William D. Hartung and Ashley Gate
The Trump administration seems intent on undermining America’s ability to make human rights a significant element of its foreign policy. As evidence of that, consider its plan to dramatically reduce policy directives and personnel devoted to those very issues, including the dismantling of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor. Even worse, the Trump team has attacked a crucial global institution, the International Criminal Court, and put it under crippling sanctions that have ground its operations to a halt — all for telling the truth about Israel’s illegal and ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza.
The Trump administration’s assault on human rights comes against the background of years of policy decisions in Washington that too often cast aside such concerns in favor of supposedly more important “strategic” interests. The very concept of human rights has had a distinctly mixed history in American foreign policy. High points include the U.S. role in the Nuremberg prosecutions after World War II, its support for the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and President Jimmy Carter’s quest to be the “human rights president” in the late 1970s. But such moments have alternated with low points like this country’s Cold War era support for a series of vicious dictators in Latin America or, more recently, the way both the Biden and Trump administrations have backed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, actions that a number of reputable independent reports suggest constitute nothing short of genocide.
Amid such ups and downs have come some real accomplishments like support for the democratic evolution of the government in the Philippines, the passage of comprehensive sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and the freeing of prominent political prisoners around the world. Some critics of the human rights paradigm argue that such issues are all too regularly weaponized against American adversaries, but largely ignored when it comes to this country’s autocratic allies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and El Salvador. The solution to such a critique is not to abandon human rights concerns, but to implement them more consistently across the globe.
In the short term, forging a more consistent approach to supporting human rights is a daunting task. After all, the Trump administration’s position couldn’t be clearer. It seeks to permanently undermine the ability of this country to promote human rights in any form by gutting the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor and making other changes that will further shift foreign policy toward the transactional and away from anything that has a hint of the aspirational. Discussions about incorporating Greenland into this country, turning Canada into our 51st state, further militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, cutting a coercive mineral deal with Ukraine, seizing the Panama Canal, or building tourist hotels in a depopulated Gaza — however farcical some of the notions may seem — have taken precedence over any discussion of promoting democracy and human rights globally.
Donald Trump relishes building closer ties to autocrats, typically embracing Hungary’s Viktor Orban and, at one international meeting, on seeing Egyptian leader Adel Fatah El-Sisi in the hallway, shouting, “There goes my favorite dictator!” In addition, strongmen like Nayib Armando Bukele Corteaz of El Salvador have helped enable his administration’s most egregious human rights violations to date, snatching up U.S. residents and sending them to a horrific Salvadoran prison without even a hint of due process. The Trump administration has also proposed shuttering dozens of embassies globally and plans to slash State Department bureaus that disseminated expertise to areas plagued by crisis and war, worked to combat human trafficking, or advised the secretary of state on human rights issues relating to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Sweeping Trump administration proposals have even included replacing the Foreign Service Institute, the nation’s center for diplomatic learning, with an office devoted to “global acquisition.” Meanwhile, even as the administration dismantles America’s basic diplomatic infrastructure, it has made no moves to close a single one of America’s more than 750 overseas military bases or scale back the Pentagon’s bloated budget, which is now heading towards the trillion-dollar mark annually.
Under the Trump administration’s current approach, the face of America — already long tilted toward its massive military presence globally — is likely to be slanted even more toward military threats and away from smart diplomacy. Trump’s crew is also seeking to shut down the collection of basic data on human rights by restricting the kinds of abuses covered in State Department human rights reports. Over the years, those reports have evolved into standardized, reliable sources of information for human rights advocates and activists seeking justice in other countries, as well as political figures and journalists operating under repressive regimes. Such objective human-rights reporting, now increasingly missing in action, had also served as an early warning system in determining which U.S. partners were more prone to engaging in reckless and destabilizing behavior that could draw this country into unnecessary and intractable conflicts.
By diluting such critical evidence-gathering mechanisms, successfully used in the past to turn other states away from violations of human rights, the administration is undermining its own future international influence. It’s also weakening critical domestic legislation meant to guarantee that this country doesn’t contribute to gross violations of such rights. While U.S. human-rights policies have at best been inconsistent in their execution, when this country has moved to protect the rights of individuals abroad, it has indeed contributed to global stability, curtailed the root causes of migration, and reduced the ability of extremist groups to gain footholds in key nations. The Trump administration, however, has it completely backwards. This country shouldn’t be treating human rights as, at best, a quaint relic of a past age. Creating a genuine policy of promoting them is not only the right thing to do, but also a potential tool for enhancing this country’s influence at a time when economic and military tools alone are anything but sufficient and often do more harm than good.
Washington’s role in enabling Israel’s destruction of Gaza brought human-rights hypocrisy front and center even before the second Trump administration. For the next nearly four years, count on this: jettisoning human rights from U.S. policy will be the order of the day. Jimmy Carter campaigned on a platform promoting human rights, which was seen as a breath of fresh air in the wake of the lies and crimes of President Richard Nixon’s administration at home and abroad. Under that rubric, Carter called out repressive regimes, made it easier for refugees from such countries to enter the United States, and elevated the human consequences of denying such rights above narrowly defined strategic concerns. Unfortunately, once he became president, he also abandoned his principles in key cases, most notably in his support for the Shah of Iran to the bitter end, opening the door to the rise of the Islamic extremist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and decades of enmity between the United States and Iran.
As president, Ronald Reagan had supported democracy movements like Solidarity in Poland, while funding and arming right-wing, anti-democratic movements that he labeled “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The biggest human rights achievement during his two terms in office arrived despite him, not because of him, when Congress overcame his attempt to veto comprehensive sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush would play an active role in the reunification of Germany, while supporting democratic transitions from communist states throughout Eastern Europe. At the same time, his administration used human rights as a tool of warfare, as when it invaded Panama to depose dictator General Noriega. At the time, that intervention was rationalized as an effort to restore democracy and protect the human rights of Panamanians. That operation, however, sparked an outcry from, among others, the U.N. General Assembly and the Organization of American States, both of which condemned the invasion as a violation of international law.
Over time, the State Department indeed expanded the range of rights it recognizes and defends — an expansion that is now under relentless attack. The Clinton administration was the first to grant asylum to gay and lesbian individuals facing persecution in their homelands. At that time, the U.S. also enacted the International Religious Freedom Act, which established an ambassador and a commission focused on protecting and promoting religious freedom internationally. Even so, that administration’s human rights record proved mixed at best. Bill Clinton himself has expressed regret over his tepid response to the Rwandan genocide and his refusal even to describe that atrocity as a genocide while in office. Still, no previous president of our times could have imagined an American asylum or immigrant policy geared only to White South Africans, as is now being implemented by the Trump administration. The idea of humanitarian intervention — military action to prevent atrocities — has backfired in some prominent cases, causing instability and chaos, death and destruction, rather than improvements in the lives of the residents of the targeted nations. Meanwhile, the devastating American wars of this century, from Afghanistan to Iraq, caused staggering death tolls and devastation.
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Ashley Gate is a researcher in the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program. William D. Hartung, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the author, with Ben Freeman, of The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home (forthcoming from Bold Type Books).
Source: CounnterPunch
