WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 20, 2024) – As the U.S. general election approaches, the country’s foreign policy is at the precipice of change. The McCain Institute’s Director of Human Rights & Freedom (HRF) Program Corban Teague and his co-author Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition, and HRF Program Advisory Council member, examine the steps needed for the next president of the United States to influence foreign policy and advance human rights across the globe.
“The United States must concentrate its energies on the decisive theater—the great-power competition with the axis of revisionist autocracies,” Teague and Abrams write. “A world dominated by a combination of the Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s aggressive, brutal kleptocracy, and Iran with its genocidal terrorist proxies will have no room for freedom. Human rights policy will be a forlorn hope in such a situation.”
Read the article HERE, in the November print edition of the National Review or below.
Op-Ed: A Conservative Human Rights Agenda
National Review
By Corban Teague and Elliot Abrams
Joe Biden promised to “put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy,” echoing the aspirational pledge Jimmy Carter made nearly 45 years earlier that America’s “commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Yet, like President Carter, President Biden not only failed to fulfill his commitment but on balance is leaving human rights around the world in a worse state than when he took office. With the Biden administration soon coming to an end, a review of its record and a look at an alternative, conservative human-rights policy for the future are timely.
President Biden continued the liberal — or, to use current language, progressive — approach to human-rights policy developed under Presidents Carter and Obama. At its core, this framework treats human rights largely as a casework problem in the realm of U.S. foreign assistance, focusing on individual interventions to address specific instances of abuse. Notably, it eschews connecting human rights to great-power competition — to paraphrase the late Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, the intensity with which that approach pursues human rights is often inversely related to the geopolitical power of the offender. And it tends to prefer highlighting America’s shortcomings (often exaggerated or completely imagined), rather than focusing on the far more egregious brutality endemic to our adversaries’ regimes, while viewing American power at best with suspicion and often with outright hostility.
Instead, the 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.
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.
The difference in results between the two approaches is staggering. While the full fruits of Reagan’s conservative human-rights policy were sometimes not realized until the subsequent administration, the global state of human rights he left behind was by any measure far better than the one Biden is likely to leave his successor and the ones Carter and Obama left theirs. When Reagan left office, he had all but won the decisive theater, and the Soviet Union’s ensuing collapse would allow entire societies to realize basic freedoms long denied under communist repression. Beyond Eastern Europe, countries as varied as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, South Africa, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan saw dramatic transformations in the rights afforded their citizens in the Reagan years or soon thereafter. Understanding why is critical to articulating a human-rights policy for today that can achieve meaningful progress.
President Biden came into office vowing to uphold “universal rights” and “promote accountability for governments that abuse human rights.” From the start, he highlighted specific violations that he intended to address, including the Saudi Arabian government’s killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, China’s horrific abuses of the Uyghur people, Tibetans, and other minorities, and the detention in Russia of political prisoners such as Alexei Navalny, who later died in custody.
Both as a candidate and as president, Biden also made the case that the future would be defined by a clash between democracy and autocracy. Such a framing seemed initially at odds with the liberal or progressive hesitation to conflate human rights with great-power competition, exemplified by Carter’s dismissal of the “inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” Biden’s democracy-versus-autocracy distinction was in practice less stark, however, as his National Security Strategy made clear that the United States would “not seek conflict or a new Cold War” and would “avoid the temptation to see the world solely through the prism of strategic competition.”
Instead, like his liberal predecessors, Biden significantly overvalued “good example” efforts to persuade America’s great-power adversaries, often through attempts to cooperate on supposed shared challenges, to change the repressive nature of their regimes. Carter had fully embraced détente and emphasized finding ways to work with the Soviets. He made clear he had no intention of “singling out the Soviet Union for abuse or criticism” or injecting himself into its internal affairs, instead relying on the power of democracy’s example to convince communist skeptics. Similarly, Biden argued that “democracies and autocracies are engaged in a contest to show which system of governance can best deliver for their people and the world.” The problem with this approach is that it incorrectly assumes America’s revisionist adversaries are merely misguided and open to being shown the error of their ways, rather than recognizing that these regimes are “evil empires” and must be countered and confronted with American power.
While Biden’s National Security Strategy rightly recognized that China “harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit,” it nevertheless naïvely claimed that it was “possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully” and “share in and contribute to human progress together.” Throughout Biden’s presidency, his administration consistently showed that it prioritized cooperating on “shared priorities,” particularly the central progressive issue of climate change, over putting meaningful pressure on China over its horrific human-rights record and expansionist threats and aggression. Notably, this included working overtime in a failed attempt to block passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which required the Biden administration to take more-robust enforcement actions to prevent goods made by Uyghur forced labor from being imported into the United States. Such intransigence was hardly consistent with Biden’s prior pledge to hold China accountable for perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghurs.
