The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

32 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL disabled persons and LGBTQ individuals. Yet, at other times, the country’s global influence has led leaders of both parties to claim exemption from the rules that bind weaker nations, creating a human rights double standard, with the United States on the lower rung. The United States’ ongoing challenge is how to pre- vent its impulses toward “negative exceptionalism” fromweaken- ing its “positive exceptionalism”: its global legitimacy and capacity to provide exceptional human rights leadership. The present administration has too often chosen the lower rung. It has not consistently told the truth: spreading disin- formation and prejudice, calling the truth “fake news,” and routinely attacking the free press, the intelligence community, the independent judiciary and what it calls the “deep state.” At home, the administration has set a disturbing example, relent- lessly scapegoating foreigners and ordering draconian immi- gration measures, some that effectively discriminate based on religion. It has torn families apart and subjected refugees and immigrants—especially innocent children—to severe medical risk and psychological damage. Such policies are not just wrong in themselves; they effectively condone and encourage similar misbehavior by dictators abroad. Nor has the Trump adminis- tration shown consistency with regard to past, present or future human rights violations. It has declined to demand accountabil- ity toward the past, falling silent about the human rights abuses inflicted by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The administration has been strikingly inconsistent in its human rights engagement: selectively criticizing human rights violations in Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, while conspicuously ignoring the same violations when committed by such “strategically important” foreign gov- ernments as Hungary, Poland and the Philippines. President Donald Trump has rhetorically supported such leading human rights violators as MBS, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. His short-term focus has hollowed out prior efforts to prevent future atrocities by strengthening early warning or using preventive diplomacy, and his admin- istration has done little to build strong democracies to foster global cooperation. And it has unwisely weakened multilateral cooperation by exiting the United Nations Human Rights Coun- cil, undermining human rights in the U.N. Security Council and attacking the International Criminal Court, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization. The U.S. with- drawal from the Paris Climate Accord will exacerbate climate change and food insecurity worldwide. Where, instead, has the Trump administration chosen to devote its human rights energies? rights and remedies that became the international human rights movement, permanently altering governmental practice and forging international agreements and law. Three Principles At the turn of the millennium, when I was privileged to serve as assistant secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), I argued that the United States should conduct its 21st-century human rights policy accord- ing to three simple principles that still apply: (1) Always Tell the Truth ; (2) Set an Example through our own domestic human rights practices; and (3) Act Consistently toward the Past, Pres- ent and Future . Simply put: toward past human rights abuses, consistently promote a policy of accountability combined with reconciliation; toward ongoing abuses, consistently engage bilat- erally with foreign governments that violate human rights and multilaterally with allies and private civil society partners who can work with us to promote human rights improvements; and toward the future, consistently give early warning of impending human rights disasters, using preventive diplomacy to prevent atrocities, and supporting democracy worldwide as a long-term antidote against future human rights violations. These three principles, I argued, should not be applied piece- meal or by the United States alone, but as part of an overarching human rights strategy to support the “globalization of free- dom”—both as an end in itself and as a means to build a more humane process of globalization. Promoting global freedom and cooperation offers the best route to humane solutions to such vexing modern problems as cyberconflict, climate change, food insecurity, international crime and terrorism, transborder trafficking and refugee flows, income inequality and the spread of global disease (exemplified by COVID-19, which plagues us as these words are written). During the last two decades, these global developments have exposed the negative face of globalization. The United States’ response has been “exceptional” in two senses. On one hand, the United States has at times been an exceptional leader, pioneering global advances in civil rights, freedom of expression and religion, and the rights of criminal defendants and minorities, particularly Promoting global freedom and cooperation offers the best route to humane solutions to vexing modern problems.