from Hoover InstitutionNonprofit Organization in Stanford, CaliforniaHuman Rights & Diplomacy: “Give Us Something To Aspire To!”The gap between aspiration and achievement in human rights promotion is a long-standing feature of U.S. foreign policy. We Foreign Service Officers learn early that, however genuine our intentions, there are natural limits to what is achievable. Competing security and commercial interests may lessen Washington´s zeal for confrontation. A host country may be impervious to our approaches. Fortunately, human rights advocacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Policymakers and diplomats merely need to learn the terrain and identify achievable victories. We must also question: Which rights are most fruitful to raise? Which diplomatic tools can succeed? Which partners best complement our efforts? Above all, which changes can we make in our own democracy to present a model worth emulating?
Partner Or Pariah? Saudi Arabia, The Biden Administration, And Human RightsThe Biden administration has set for itself an ambitious human rights agenda. “When I am president, human rights will be at the core of U.S. foreign policy,” then candidate Joe Biden told the New York Times in February 2020, citing “China’s deepening authoritarianism” and “the unconscionable detention of over a million Uighurs in western China.” His statement recalled the famous line of Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Carter had given unprecedented priority to the issue of human rights in the conduct of foreign policy. Biden seemed poised to follow in his path. Unfortunately for the rulers in Riyadh, Biden’s focus on human rights is not merely about China. It also stems from concerns with Saudi Arabia, together with the Trump administration’s perceived willingness to condone Saudi excesses.
It has been a tough few months for human rights in Iran. Wrestler Navid Afkari and laborer Mostafa Salehi were executed in quick succession for participating in public protests against the Islamic Republic. Dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was, in an elaborate plot hatched by the Revolutionary Guards, lured to Baghdad from his home in France and abducted to Tehran. After a brief show trial, in December Zam was hanged. In February, prisoner of conscience Behnam Mahjoubi was denied medical treatment and killed under torture. Add to this list, just in the past six months, a number of Baluchi and Arab-Iranians have been executed as part of a campaign to sow fear among the country’s ethnic minorities. Biden has made human rights a prime consideration in shaping his foreign policy towards Turkey and Saudi Arabia. When it comes to Iran, however, he seems to be intent on simply undoing some of the effective policies put into place by the previous administration. Certainly, the new team has shown little indication that the Iranian popular campaign for freedom or the country’s abysmal human rights record is to be at all relevant in its overall strategy toward the country.
The Islamic Republic of Iran remains one of the world’s worst human right abusers: it has the highest executions per capita; it constantly crushes peaceful assembly and freedom of expression; and it harshly persecutes human rights defenders and civil society activists. From the perspective of the Iranian regime, what the West defines as Iran’s “human rights” problem is actually a deadly serious political problem. It is about safeguarding the inviolability of Iran’s theocratic and authoritarian political system by denying civil and political freedom to its subjects. Yet, despite the regime’s appalling record of human rights abuses, the free world, of which the US claims moral leadership, has repeatedly failed to stand up to it. For in the US policy calculation, human rights in Iran must always give way to issues of higher order, such as Iran’s nuclear file.
The idea of “Human Rights” is modern. Humanity’s history only recently has recognized the need for such a category, and a concomitant need to explain what the category covers and where it comes from. Through most of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first to a considerable extent, there has been a structural dichotomy between those regimes, the largely autocratic kind, who declare human rights to be material in content: food, clothing, and shelter, and open societies which, while agreeing to material needs, have given most political weight to ideals of freedom and justice. All through the Cold War decades the centralized, one-party regimes of “The East” stressed material necessities while “The West” valorized political considerations. That dichotomy no longer prevails, but the concept and its practices as actually carried out have shown “human rights” as continuing to evolve ever more into “an American thing.”
As a young man, Egypt’s legendary playwright, Tawfiq Al Hakim had worked as an assistant to the Attorney General in the Egyptian countryside. There he would witness firsthand the dismal state of the country’s fellahin and the grave injustices Egypt’s rural population lived under. The experience would leave a profound impact on the young author and would shape his views of Egypt’s ills and the necessity for social change that became evident in his literary works. Most importantly, however, it was Al Hakim’s brief legal career that would produce one of his most brilliant works; Diary of a Country Prosecutor. Published in 1937, the novel achieved wide success and was translated into many languages, including English in 1947 by none other than the future Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban. In this novel, describing life in the Egyptian countryside, his main character, modeled on the playwright himself, speaks for Al Hakim when he says “I realized that human life has no value in Egypt; for those who are supposed to care about it care very little.”
In April 2020, the US Department of State decided to support the opening of a dialogue between the Kurdish National Council (KNC), an umbrella organization of Syrian-Kurdish political parties close to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani, and the Democratic Unity Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party). At the end of May, the PYD founded the "Kurdish National Unity Parties", a coalition of 25 political groups, and in June, the talks between the Kurdish Unity Parties and the KNC began in earnest. The aim of these negotiations was, and still is, to reach a compromise regarding the political future of the Syrian Kurds’ autonomous administration thus far solely controlled by the PYD.
America’s violent protests in the summer of 2020 have impacted how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) re-calculates the geopolitical power balance and strategic risk of a head-on confrontation between it and the presumably weakened United States, and enlivened the communist government’s ideological impulses against the international capitalist system.
Deterrence is a tricky business because it all occurs in the minds of adversaries, forming fears that inhibit action. In 1977, while working in South Korea in a last-minute attempt to find quick ways of improving the country’s remarkably retrograde ground forces (President Jimmy Carter wanted to withdraw U.S. troops quickly, as Presidential Review Memorandum #13 prescribed), I kept wondering why North Korea had made no attempt to exploit the Fall of Saigon opportunity of April 30, 1975. After all, that ignominious day of desperate last-minute evacuations of American lieges and of many more abandonments, was not the result of some tactical error but rather the ineluctable consequence of the Congressional decision to abandon South Vietnam to its enemies, which in turn reflected the opinions of a majority of Americans at large no longer willing to accept Vietnam’s frustrations, and indeed unwilling to fight any land war in Asia. Well, South Korea was part of Asia, and its North Korean enemy seemed very eager to attack it. Indeed, back on January 21, 1968 North Korean commandos had penetrated right into the grounds of the Presidential palace in Seoul.
George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer triggered allegations that his fate exposed a much broader problem of racism in American law enforcement and American society more generally. As this interpretation spread across old and new media, protests and riots erupted across the urban landscape, spearheaded by the movement Black Lives Matter. The violence and looting, which in some cities went on for several months, cost the nation an estimated $1 billion in damages.
An American foreign policy that includes the promotion of human rights as one of its missions can draw on a tradition rooted in the Declaration of Independence. The assertion of universal equality and the designation of unalienable rights, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," have shaped American political culture. That the reality of American life has never fully realized these ideals and at times failed them egregiously, notably in the institution of slavery, does not negate the validity of the ideals themselves.
If the Biden Administration lives up to its campaign promises and early governing pronouncements, human rights will play a larger role in its foreign policy than in that of the Trump Administration. This isn’t necessarily good news. Such a prominent focus on human rights in U.S. diplomacy is far more likely to underscore Washington’s hypocrisy—or worse yet do real damage to American interests abroad. Recall the last time a U.S. administration pressed hard for human rights in the Mideast under President Jimmy Carter. The result was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, undeniably a despot, but it is impossible to argue Iranians’ lives have been any better over the past four decades of rule by an intolerant and cruel Islamic theocracy. And, without doubt, U.S. interests in the region have suffered.
