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.
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.
The Transactional President
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 Orbán 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 toward 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 backward. 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.
The American Human Rights Record Over the Last Half-Century
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.
On balance, this country has all too often employed human-rights rhetoric as a justification for the use of force rather than as an actual force for democratic reform.
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.
The 2005 Responsibility to Protect doctrine epitomized the double-edged sword of human rights rhetoric. The leading role of Barack Obama’s administration in the 2011 NATO-led “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, which was soon transformed into a destabilizing regime-change mission, marred his presidency. At the same time, Obama did help promote international rights and protections for LGBTQ+ peoples, while his administration’s work on the U.N. Human Rights Council also helped develop commissions of inquiry to investigate human rights violations in Syria, North Korea, and Muammar Qadhafi’s Libya.
On balance, this country has all too often employed human-rights rhetoric as a justification for the use of force rather than as an actual force for democratic reform. Still, as imperfect as the implementation of human rights principles has been, that’s hardly a reason for it to be abandoned outright, as seems to be happening now.
Human Rights as an Early Warning System
Regimes that engage in systematic human rights abuses domestically are also more likely to engage in reckless, destabilizing behaviors in their own regions and beyond. Such was the case with Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded a brutal invasion of Yemen that began in March 2015 and lasted for more than seven years. That war resulted in nearly 400,000 direct and indirect deaths through bombing and the devastating effects of a blockade of Yemen that slowed imports of food, medicine, and other vital humanitarian supplies. (And mind you, as is true of Israel’s ongoing horror in Gaza, that war in Yemen was carried out with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied arms.)
The Saudi regime has never been held accountable for its campaign of slaughter in Yemen. If anything, it has been rewarded. During his recent visit, in fact, President Trump announced a $142 billion arms deal with that nation, a multi-year arms package for Riyadh that the White House described as the largest defense cooperation agreement in history. If the past is any guide, that deal could end up being considerably less than the present sum suggests, but the very existence of such a deal represents a vote of confidence in the Saudi government and its reckless de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, that could get the United States entangled in another Saudi-initiated conflict.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which partnered with Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, ran a series of secret prisons in that nation where its personnel and their Yemeni allies engaged in widespread torture. More recently, the UAE has been supplying weapons to rebel forces in Sudan that have committed systematic human rights abuses. And it supported opposition forces attempting to overthrow the internationally recognized government of Libya. Not only did the U.S. impose no consequences on its frequent arms client, but it declared the UAE a “major defense partner.”
Restoring Human Rights as a Policy Goal
If America is to be more than a garrison state that bullies other countries and takes a what’s-in-it-for-me approach to international relations, the concept of human rights will have to be preserved and revived in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Advocates of “hard power” should think twice before throwing U.S. human rights commitments into the dustbin of history. At a time when rights at home are under unprecedented assault, Americans need all the allies they can get if they are to help build a world grounded in responsive governance and a spirit of pragmatic cooperation. Values-based cooperation will be essential for tackling our most pressing existential crises, from climate change and pandemics to the ascendancy of arbitrary and repressive regimes.
Unfortunately, the current administration has shown no interest in speaking up on behalf of human rights, much less using them as a tool to promote more responsive governance globally.
Throwing rights overboard in pursuit of narrow economic interests and a misguided quest for global dominance will not only cause immense and unnecessary suffering but it will undermine U.S. influence around the world. The “pragmatists” who denigrate human rights in favor of a transactional approach to foreign relations are promoting a self-defeating policy that will do great harm at home and abroad. A better approach will, unfortunately, have to await a new administration, a more empathetic Congress, and a greater public understanding of the value of a foreign policy that takes human rights seriously with respect to allies and adversaries alike.