Biden also revived President Obama’s approach of treating hostile regimes such as Cuba and Iran as favored negotiating partners without securing in return even the slightest improvements in their human-rights conditions. Rather than being excoriated for their vicious human-rights abuses, these two regimes were given U.S. apologies for our imagined sins and let off the hook for their real ones. The people of those nations, whose struggles for freedom and against violent repression deserved full American support, instead watched as deals were struck that brought cash and recognition to their oppressors. As part of the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, President Obama sent $400 million in cash to Iran and lifted sanctions to allow the regime to access amounts estimated at a minimum of $50 billion and perhaps two or three times that. Similarly, through a sanctions waiver, the Biden administration allowed Iran to repatriate $10 billion in funds previously frozen in accounts overseas; it unfroze $6 billion more for the release of U.S. hostages. Just as President Obama failed to support the Iranian people’s uprising in 2009, the Biden administration in 2022 and 2023 failed to assist Iranians protesting the presumed murder of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Instead, the Biden years have witnessed a consistent failure to enforce U.S. sanctions, a steady rise in Iranian oil exports and oil revenues, and multiple attacks on Israel by Iranian-backed terrorists and the Iranian military itself.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Biden decreased pressure on Nicolás Maduro and his thugs by partially lifting U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil, in exchange for highly dubious promises of free and fair elections, which Maduro has since blatantly violated. And of course in Afghanistan, the state of human rights, particularly for women, is abysmally worse than when Biden entered office.
Even in his response to Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the rare cases in which Biden has taken action against an adversary, his efforts have been far too slow and far too limited. His administration has consistently failed to send weapons to Ukraine in a timely fashion, forcing it to endure a grinding war of attrition as the American public’s support erodes.
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.
Like Carter and Obama, Biden looks certain to bequeath his successor a global condition of human rights and freedom worse than the one that prevailed when he took office. This does not mean that Biden has no successes to highlight — securing the recent releases of political prisoners including Evan Gershkovich and Vladimir Kara-Murza, for instance, was a notable achievement. But when taken in totality, individual interventions are nowhere near enough to counterbalance the increased threats accompanying the growing power of America’s autocratic adversaries. Not only is repression worsening in Iran, China, Venezuela, and Russia, but those countries are ever more tightly bound in their assault on the United States and our democratic partners and allies — from the Philippines and Taiwan to Israel and Ukraine.
The state of human rights around the globe that President Reagan inherited was pitiful. In 1979 alone, a Cuban- and Soviet-aligned Marxist group had taken over Nicaragua and begun subverting its neighbors, the Soviets had seized Afghanistan, another petty Marxist had seized power in Grenada, and the shah had fallen to an Islamist regime in Iran that began immediately to crush the people’s hopes for freedom.
When Reagan entered the White House, he was under no illusions that there could be “peaceful coexistence” with the great-power adversary he faced. As spelled out in a 1981 State Department memo written by one of us, human rights — specifically, fundamental political freedoms — were at the heart of the Cold War conflict. The primary dividing line between the American and Soviet visions for the world was defined by those countries’ “attitudes toward freedom,” and it was the Soviet Union that was “the major threat to liberty in the world.” The Reagan administration recognized that human rights had to be central to America’s fight against the Soviets, but also that the U.S. needed to go beyond addressing individual cases and making speeches. As the introduction to the State Department’s 1981 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices stated, the goal should be not to settle for a handful of small wins such as freeing a political prisoner here or there, important as each case was on its own, but “to encourage conditions in which new political prisoners are not taken” and “to assist in the gradual emergence of free political systems” in which human rights would be respected.
Reagan recognized that such an ambitious human-rights agenda had to be backed by power. The Soviets were never going to be persuaded of freedom’s merits by flowery rhetoric or well-crafted arguments. It was after all a competition between great powers with irreconcilable visions for the world, and it required power to ensure that the side favoring human rights and freedom came out on top. Despite the horrified palpitations of his critics in the human-rights establishment, Reagan understood that this included the need for a stronger American military. Far from hindering human rights, U.S. military power was necessary for adversary and ally alike to take America’s prioritization of the issue seriously.
Reagan also realized the importance of projecting power through robust information and political warfare, both to provide meaningful psychological support to citizens inside communist regimes and to exacerbate those regimes’ internal instabilities. As political scientist Hal Brands points out, Reagan believed that America should “make common cause with those trying to change the system from within” and that it was “time to remind ourselves and others of the difference in culture, in morals, and in the levels of civilization between the free world and the communist ant heap.” Through the use of tools such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and aided by covert operations inside countries such as Poland to distribute necessary broadcast and communications technology, the Reagan administration made sure that people behind the Iron Curtain were exposed once again to goals of rights and freedom, fully aware of the horrific crimes and failings of the Soviet leaders around the globe, and able to organize themselves to drive change from within. These tactics helped America eventually achieve the Reagan human-rights agenda’s ultimate objective — that, as Reagan put it, “freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.”
