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Sarah Yager is the Washington director for Human Rights Watch. He worked on human rights under 3 U. S. presidents and from 2016 to 2018 the first senior human rights advisor to the president of the U. S. Department of Defense.

If Donald Trump’s period resembles his first time, the new US president will not advance the cause of human rights. Its foreign policy is most likely to damage democratic values ​​global than for them. But as dark as they can be the next 4 years, the last 4 have barely been a blessing for human rights. President Joe Biden, who arrived here in office, promising that his management would be different, finished being convinced in those ideals.

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. In his second week as president, Biden told staffers gathered at the State Department that “upholding universal rights” was the “grounding wire of our global policy, our global power”; rights, he said, were the United States’ “inexhaustible source of strength.” Biden was a seasoned politician, and he knew that the world was complicated. But he didn’t present rights as values to be promoted only when world events allowed. Instead, in his view, advancing them was itself a way to meet the country’s greatest foreign policy challenges.

Biden made his promises for the first time, issuing dozens of decrees in his first month to face the measures Trump had done to reduce the commitment of the United States to foreign human rights. Biden joined the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Paris Meteorological Agreement. Eliminated Trump sanctions opposed to the International Criminal Court. He ordered the federal agencies to announce the protections of LGBTQ people and published the first complete strategy of the United States to save him atrocities.

So anything has changed. Instead of dealing with the American commitment to its values ​​as a source of force, management behaved as if its own declared principles were an albatrosh around its neck. Instead of taking the merit of the American force to advance human rights abroad, Biden hesitated to face allies about his abuses. Management has minimized considerations with respect to foreign legal criteria and, at the end of its mandate, Biden sent terrestrial mines of antipersonal to Ukraine, even if a global prohibition of weapons had been in position for decades and the weapons of end. Despite his serious violations. War laws in Gaza.

Biden returned to human rights and justice issues in two notable cases: when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and when Hamas and other armed teams killed more than 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023. Two occasions They justified the justified conviction of Biden. However, it remained Franco in his complaint for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, supporting the efforts of foreign establishments such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to intervene, ignored or defended similar conduct through Israel when it introduced a Crusade of the Army in Gaza, and blocked foreign service efforts. The inconsistent biden application of alleged US values ​​has not gone unnoticed. The obvious disappearance of human rights either, previously a central component of the declared strategy of Biden, of the rhetoric of the administration. When the Biden National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, wrote in Foreign Affairs on “US power resources” in the autumn of 2023, he addressed the economic and army force. Human rights were absent from discussion.

U.S. presidents often fall short on their human rights commitments. Some outside the United States—especially in non-Western countries that have long seen hypocrisy in Washington’s promotion of liberal values—will even find it refreshing if Trump drops the pretense of caring about those ideals. But excising human rights from U.S. foreign policy—as many of Biden’s decisions have done and as Trump has proved willing to do even more decisively—will seriously damage U.S. 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 can do to the cause of human rights can create a temptation to look back on the Biden era with nostalgia. But those pink glasses would mask the genuine image. As global strength shifts, democratic values are America’s enduring comparative merit. Biden claimed to perceive this, but abandoned his own strategy at a critical moment. In doing so, he paved the way for a race to the bottom, because longtime U. S. presidents and their foreigners, Democrats and autocrats face fewer consequences for forgetting about foreign law and degrading human rights.

States that deny human rights create chaos. They can be volatile partners. Their populations are nevertheless agitated, infrequently violently, for freedom. When human rights violations go unchecked, they precipitate shock cycles that disrupt the global economic formula and make advocacy efforts such as combating terrorism. Biden, at first, seemed to recognize this, criticizing Trump’s penchant for dictators and pledging to create a more potent alliance between democracies. He vowed to flee from the Saudi crown prince for his rights violations.

