If Donald Trump’s second term is anything like his first, the incoming US president will not advance the cause of human rights. His foreign policy is more likely to harm democratic values around the world than it is to protect them. But as bleak as the next four years may become, the past four have hardly been a boon for human rights. President Joe Biden, who came into office promising that his administration would be different, ended up chipping away at these ideals himself.
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden disparagingly quipped that Trump had embraced “all the thugs in the world,” from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier, in 2019, Biden had pledged to make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” for the part that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, played in the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. When he entered the Oval Office, Biden claimed he would match his words with actions by making human rights a foreign policy priority.
Instead of treating the US commitment to its values as a source of strength, the administration behaved as though its own stated principles were an albatross around its neck. Instead of leveraging US power to advance human rights abroad, Biden hesitated to confront allies about their abuses. The administration downplayed concerns about international legal norms, and by the end of his term, Biden was sending antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine—even though a global ban on the weapons had been in place for decades—and sending arms to Israel’s government despite its serious violations of the laws of war in Gaza.
Biden remained outspoken in his criticism of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, supporting efforts by international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to intervene, he ignored or defended similar conduct by Israel as it launched a military campaign in Gaza, and he blocked international efforts at accountability. Biden’s inconsistent application of purported US values did not go unnoticed. Neither did the seeming disappearance of human rights, once a central component of Biden’s stated strategy, from the administration’s rhetoric. When Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote in Foreign Affairs about “the sources of American power” in the fall of 2023, he focused on economic and military strength. Human rights were absent from the discussion.
US presidents often fall short on their human rights commitments. But excising human rights from US foreign policy—as many of Biden’s decisions have done and as Trump has proved willing to do even more decisively—will seriously damage US interests and the international system. When the United States selectively applies internationally accepted rules, it undermines its credibility and loses influence in the rest of the world. And because Washington has been the architect of the modern global order, its behavior carries extra weight. If the United States flouts the rules, authoritarians and other illiberal leaders need no further excuse to break them at will, inflicting horror on their own people and inciting instability beyond their borders.
The damage Trump may do to the cause of human rights could create a temptation to look back on the Biden era with nostalgia. But those rose-colored glasses would obscure the real picture. As global power shifts, democratic values are the United States’ enduring comparative advantage. Biden claimed to understand this, but he abandoned his own strategy at a critical time. In doing so, he paved the way for a race to the bottom, as future US presidents and their foreign counterparts, democrats and autocrats alike, face fewer consequences for disregarding international law and degrading human rights.
Biden’s recent dealings with the United Arab Emirates struck a similar chord. For years, the UAE government has fueled what the US State Department has called genocide in Sudan by sending weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, one of the factions in the country’s civil war. But in September, Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed was welcomed to Washington on a state visit; during MBZ’s trip, Biden announced an upgrade to Washington’s bilateral defense cooperation with the UAE. As MBZ dined at the White House, Biden’s own special envoy to Sudan was desperately but fruitlessly trying to stop Sudanese generals from massacring civilians with Emirati weapons.
Biden’s desire to draw middle powers away from China and Russia also came at the expense of human rights. Even as governments in places such as India and Thailand committed rights abuses, Washington avoided expressing serious disapproval, fearful that they would turn to Beijing or Moscow for defense, development, and trade deals. And these countries, knowing how the game was played, carried on with domestic repression while keeping channels open to the United States’ great-power rivals.
The White House rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023, even after US intelligence had implicated Indian government agents in a conspiracy to kill a Sikh separatist activist on US soil. At home, Modi’s government has discriminated against and stigmatized religious and other minority groups. Yet Modi has faced little public criticism from US officials. Other parts of the US government have raised the issue of rights abuses: in both 2021 and 2022, the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that India be listed as a “country of particular concern,” which is a status that triggers sanctions under US law. Both times, the State Department declined to follow the recommendation, and in early 2024, the Biden administration cleared a $4 billion drone sale to India as part of a broader effort to keep a geopolitically important country onside.
In the case of Thailand, the Biden administration considered the country to be so indispensable to US military planning in the Pacific theater that Washington could do no more than offer mild rebukes in response to the Thai government’s rights abuses. The abuses thus persisted without any consequences. Thailand used to be a safe haven for dissidents from Cambodia, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam, but no longer. The Thai government either ignores the threat of transnational repression or actively helps foreign governments target their citizens who have fled to Thailand. A former Cambodian opposition lawmaker was gunned down in Bangkok just last week. The administration has taken no meaningful action in response. Nor did the United States act when Thailand’s Constitutional Court disbanded the opposition party Move Forward, even though Washington had repeatedly urged the Thai government not to dissolve the party. The US-Thai relationship is hardly a fragile one; Thailand has had diplomatic ties with the United States for more than a century and is unlikely to walk away now.
But many of these efforts were of relatively low geopolitical consequence. When policy decisions had higher stakes, members of Biden’s senior team who tried to prioritize human rights were consistently overruled. At times no one was even in the room to remind the president that human rights were supposedly part of the administration’s strategy. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor lacked an assistant secretary, its most senior position, for the first three and a half years of Biden’s term.
Without high-ranking officials to make the case for protecting human rights, even faltering progress was undermined by policy decisions at the top. The State Department, for instance, issued a formal atrocity determination in 2023 that named Ethiopian forces responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. US officials undermined the determination just three months later by allowing foreign economic investment in Ethiopia and failing to issue alternative measures to address the abuses—even though some of the same forces remained engaged in atrocities.
Source: HRW