On June 14, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) held a public panel discussion titled, “The Role of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Setting Examples or Exercising Leadership?” E. Robert Goodkind, Chair of JBI’s Administrative Council, moderated the program which featured the following panelists:
George Packer, writer for The New Yorker magazine; Suzanne Nossel , U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations; Sharon Hom, Executive Director, Human Rights in China, and Andrew Apostolou, Senior Program Manager, Freedom House. A summary is presented below.
George Packer: Rights and Wrongs
George Packer’s essay titled "Right and Wrongs," published in The New Yorker on May 17, 2010 critiqued President Barack Obama's human rights policy. Beginning from the premise that following the Bush administration there was “a need to cleanse the air,” Obama’s speeches did not moralize about good and evil, nor did he emphasize freedom. Rather than prodding other countries to focus on human rights or democracy, however, Obama embarked on a policy that featured other issues: renewing American partnerships with countries like Russia, rebuilding multilateral institutions on issues like nuclear non-proliferation, and trying to engage with hostile regimes like Iran.
In China, early in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly assured her hosts that human rights would not interfere with improved relations. General Scott Gration, the President's Special Envoy to Sudan, suggested that the U.S. would deal with President Omar al-Bashir who was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). These developments were met with dismay by human rights activists, according to Packer. In time, the administration found "a better balance between engagement and criticism" but it continues to face serious questions and is "coming up against the limitations of engagement."
Packer talked with experts close to the Administration and found that while some of Obama's speeches, such as the speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, were quite weighty and even stirring on rights issues, there was a widely recognized gap between the policy stated in the speech and any action thereafter. It is not just the disjunction between words and action, it is actually worse than that. The pattern has been to “say one thing and then imagine that saying it has created a policy and that that policy is going to be implemented.” Packer emphasized that “Implementation is 90% of the battle, and it's taken a long time for implementation to begin to catch up with the speeches." Complicating things further, according to Packer, this is the “most White-House-centric foreign policy since [Richard] Nixon.” The State Department is cut out of foreign policy-making issues, or left to wait for various policy matters to be resolved elsewhere before they can take action -- such as with Afghanistan. While Secretary Clinton has become "more of a dominant force," there is still a lot of frustration in the State Department about White House control.
The critique of Obama from his supporters is a kind of "lover's complaint." They harbor an expectation that Obama, in trying to restore or repair relations with Russia, Iran, China or Burma, and in making an outreach to the Islamic world, will still find a way to raise human rights. To be sure, after the failed policies of the Bush administration, Obama had to "disinfect the room" and make sure the U.S. would "speak with credibility and authority” on rights issues. And yet Obama did not use the terms "human rights" or “democracy” in his Cairo speech until paragraph 44 –“pretty far down” as any journalist could see. When non-violent Iranian demonstrators were demanding their human rights and being shot or hauled off to jail, the Obama Administration’s initial response was “pathetically muted.”
"I don’t think it’s because they didn’t care. I think it’s because they didn’t know how to jump from engagement to criticism," remarked Packer, and they hadn't yet figured out how to "engage and, at the same time, use public as well as private channels to criticize human rights violators and violations". As a result, there has been a lot of disappointment. A key problem with the engagement strategy, he stated, has been too much engagement with governments and too little with the publics, whether in Iran, Burma or elsewhere. “Why is it that over and over we are hearing from Egyptian democracy and civil society activists that they feel they’ve been abandoned?” There is real opportunity there now.