Yes, America Should Save the World—From its Own Elites

This article originally appeared at Newsweek.

It's common to refer to "American cultural hegemony" in discussions of foreign affairs. Our slang and pop culture appear on every country's billboards and handheld screens. American academia and journalism set the mainstream narrative around the globe, even in many hostile nations. Our banking system controls the global flow of capital. Our military and intelligence agencies—including corporate contractors like Amazon—influence foreign governments, global industries and trade.

"We're all living in America," as the 2004 hit from German rock band Rammstein reminded its worldwide fan base.

But a clear-eyed look at America's international "soft power" makes immediately apparent how un-American it is. Multinational bankers don't have the backs of the heartland's small business owners, families and blue-collar workers. Hollywood tastemakers are hell bent on upending the world's cultural norms to include behaviors the average American finds repugnant. Our "public health" bureaucrats convinced the world to commit social suicide during the COVID pandemic while the power and wealth of a few expanded. The universal surveillance panopticon operated by intelligence agencies is antithetical to our long-cherished concept of personal liberty.

American populists often shy away from foreign policy, but they shouldn't; they must broadcast their anti-establishment message to other countries, making clear that our elites' shoddy "American" empire, wrapped in the stars and stripes, does not represent us. Our elites claim they want to "save the world" by bringing democracy, disseminating education, fixing climate change and redistributing wealth—but they themselves are, in fact, the most imminent threat to the world.

This fact has never been more visible as influential pundits and politicians try to gin up America's appetite for belligerence in Ukraine. Though Russia's justifications for invasion are obscure to most Americans, one thing we do know is that our own corporate and political establishment played a leading role in plunging the country into chaos. Warmongers from both parties have long sought to grant Ukraine NATO membership despite knowing it would unnecessarily destabilize the region. The official reason for this antagonism was the usual fare: freedom, democracy and the "rules-based" international order. But new revelations about our elites' corrupt activity in the country suggest that their interest goes beyond geopolitics.

Thanks to leaks of financial records like the 2016 Panama Papers and 2021 Pandora Papers, Ukraine cemented its reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Holding office there seems to be synonymous with influence peddling and siphoning money to offshore accounts. Even the lionized President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, who has become arguably the most popular foreign leader in London and Washington, has benefitted from shady finance.

But Zelensky is not the root of the problem—the problem is our own elites. As the Hunter Biden laptop and other revelations have shown, after 2014 Ukraine turned into a playground for money laundering, secrets and crime. Hunter Biden used his family's connections in the Obama administration and now their own administration to reap millions of dollars in kickbacks through corrupt diplomacy and business dealings. Ukrainian donors became the top source of foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation, sparking an investigation by the Justice Department. U.S. elites' connections in Ukraine fostered insider trading and other shady business dealings, including by the oligarch who serves as Zelensky's primary benefactor, Ihor Kolomoisky.

Our elites pretend to care about average Ukrainians, but all they care about is using the country for their corrupt and degenerate activity. Ukraine's weak rule of law has made it the top facilitator of heroin trafficking in Europe. Hunter Biden himself paid money to a number of women apparently connected to human trafficking rings in the country, according to a publicly accessible Senate report, and helped raise funds for biological labs in the country that have lately been the subject of controversy. The war has amplified Ukraine's human trafficking problem while it lines pockets on Wall Street.

This is what other countries now associate with "American cultural hegemony." Ukraine is merely the latest flash point in the unfolding disaster our un-American elite has inflicted on nations around the world. But it goes beyond war: the globalist class does whatever it pleases to whomever it pleases, all in the name of our nation and its people.

These are the true stakes of American populism. It's not just a red team-blue team squabble among political personalities. It's a recognition that American elites are the center of a corrupt supranational system that must be abolished. Populists want so much more than for America to be great again. We want to overthrow the false America of the global elite, and to revive the true America of popular sovereignty.