But by 2022, halfway through his presidency, Biden was flying to Saudi Arabia and offering MBS a fist bump. The visit was intended to convince Riyadh to lower oil prices amid a global energy crunch caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Biden came home empty-handed. And even though Biden said human rights concerns would be “on the agenda,” autocrats aren’t swayed by quiet conversation. They need to face serious consequences, which Biden was unwilling to impose. In fact, after Biden’s visit, the Saudi government increased its repression, imposing measures such as decades-long prison sentences for online activism. And far from keeping Saudi Arabia at arm’s length, the Biden administration hitched the United States’ reputation to the autocratic state. By 2023, Washington was negotiating a defense alliance with Saudi Arabia that would pledge U.S. resources and forces to protecting the country, similar to U.S. commitments to NATO. Saudi Arabia would have been the first nondemocracy invited into the club of U.S. treaty allies in decades.

Biden’s recent dealings with the United Arab Emirates struck a similar chord. For years, the UAE government has fueled what the U.S. 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.

Washington would possibly have strategic interests in strengthening the US-Emirati defence relationship, however, the UAE’s preference for a deal has also resulted in US leverage in the EU. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes little sense for the United States to spend many millions of dollars on humanitarian aid to engage the consequences of a lost crash when it can also save you hunger and suffering through less expensive diplomatic means.

What makes Biden’s reluctance to use leverage effect so disappointing is that when he took a complicated position on human rights, he got results. Having branded Saudi Arabia as a Pariah and then elected, MBS implemented safe reform of the transitional period, adding the release of political prisoners such as women’s rights defender Lojain al-Hathloul. In 2021 and 2022, after Biden has retained a small amount of security aid in Egypt for failing to find human rights benchmarks mandated through Congress, Egypt also released political prisoners. But in 2024, Biden used a waiver to repair the $1 billion in overall U. S. assistance to Egypt to praise the country’s humanitarian efforts in Gaza-Egypt efforts that were arguably in its own interest. At home, on the other hand, the Egyptian government’s human rights record is the worst it’s been for a decade.

Biden’s preference for diverting the middle powers of China and Russia has also detrimental human rights. Even if Puts governments such as India and Thailand have committed rights violations, Washington has prevented expressing serious disapproval, fearing to turn to Beijing or Moscow for advocacy, development and trade transactions. And those countries, knowing how the game was played, continued internal repression while keeping the channels open to the rivals of the wonderful powers of the United States.

The White House rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023, even after U.S. intelligence had implicated Indian government agents in a conspiracy to kill a Sikh separatist activist on U.S. soil. At home, Modi’s government has discriminated against and stigmatized religious and other minority groups, leading in some cases to communal violence and the bulldozing of Muslim family homes. Yet Modi has faced little public criticism from U.S. officials. Other parts of the U.S. government have raised the issue of rights abuses: in both 2021 and 2022, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that India be listed as a “country of particular concern,” which is a status that triggers sanctions under U.S. 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. U.S. overtures, however, did not stop Modi from visiting Putin in Moscow a few months later, frustrating American officials.

In the case of Thailand, the Biden administration considered the country to be so indispensable to U.S. 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 U.S.-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. Washington may not want to criticize Thailand so severely that it undermines U.S. military operations in the Pacific, but surely the Biden administration could have said and done more about human rights abuses than it did.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to his credit, raised human rights concerns in every diplomatic engagement, even if the autocrats he chastised knew there would be little pressure behind his words. Other senior officials and staff also tried to live up to Biden’s original vision of advancing human rights. There are former political prisoners in Vietnam who are free today because U.S. diplomats were willing to fight for them. The State Department cut U.S. assistance to Tunisia by nearly half when the president there dialed up his repression, and it created new sanctions against foreign companies that sell spyware to dictatorships. Guatemala is on a path to reform, albeit a steep one, because U.S. diplomats helped head off a coup before the swearing in of the president-elect. Courageous U.S. ambassadors, such as David Pressman in Hungary, took personal risks to challenge repression. And the administration levied sanctions on rights abusers in Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, and Uganda, as well as on violent settlers in the West Bank.

