No western country is likely to step up at this point, in my view at least. The conservative leaning folks are going hard into authoritarian xenophobic trends, and the left leaning folks consider anything that alters the existing culture of an area to be genocide.

The latter is really kinda tragically hilarious, cause we see countries like Canada declaring themselves genocidal and shaming their non-indigenous population as though they're monsters, while simultaneously defending Israel's actions in regards to Gaza. There's even talk of making it a crime to question how horribly genocidal Canadians are, and also to make it a crime to say anything bad about Israel. If we see a religion-backed school, we're to think "genocide! You're attempting to subvert the student's cultural religion and norms under the guise of teaching people to read and write! Their traditional culture doesn't have reading or writing, you're genociding their oral traditions too!!"; and when we see a mass grave filled with civilians, we're to think "Totally justified, those bulldozers are just defending themselves against the toddler / journalist / civilian corpses, and mass graves are just practical! No moral issues or crimes here! Definitely not a genocide". These things were brought forward by our left-leaning government parties. Not sure if those've passed yet, but they've definitely been on the table.

The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is.... interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren't, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to "just trust us", while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.

idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I'd avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn't matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn't have 'bet' on like a decade ago, but here we are.

Israel's actions in the past couple years have all seemed like sorta a desperate attempt to leverage the US Hegemony that's protected them, before the US buckles.

Sorta like imagine a kid in Grade 1 who's a total racist bully to his classmates. But the kid has an older brother in grade 6 who has no issue beating the shit outta any Grade 1 kid who fights back. When the older brother nears the transition to middle school -- at which point the younger will lose his protection -- the younger brother starts instigating like crazy, to try and establish dominance while still protected.

Is this a questionable move under the current administration? Definitely. I can imagine it essentially being them wanting to broadcast racist/discriminatory things, without worrying about foreign country hate speech laws generating lawsuits for US social media companies that put that sorta thing out there. They want media companies like X to be free to broadcast as much right wing hate as possible to democratic nations, to more easily influence things like political elections. The Trump admin/repubs would almost definitely abuse the hell out of it.

But awkwardly, is there a case, generally, to be made out of this sort of thing? Yeah, I'd say there is. But the approach to resolving it is kinda extreme, and authoritarian in nature. Like step 1 of trying to have control over your nations online media, would be to bring in a China/Russia style national Firewall. If the government wants to allow people to make online comments without fear of repercussions from foreign actors, or to have social media options that are uninfluenced by foreign actors, governments need some level of control over the geo-location and flow of internet traffic. If America wants to let Musk goose-step around Nazi saluting, while ensuring that Americans are uninfluenced by how the rest of the world views that sort of thing, they need to be able to block connections to/from foreign countries. If they want to block Chinese bot farms from manipulating the public image of the CCP on social media, they need more direct control over how data from China flows into the USA. And they likely need more 'direct' influence/control over social media companies via stricter regulation on things like knowing your customers.

I'm not sure how you'd have to structure that sort of thing's governance, in a democratic nation, to ensure that it doesn't get abused, and I imagine the only politicians that would be interested in this sort of thing would be the ones hoping to abuse it.

But that wouldn't even be full mitigation. Someone like Khashoggi, who is sort of a poster child for this concern, was killed by Saudi Arabia due to expressing his opinions in Journals / online about the SA regime (to my understanding at least). It's questionable, had his opinions been "successfully" kept within nations that view free speech as paramount, whether he would not have still been targeted/killed. Even if that story was successfully "kept" from the population of a dictatorship, there's no particular reason to think that the dictator would not seek vengeance for the slight. Like Kim Jong's got a pretty tight stranglehold on the media in North Korea from what I understand, but I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't above trying to assassinate foreigners who campaign aggressively against him or who end up going viral for insulting him.