By Jose Nino, Mises Institute

“What starts here changes the world.”

The University of Texas at Austin’s motto not only applies to the research university’s overall impact on world affairs, but also to the outsized role cultural and political developments within the United States have on the rest of the planet.

Ever since it became the world’s premier superpower after World War II, the US has left its mark from New York City all the way to Tokyo. Doubly so during the Cold War, when the US used, as geopolitical analyst Niccolo Soldo described, the “four cultural ICBMs” of Coca-Cola, rock ’n’ roll, Bugs Bunny, and Levi’s Jeans to project soft power abroad in its struggle with the Soviet Union.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the US entered a unipolar moment in the 1990s when it seemed that it had no peer competitors on the horizon. However, the rise of China and Russia as more assertive geopolitical actors in the last fifteen years has gradually whittled away at this state of unipolarity.

Despite the rise of new competitors on the world stage, the US remains the most powerful country on the planet. With two moats in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and a vast nuclear arsenal, the US is virtually unassailable by external threats, not to mention its overall economic base, which is leaps and bounds ahead of all other nations.

As far as soft power is concerned, the US maintains its primacy in that regard. One need only look at the foreign box office numbers of the Marvel franchise to see how strong the US’s cultural reach is, even in rival countries such as China and Russia.

It’s not just Hollywood content that’s proliferating internationally. Even the US’s most obnoxious cultural developments, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) fanaticism, are making their way across the globe.

The wave of BLM protests that swept across Europe and even reached Japan illustrated the level of cultural power the US is able to wield. When LGBT and BLM flags adorned the South Korean embassy, one couldn’t help but ignore the US’s cultural influence on the international stage.

Given the breadth of US cultural power, George Mason University professor of economics Tyler Cowen argued in a piece titled ”Why Wokeism Will Rule the World” that wokism would likely engulf entire nations. He believes that “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence” and therefore should be extended. Such pretensions are commonplace among denizens of the Beltway.

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