But many of those efforts have had small geopolitical consequences. When policy decisions saw superior actions, members of Biden’s senior team who tried to prioritize human rights were consistently shunned. At one time, no one was in the room to remind the president that they were components of the administration’s strategy. The Office of Democracy, Human Rights, and State De-Economicization did not have an Assistant Secretary, its highest-ranking position, for the first 3 years and a Component of the Biden years.

Without senior officials to declare in favor of the coverage of human rights, even the breach of progress has been compromised through political decisions in the upper part. The State Department, for example, published an official determination of atrocity in 2023 that designated the ethiopic forces guilty of war crimes and crimes opposed to humanity. American officials have undergone a determination 3 months later through the authorization of foreign economic investments in Ethiopia and not have election measures to combat abuse, some of the same forces have remained involved in atrocities. The White House has also tried to combat transnational repression by issuing the prohibition of traveling to Saudi citizens related to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and feeling federal agencies to touch the communities of the diaspora in the United States. But the amazing decision makers have never had countries like Egypt, India or Rwanda guilty for attacking their complaints in the United States or punishing the families of those complaints to the camera.

The hypocrisy of Biden’s policies came into sharpest relief in his responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. International law was applied in only some cases, not all. When the president wanted to pursue justice for abuses, he could and did. His administration led the charge to kick Russia off the UN Human Rights Council and supported the International Criminal Court’s efforts to gather evidence of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. In February 2023, a year into the war, Blinken powerfully detailed to the UN Security Council how Russia had violated international norms as it killed and displaced civilians, destroyed half of Ukraine’s energy grid, and used starvation as a weapon.

But management didn’t deal with other injustices as clearly. Biden is fervent on the Israeli government’s crusade in Gaza was perhaps his maximum hypocritical position and maximum harmful in foreign law. The United Nations Secretary-General, global leaders, and human rights organizations accused the Israeli military of having committed the same war crimes in Gaza that express Russia of engaging in Ukraine. However, Biden insisted on sending weapons to Israel without enforcing situations about their use, refusing to use the maximum hard tool at his disposal to modify the conduct of the Israeli government.

The Biden State Department capable of constantly identifying and condemning crimes of the Russian war. In March 2022, only one month after the giant invasion of Ukraine scale through Russia, an official evaluation reported that more than 2,400 civilians had been killed in Mariupol and detailed a Russian strike opposed to a theater in the city that marked The Russian word for “children. ” However, 8 months after starting the heartbreaking crash in Gaza, and despite the deep evidence of the Israeli government crimes documented through humanitarian rights and humanitarian groups, the State Department said that it cannot determine any kind specific. Israel’s case that violates foreign law.

With the utmost complicated intelligence on the global, Biden’s management seemed not to register what the rest of the global can obviously see. Gaza destroyed more absolutely than Almaximum any urban domain in the history of fashionable warfare. Nearly 50,000 Palestinians were killed due to the Israeli army’s operations, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and many others are injured and traumatized. More than 90% of the population moves. Israeli government and forces have stopped water in Gaza from Israel, cut off the territory’s electricity and destroy its critical infrastructure.

Even as evidence piled up showing the Israeli government’s disregard for the laws of war, Biden refused to use U.S. weapons shipments to Israel as leverage to change its behavior. Instead, he enabled persistent human rights abuses in Gaza and violated U.S. law to do so; several statutes, including Section 502B of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, prohibit arms transfers to countries that do not adhere to the laws of war. Another section of the same U.S. law bars the United States from sending weapons to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” In April 2024, Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, sent a memo to Blinken stating that Israeli authorities had interfered with the agency’s efforts to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza, including by killing aid workers, bombing ambulances and hospitals, and repeatedly delaying or turning away trucks full of lifesaving supplies. But the Biden administration continued to transfer weapons, with seven shipments arriving in Israel the following month alone.

