant-garde concept of “rights” with the result of isolating America. Instead of being admired and emulated, the U.S. is becoming for other countries, including some allies, a power to be at best ignored and at worst avoided.
Take the White House’s “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,” published in October. According to a fact sheet accompanying this document, “no country in the world,” including the U.S., “has achieved gender equality.” Consequently, a priority of the Biden administration will be to push for “gender equity” at home and abroad. That entails a radical interpretation of equality of the sexes, including a demand for the wide availability of abortion everywhere. “Gender” is understood not merely as a synonym for sex; the document asserts that a “transgender athlete” must be allowed “to compete free from discrimination”—meaning that men who define themselves as women can run track or wrestle with women.
Such a worldview puts every country—allied or not, democratic or dictatorial—at fault. Afghanistan under the Taliban violently prohibiting women from studying or working is on the same level as Ukraine, which doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage. To make things worse, America’s geopolitical rivals are in many cases more “progressive” than its allies and even than some U.S. states. China, which provides abortion on demand, is thus deemed more advanced than Texas, which has laws aimed at protecting the unborn. According to the logic of this document, the Biden administration is likely to be more hostile to Texas than to China—and in fact this National Strategy asserts that Texas “blatantly violates women’s constitutional rights” and makes no mention of China.
In the same vein, the State Department publicly celebrates the postmodern dogma of gender fluidity. It promoted “International Pronoun Day” by advocating for “pronoun proficiency” and explaining “why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.” The U.S. now issues passports allowing citizens to identify their sex as they wish, including “an X gender marker for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons.” It has authorized U.S. embassies to fly Black Lives Matter and gay-pride rainbow banners alongside the American flag, as some had done on their own during the Trump administration.
Instead of defending liberty, the U.S. exports eccentric ideas from niche groups in American universities and online. As a result, the U.S. becomes less appealing to many of our friends and less fearsome to our enemies.
The Biden administration is creating opportunities for our rivals. Promoting “Pride events” in Ukraine puts the U.S. at odds with the culture of an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian country, giving Russia the chance to assert itself as the friendly protector of tradition and religion. The Ukrainian babushka heading to a Uniate or Orthodox church will be more amenable to Russian domination than this version of American freedom.
U.S. officials are acting as cultural aggressors, while our geopolitical adversaries become helpful defenders of local culture. To retrieve America’s lost appeal and authority, two steps are necessary.
First, U.S. foreign policy should distinguish between fundamental rights of the human person, often called natural rights, and personal preferences. The former are rights that protect the individual from state power, permitting liberty to flourish. What Mr. Biden advocates is the opposite: rights as wishes, which often change for the same individual, ranging from the “right to leisure time” to the license to define oneself as male, female or something else. These progressive rights establish the state as a domestic and international machine of social, economic and cultural engineering, justifying the pervasive intrusion of its power (and of international institutions that are often the repositories of these fluid “rights”).
Second, U.S. foreign policy should not enforce political uniformity abroad as the guarantee of liberty. A monarchy or other undemocratic regime may respect basic liberties even if it doesn’t share every fluid norm or cultural goal espoused by international institutions or an aggressively leftist American administration. Democracies are stable and effective when they are grounded in tradition and national cultures, not when they are pressured to adhere to a uniform global standard.
Insisting on such uniformity weakens American security, especially when we deal with our democratic allies. They are all different, and we should respect and celebrate their differences and not impose a stilted uniformity on them. Frontline allies, such as Poland and Hungary in Europe and South Korea and Taiwan in Asia, will have variegated versions of democracy, differing on constitutional arrangements (e.g., who nominates judges); on what they consider to be essential to their political order (e.g., some will value and protect marriage, family and life as foundational); on how they approach migration (e.g., they may build border walls to preserve social order). They are stronger that way.
To be true to American political foundations and to compete effectively with geopolitical rivals, the U.S. should preserve the concept and practice of natural rights—rights that are under attack both from foreign tyrannies afraid of their citizens’ liberty and from the domestic avant-garde proliferation of grievances masquerading as rights.
Mr. Grygiel is a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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No wonder they call it BSM.
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