American leadership wants to posture around the world like the big bully in the room, displaying its military might and expecting other nations to be intimidated.

The United States put forward a $1.01 trillion national defense budget request for 2026, pouring enormous resources into military power, missiles, munitions, ships and defense systems. Yet the last comprehensive estimate from America’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in five people in the United States had a sexually transmitted infection on any given day in 2018. That represented about 67.6 million prevalent STI infections. During that same year, Americans acquired another 26.2 million new STI infections.

And look at who keeps taking a massive share of the new infections: the young. In 2018, people aged 15 to 24 acquired 11.9 million new STI infections, accounting for 45.5 percent of all newly acquired infections even though that age group represented a much smaller share of the population.

Ten years earlier, CDC researchers estimated 19.7 million new STI infections in 2008, with 9.8 million of them among people aged 15 to 24. They also estimated about 110 million prevalent STI infections in the country that year.

You want a culture where nobody tells anybody no. You glamorize sugar daddies and sugar mommies. You make older people pursuing much younger partners sound cute and fashionable. You normalize hookups, multiple partners, cheating and casual sex, then act surprised when millions of new sexually transmitted infections keep appearing.

You don’t want to encourage marriage, one-partner commitment, fidelity, sexual discipline and some damn boundaries. Anybody who does is treated like the dangerous one.

Then when the infections come, you polish up that part too. Talk about medication. Talk about treatment. Talk about screening. Talk about how manageable everything is. Build excellent facilities to treat the consequences and congratulate yourselves for being advanced.

What about the culture continually feeding people into those facilities? What about the 15-to-24-year-olds acquiring new infections by the millions?

You normalize the behavior, give everything a cute name, minimize the consequences and then show off how well you can treat the damage. After that, you package the same sexual culture through entertainment, pornography, celebrity culture, dating culture and social media and broadcast it around the world as liberation and progress.

Then American leadership wants to stand over other nations displaying military hardware. Look at this evil bitch nation.

Your own disease-control agency estimated that one in five people had an STI on any given day. It estimated 26.2 million new STI infections in a single year, nearly half among people aged 15 to 24. Yet you want the rest of the world staring at your missiles, ships and military budget in awe.

I’m looking inside your house. I’m looking at the millions of young people acquiring infections. I’m looking at the culture being handed from one generation to the next. I’m looking at a nation so busy displaying its power abroad that it should be ashamed of what is happening at home.