Influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in an April 18 article on his visit to NATO-occupied Afghanistan with Joe Biden, provided the clearest example yet of the newly hegemonic ideology of intersectional imperialism.
“The real source of our power,” Friedman wrote, is the racial diversity of US society, and especially that of its military.
It is the fact that US Special Forces teams — the symbol of Washington’s ubiquitous covert operations and meddling across the globe — are “made up of a collection of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and white Americans. It is our ability to blend those many into one hard fist”, he boasted.
This has become the US empire’s modus operandi: Justify imperial exploitation and expansion by claiming that Washington is spreading enlightened views of anti-racism, feminism, and LGBTQ equality.
The strategy is not entirely new. The US and NATO exploited women’s rights to rationalize a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Israel, too, frequently uses pinkwashing to defend its colonial violence against the Palestinian people.
But US hawks are now eagerly proselytizing a kind of inverted “White Man’s Burden” — one that preaches a superficial version of “anti-racism” while still fundamentally reinforcing the centuries-old colonial trope that the empire is helping to “civilize” the barbaric hordes in the rest of the world.
The incredible hypocrisy just beneath the surface of this liberal-imperialist philosophy was reflected in the condescending tone of Friedman’s column, which portrayed the Afghan people as knuckle-dragging brutes.
In one of such patronizing passages, Friedman lamented the surge in Trumpian racism at home in the United States, writing, “I confess that I wonder if we have become more like the Afghans and not the Afghans more like us”.
