A Conservative Human Rights Agenda

How can the United States successfully promote human rights and democracy in the multi-polar and deeply divided world the country now faces?

The Reagan administration’s approach, in which I was deeply involved as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights, offers some lessons. In National Review magazine, my co-author Corban Teague, director of the Human Rights & Freedom Program at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University, and I explain in “A Conservative Human Rights Agenda” what the Reagan approach was and why it works better than the more “progressive” approach of the Obama and Biden administrations.

Here is a taste:

[T]he progressive approach hopes to convince other kinds of regimes of the need to improve on human rights, and it prioritizes efforts to build better relationships through cooperation on shared challenges as a means of bolstering these attempts at persuasion. To the extent that liberals did and progressives do advocate a more robust use of American power to advance human rights, they tend to prefer applying such pressure to allies rather than adversaries. A good example: Jimmy Carter harassed the Somoza regime in Nicaragua but not the far more repressive Castro regime in Cuba.

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Abrams gives his take on U.S. foreign policy, with special focus on the Middle East and democracy and human rights issues.

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In contrast, the conservative human-rights policy developed by President Ronald Reagan emphasizes both the importance of geopolitical balances of power and the indispensable role American power plays in advancing fundamental rights. While working on individual cases of human-rights abuses is seen as necessary, as is chiding and pressuring U.S. allies that commit abuses, the conservative approach understands that any progress made on human rights through individual interventions will have only a limited overall impact in a world where the global balance of power tilts toward repressive and tyrannical regimes. In Reagan’s case that regime was the Soviet Union. Today the United States confronts an axis of revisionist autocracies that includes China, Russia, and Iran, supported by allies such as North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. A conservative human-rights policy views great-power competition as the decisive theater, recognizing that success there is a prerequisite to advancing freedom on a wide scale….

Trade-offs are always necessary in foreign policy, especially during a dangerous global competition with repressive and aggressive powers. Without a magic wand, human-rights problems will never be completely solved, and they are only one part of a larger geopolitical picture. Biden’s famous fist bump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman left no doubt that Saudi Arabia’s value as a strategic partner was too great to subordinate to human-rights concerns — something already obvious when Biden painted himself into a corner with his foolish comment that he wanted to make Saudia Arabia a “pariah” over the Khashoggi assassination. The United States government is not an NGO dedicated to human rights, and balancing security, financial, commercial, and human-rights goals will always be complex.

But even in that context, the Biden administration’s record on tiny Tunisia is perhaps the best demonstration of its failed human-rights policy. Tunisia is the one country that was a democracy when Joe Biden came to office and has lost that freedom since. In Tunisia there were few or no counterbalancing U.S. interests, and the failure to protect democracy there reflects indifference or ineptitude — or both. Starting in 2021, President Kais Saied began gutting every other institution of government and concentrating all power in his own hands. He dissolved the parliament and imposed a new electoral law and constitution in a slow-motion coup. The Biden administration watched but did nothing — or at least nothing even slightly effective.

Developing an effective human rights policy will bedevil the next administration, because the choices are often very difficult. But the United States can do better than it has in recent years, and the goal of the article is to discuss how.