The replacement of US law provides long -term presidents a license to do the same. International regulations designed for civilians also degrade, when a nearby spouse can violate them and face few consequences. In an interview with the New York Times in January 2024, Blinken refused to answer repeated questions about whether Israel had followed the foreign law in Gaza. It is not, in a way, management has stopped publicly condemning Russian war crimes, perhaps recognizing that it can no longer do it credible.

The resolution of the Biden management to send antipersonal land mines to Ukraine in November 2024 some other case in the United States without taking into account the so -called universal standards. Because this type of weapon cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants, a prohibition has been in position for 25 years under a negotiated treaty between 164 countries. The United States has never signed the treaty, but in 2022, the Biden management prohibited the use of antipersonal land mines outside the doors of the Korean peninsula. When Trump in his first term raised a past American prohibition, Biden had even called the “reckless” resolution. Biden defended his recent resolution to export weapons as a rule to save another, specifically the right to sovereignty, which is now in danger in Ukraine. It is the same justification as the management used in July 2023 when it began to send ammunition of the Ukrainian cluster, which are also prohibited through a foreign treaty (others that are not the United States did not sign). But no weapon will reposition the scenario for Ukraine, so Biden’s contempt for the two treaties will only put more civil lives in danger and the humanitarian standards erodes more.

By ignoring the law in some areas, the Biden administration also undermined its own efforts to strengthen protections elsewhere. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, tasked the Pentagon with developing an infrastructure to mitigate civilian harm in conflict, drawing on the lessons of the United States’ 20 years of counterterrorism operations. The Department of Defense now includes a staff fully focused on civilian protection and a new center created to develop training, doctrine, and investigation procedures to minimize and recognize civilian harm caused by U.S. operations. It is a historic effort that could save many lives in conflicts that involve either the United States or its partners. Austin aimed to bring U.S. security partners on board, too, to adopt a similar civilian protection ethos and set of standards. But after Washington overlooked war crimes to support Israel’s campaign in Gaza, other countries may no longer take the United States seriously on matters of civilian protection and adherence to international humanitarian law.

All conflicts have noticed a safe violation of war legislation. The United States itself has a verified history, adding more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the regulations deserve to be preserved, even if their defenders are not up to the behavior criteria with which they marry. These railings are destined to save lives and keep the guilty criminals. Biden may have strengthened these shields, using the influence of the United States and when fulfilling their daily jobs as superpower, one of the founders of foreign humanitarian law, one of the largest weapons suppliers of the global and major taxpayer of the UN. But the opportunity was wasted and allowed the criteria that protect civilians from war decompose.

Why Biden abandoned human rights as a precept of U. S. foreign policyU. S. It will be a consultation for historians and biographers. He may never have believed that protective human rights were a central concern of the United States, yet he made the factor a centerpiece of his presidential crusade and promises after the inauguration. While he arrived in the Oval Office to realize that the global was even more complex than he expected and that decisions were more difficult to make. But after decades of foreign policy, he will have to have known the realities.

Whatever the reason, Biden’s inconsistencies on human rights and rule of law issues have made those principles vulnerable to further erosion under long-term presidents and other world leaders. If the United States continues to lower the standards it imposes on its partners, allowing many of them to engage in human rights violations without repercussions, there will be few defenders of the rules-based order left. This result makes the game of China and Russia, which they review to open infractions in the foreign formula, based on the rules. How much more Washington’s willingness to weigh its full weight in the defense of human rights and, therefore, maintain a very favorable global order intact in the United States. Interés. Al refusing to deploy American force as much as he had, Biden sold this advantage.

The forfeit brings the United States down to the level of its adversaries, relying on economic and military deals to shape outcomes abroad and minimizing the very democratic values that Biden himself said make the United States what it is. It endangers people both in the United States and around the world who are supposed to be protected by the web of norms that make up the international system. After a long career of public service, Biden made his bid for the presidency with pledges to mount a strong defense of human rights. Yet when he reached the United States’ highest office and took charge of the power it holds, Biden backed away from the fight for a more principled foreign policy and a more humane world.

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