The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

34 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL to obey all international human rights obligations embed- ded in customary international law or treaties that the United States has ratified. The fundamental rights enshrined in the UDHR encompass not just freedom of thought, conscience and religion, but also the rights of immigrants; the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the right to equal protection from discrimination; as well as such crucial economic, social and cultural rights as the right to health, including reproductive health. The commission’s initiative to reframe a distinctively U.S. version of human rights gives license to every other country to define for itself which human rights it will choose to recognize: Compare this effort with China’s claim to respect only those “human rights with Chinese characteristics.” Should the com- mission continue down this path, its work will only sharpen the U.S. reputation for “negative exceptionalism” and diminish our “positive exceptionalism”: our long-term capacity to lead inter- national human rights institutions and innovation. By downgrading and slanting the role of human rights, this administration has not just rejected the bipartisan foreign policy pursued by many past administrations; it has rejected a time-tested approach to international cooperation to promote human rights and advance the rule of law. When I served as DRL assistant secretary under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, we worked to pioneer a continuing State Department initiative to build a “Community of Democracies.” That initiative’s simple underlying notion—echoing Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795)—was that law-abiding nations should live not under world government, but in a law-governed international society, where free sovereign states can engage in mutual discourse to achieve shared goals based on shared respect for the rule of law. A Global System to Promote Human Rights Remarkably, after World War II, the United States helped to erect a version of the global system that Kant envisioned. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States supported the revival of an economically united Europe, led by the European Union and protected by NATO, that became our indispensable global partner in promoting human rights. This approach to global governance formed the basis for the United Nations—our system to end war and promote human rights—and associated international institutions to govern international monetary flows, trade and development. The United States became the indispensable balance wheel of a values-driven system of global governance that empowered like-minded nations to organize ambitious multilateral attacks on all manner of world problems. The last few years have offered instead a disturbing counter- vision—hauntingly evocative of the “spheres of influence” painted by George Orwell’s 1984 —of a system where global megapowers are increasingly indistinguishable from one another in their authoritarianism and commitment to disinfor- mation. These great powers ignore the violation of human rights and the rule of law in other spheres and violate them within their own, forging cynical alliances and manipulating public opin- ion to make today’s adversaries tomorrow’s allies. Physical and economic barriers are going up everywhere; European unity is cracking; and the global commitment to human rights and the rule of law seems to be eroding. Without consistent U.S. leader- ship, we risk returning to the balkanized world that helped bring about the devastations of the last century. As a nation, we must ask: Are we really ready to follow this dead end? If we downgrade human rights in favor of a more “pragmatic” foreign policy, what makes us different from any other country? After all, advancing human rights is our founding national credo. Abandoning America’s leadership role is both contrary to our interests and risks further global destabilization. It is a false dichotomy to claim that a pragmatic foreign policy must “balance” the pursuit of our national interests with the preservation of our fundamental values, including the defense and protection of human rights. Paramount among our national interests must always be the preservation of our fundamental values. For ours is not a country built on a common race, ethnic- ity or religion. Instead, America is an idea: “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” If we do not consistently defend, protect and promote human rights at home and abroad, we will lose our distinctive national identity. Particularly in a time of COVID-19, climate change and refugee outpourings, U.S. leadership matters in the global defense, protec- tion and promotion of human rights. The coronavirus pandemic has unveiled the close global intertwining of environment, health, economy and human rights. Climate-caused injury destroys animal habitats, triggering zoonotic (animal-to-human) dis- eases, causing pandemics that shatter lives, exacerbating income inequality and spurring the rise of authoritarian governments that perpetuate climate injury. Unless we break this vicious cycle, more pandemics will surely come. This unsettling moment of instability and uncertainty makes it all the more urgent that we get back to first principles, both at home and abroad. There is still time to return our human rights policy to simple values: telling the truth, setting an example, and pursuing a consistent vision of human rights protection for the past, present and future. n