Over the course of his eight years in office, Reagan developed a balance between keeping maximum pressure on the primary threat to freedom, the Soviet Union, and finding opportunities to end military dictatorships in allied countries and ensure that democratic governments successfully replaced them. Owing in part to the influence of his secretary of state, George Shultz, he realized that it was possible through steady, thoughtful campaigns to move bad regimes to reform or even to replace them with genuine democracies. Sometimes this meant having to be content with slow, incremental progress over time, because replacing a bad regime with a worse one would only harm the human-rights cause. Other times, however, when a legitimately better democratic option did emerge, the administration took action to support it, and over the course of a decade numerous military dictatorships were indeed replaced by democratic governments affording greater freedoms to their citizens. Thus Reagan pressured the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and South Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan to permit free elections and then step down — but South Korea’s election came only in 1987 and Chile’s plebiscite in 1988, because Reagan moved slowly and carefully to ensure that friendly dictators would be followed by friendly democrats rather than chaos.
Reagan’s successful pivot away from Carter’s failed human-rights policy provides three key lessons for a post-Biden course correction next year.
First, the United States must concentrate its energies on the decisive theater — the great-power competition with the aforementioned axis of revisionist autocracies. A world dominated by a combination of the Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s aggressive, brutal kleptocracy, and Iran with its genocidal terrorist proxies will have no room for freedom. Human-rights policy will be a forlorn hope in such a situation.
The single most important way to advance human rights today is to ensure that the United States wins this fight. This requires treating the revisionist adversaries not as problems to be managed, and certainly not as autocracies and potential partners to woo, but as adversaries that need to be countered and confronted. A conservative human-rights policy will take every opportunity to put these regimes on the back foot — including by issuing individual sanctions and visa bans on regime officials and their families, using international forums to constantly spotlight their abuses and repression, banning imports tied to human-rights abuses such as forced labor, and seizing regime assets to compensate victims.
Second, we must take a careful, nuanced approach toward allies and partners that are not democracies and do not seek to be. We should look for opportunities to push the status quo autocracies, including our allies, toward more respect for basic human rights. This means keeping them as allies — as we learned from Carter’s mistakes, it is critical that we keep these countries in our orbit. They are far less likely to reform if they fall under the influence of China or Russia. We should also be aware that political change does not automatically mean a better outcome for their citizens.
Such an approach requires a careful assessment of what progress is genuinely possible. Where fundamental change is not possible, we should look for opportunities for incremental progress — increased religious freedom, for example, or free elections at municipal levels even when the national government is not elected. We should try to measure the legitimacy of these governments and political systems, which may be monarchies. Where a government is legitimate in the eyes of its own people, we should promote our ideals with careful attention to those of a populace that may have different priorities or values.
We should also speak about human rights with greater candor. We should not say human rights are improving in a country if they are not, but should instead express our disapproval of serious abuses while admitting that we need to maintain the partnership for other reasons. Human-rights policy, we should remember, has several goals: to express our own ideals, to advance the cause of freedom globally, and to make actual progress in specific countries in the real world. Balancing those goals and choosing the right tools to advance them is what makes human-rights policy difficult — and has often made it fail.
Third, a successful human-rights policy depends not only on our principles but also on our power. Nothing will undermine the cause of freedom more than a weakening of the United States. In a world where the likes of Russia and China are thought to be gaining in power while the United States appears to decline, respect for human rights will plummet and tyranny will expand. As in Reagan’s time, our ability to advance human rights globally is connected to the size and strength of our military and its ability to project power. American weakness invites aggression, and as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s October 7, 2023, proxy attack on Israel have shown, our adversaries’ aggression inevitably involves horrific human-rights abuses.
A principled application of power also requires a willingness to make trouble, particularly inside our adversaries’ regimes. We must effectively and relentlessly utilize information warfare to highlight our adversaries’ corruption and repression. This should include getting information to citizens inside those regimes, which may involve using covert methods to distribute technology to help bypass censorship efforts. It also should involve efforts to harden opposition to autocratic regimes in nations being wooed by our adversaries.
Ultimately, a human-rights policy must include identifying and pressing on the fractures and instabilities in those adversarial regimes in order to blunt their expansionist ambitions. While the end state we should aim for is greater civil and political freedoms for their citizens, it has to be achieved finally by those people themselves, working to change the system from within. But where we see a population clamoring for freedom and believe that the regime is all that prevents it, as in Iran or Venezuela, we should support concrete efforts to replace autocracy with democracy.
In this new global power struggle, once again the attitudes toward human rights and freedom are the dividing line. The 1981 State Department human-rights memo is as true today as it was then:
Human rights is at the core of our foreign policy, because it is central to America’s conception of itself. This nation did not “develop.” It was created, with specific political purposes in mind. It is true that as much as America invented “human rights,” conceptions of liberty invented America. It follows that “human rights” isn’t something we add on to our foreign policy, but is its very purpose: the defense and promotion of liberty in the world.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition.
Corban Teague is the director of the Human Rights & Freedom Program at the McCain Institute.
About the McCain Institute at Arizona State University
The McCain Institute is a nonpartisan organization inspired by Senator John McCain and his family’s dedication to public service. We are part of Arizona State University and based in Washington, D.C. Our programs defend democracy, advance human rights and freedom, and empower character-driven leaders. Our unique power to convene leaders across the global political spectrum enables us to make a real impact on the world’s most pressing challenges. Our goal is action, not talk, and like Senator McCain, we are fighting to create a free, safe, and just world for all.
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