The administration of President Donald Trump has focused very little on the promotion of U.S. values – particularly international human rights – in its first nine months. At times the president and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, have appeared to belittle the use of human rights in foreign policy as an impediment to U.S. interests. If this stance holds, it would break with almost 40 years of American diplomatic tradition. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with Dr. Edward Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for International and Strategic Studies and international military consultant, about the history and utility of human rights as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.
The Cipher Brief: When you look back at the history of U.S. foreign policy, what role do you see human rights playing in that policy?
Edward Luttwak: Human rights is a very modern term for an old idea. The old idea is that when you are involved in international affairs, you should have an army but you should also have a moral case for your actions. People have always made a moral argument for their foreign policies. These could be arguments of legitimacy – one royal claim against another, for instance – ancient legal arguments, or indeed they could be humanitarian arguments. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, was far more humanitarian than the Tsar of Russia, but when he executed a German pamphleteer, British propaganda used this act to form part of the moral case against him.
So, first of all, for an Anglo-Saxon power like the United States, human rights are an extremely effective tool of foreign policy. In the ideal scenario, you preach human rights in the morning and you bomb them in the afternoon. This may strike you as unfair, but it works. The United States has a lot of guns, but its great power is that it can also make a strong moral case for its position.
Therefore, even if you are personally indifferent to human rights and you prefer, say, property rights, you would still want to maximize their promotion in foreign policy because this weakens the enemy, and it’s cheaper than bombs.
TCB: What are some good historical examples of the U.S. State Department using human rights as a tool to enable larger foreign policy goals?
Luttwak: As a structural measure, the State Department keeps lists of countries that it views as human rights offenders – essentially officially stating who the “baddies” and the “goodies” are in international affairs. The baddies don’t like to be on the list, they feel that it imposes all kinds of costs on them and undermines their domestic and international legitimacy and their own propaganda, which makes this an effective tool.
In this way, U.S. human rights policy does not produce momentous sudden shifts in states’ policies, but it does provide the option for continuous volume modulation on these countries. For offending countries that are useful to the United States, we can set the volume very low, but for countries that are bothering us we can raise the volume.
Other people can accuse the United States of hypocrisy but that is mostly ineffectual because the basic U.S. position is usually the right position. The fact that we don’t necessarily pursue or advertise it well enough in some cases, does not mean that the overall message has suddenly become wrong. The sensible and obvious nature of U.S. values gives U.S. foreign policy great power.
In other countries – the British Foreign Office, for example – talk of human rights produces a certain amount of embarrassment, and they rarely see it as a useful tool. That reflects their concept of diplomacy, which I believe is outdated. Their concept is that diplomacy takes place between foreign ministries, and it is true in most cases that to talk human rights to your diplomatic counterparts in ordinary diplomatic interactions is completely inappropriate. First of all, the chances are that foreign diplomatic officials are the most cosmopolitan and international people in their country, and therefore they agree with you anyway. Second, you are talking to them about specific state-to-state transactions, which likely don’t involve human rights.
However, when our diplomats deviated from this diplomatic norm back in the 1970s – castigating the Russians on human rights – that was extremely advantageous for U.S. policy because the Russians paid a huge price. I think this was a key factor in the Soviet Union’s loss of support from Communist organizations around the world. Before this Russia had great support from Communist parties and useful idiots around the world, but much of this was lost because the United States took up the issue of human rights and undermined the Soviet Union’s moral case.
So, I repeat, human rights are an extremely valuable tool of American foreign policy. Looking back, our use of human rights has a higher effectiveness score than our use of military power. And it is far far cheaper. Human rights are the strongest instrument of American soft power in the world.
TCB: In that case, what do you make of the Trump Administration’s apparent retreat from using human rights values as an explicit objective of U.S. foreign policy? Will we lose this diplomatic tool?
Luttwak: I hope that it will mean exactly as much as previous administrations’ fervent assertions that they will emphasize human rights
The United States raised human rights issues with the Russian government of the Tsars before 1914. Before this thing acquired a name, the United States was already using it as a tool of foreign policy. And what has happened over time, in my experience, is that administrations which claim to support human rights may actually do very little, while administrations that are less concerned with human rights may do more. For example, you might say that Ronald Reagan would not be a great human rights campaigner – and there was nobody in the Reagan Administration who was associated with a values-focused policy. Yet the Reagan Administration went all out on human rights.
The people who say they will support human rights often do not, and others who say they don’t care – or may indeed not care – often end up doing a lot because this is actually a powerful tool of foreign policy.
Obama’s claims about human rights, for example, are obliterated by his policy in Syria. I am the last to condemn him because I do not fundamentally disagree with that policy, but then again I’m a pretty nasty character. Obama’s failure to do anything to diminish the Syrian massacres nullifies whatever claims he might have made.
Bill Clinton presents another example. I’m supposed to be a strategist – and I may or may not be – but I really make a living as an expert on military operations, I’ve been doing it all my life, I was in combat, and I know this stuff. I can tell you that the Rwandan genocide could have been stopped with just two battalions of European or American troops – including logistical support roughly 2,000 people. 2,000 people could have prevented the death of one million, but the Clinton Administration, which was very vocal about human rights, could not even do that.
What people do in the realm human rights, in my opinion, has no correlation with what they say. Trump may behave like Obama or Bill Clinton or he may behave like Ronald Reagan, we do not yet know.
TCB: But even if this is the case, is there a danger in creating the perception that your administration does not care about human rights?
Luttwak: Not really. What will it do? The Chinese, for example, calculate that if China and the United States begin moving towards conflict, the U.S. will ignore Chinese progress and accomplishments on some material aspects of human rights and emphasize everything that Beijing does not do right. And China knows that we can persuade many around the world and within China, because they do not have anywhere the same level of overall legitimacy as the United States. The chief target for this push would be China’s more educated population – and remember, these days there are educated policemen not just professors. In a future conflict, one of the great problems that China would have is a huge fracture within their own society – a split between nationalists waving the flag and people who refuse to defend what they view as a horrible oppressive government (how many Chinese today can recall a grandparent killed by Mao’s policies? Certainly many more than can recall one killed by the Japanese).
We will lecture them on human rights in the morning and bomb them in the afternoon.
TCB: Last thoughts?
Luttwak: I’ve always been puzzled by this misplacement of human rights. Instead of being viewed as an extremely effective, and certainly the most cost-effective, tool of foreign policy, it is viewed by the would-be tough-minded as some sort of uncomfortable appendage.
