Ashton Kutcher: The Last Working Piece of American Foreign Policy

Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works

by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123”

PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in that sentence lies the entire tragicomic arc of 21st-century soft power: we can’t keep the lights on in Johannesburg, but we can absolutely keep Kelso from “That ’70s Show” on every screen from Lagos to Lahore.

Across continents, Kutcher has become the rare U.S. cultural product that still clears customs without a 40 % tariff on irony. In Seoul, venture-capital bros quote his 2009 Twitter thesis on “media as a two-way conversation” while their government fines Netflix for not carrying enough Korean content. In Nairobi, NGOs hand out mosquito nets branded with his venture-capital firm’s logo, a gesture that makes both malaria and late-stage capitalism feel eminently survivable. And in Berlin, university seminars dissect how a man who once wore a trucker hat on MTV now advises the EU on AI regulation—proof that history doesn’t repeat itself; it merely reboots with better cinematography.

The global appeal is partly accidental: Kutcher’s face is symmetrical enough to look familiar in any passport photo, yet generically handsome enough that no one can quite place him. To Brazilians, he’s the guy who invested in Nubank and therefore helped them avoid standing in bank queues next to people still watching “Two and a Half Men.” To Indians, he’s the Hollywood A-lister who invested in local Airbnb clones, which sounds philanthropic until you realize it just means someone in Mumbai is now charging $500 a night for a cupboard with Wi-Fi. To the Japanese, he’s simply “the tall American who married the older woman,” a plotline so perfectly Shōjo-manga they assume it was scripted.

Yet beneath the cross-border aftershave commercial lies a darker punchline: Kutcher is what passes for American institutional memory these days. While Congress live-streams its own paralysis, Kutcher’s Sound Ventures fund quietly underwrites satellite imaging that tracks Russian troop movements in Ukraine. When the WHO tweets plaintively about vaccine equity, Kutcher’s nonprofit, Thorn, is already scraping Telegram for evidence of black-market oxygen cylinders. It’s as if the entire State Department were being run by a former underwear model with an Apple Watch; inconveniently, that’s still more competence than the State Department has shown lately.

Europe, naturally, is appalled and enthralled in equal measure. The French call it “soft-power porn”—watching an American solve problems their own governments can’t even describe without a 300-page white paper. The Germans file it under “Post-Ironische Realpolitik,” a category previously reserved for David Hasselhoff singing on the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, the British simply outsource their moral outrage to Twitter, where #KutcherColonialism trends every time he funds an anti-trafficking drone in Southeast Asia—never mind that the same drones are later used to deliver KFC to yacht parties in Monaco.

The Chinese, ever pragmatic, have tried cloning him: a state-sponsored influencer named “A-Si-Dun” who lectures on innovation while wearing the same flannel shirt Kutcher sported in 2003. Unfortunately, A-Si-Dun’s algorithmic charisma bottoms out somewhere between tax audit and hostage video. The lesson Beijing refuses to learn is that Kutcher’s currency isn’t charm; it’s the residual optimism of a pre-9/11 America, shrink-wrapped and FedExed to a planet that still wants to believe the iPhone could, if pressed, also be a moral compass.

In the end, the joke is on all of us. We spent two decades mocking the idea that celebrities should save the world, only to discover they’re the only ones left with both the cash and the delusion necessary to try. Ashton Kutcher hasn’t solved global inequality, but he did once convince a room of Saudi princes to fund a company that turns refugees into gig-economy coders—an achievement so morally ambiguous it deserves its own Netflix limited series starring, naturally, Ashton Kutcher.

So here we are, orbiting a dying planet where the most reliable international institution is a man who once played an airhead on television. If that’s not a metaphor for the age, I don’t know what is. Pass the escargot; the Wi-Fi just dropped again.