Biden's foreign policy has human rights emphasis

Analysis

Since the mid-1970s, when congressional and public attitudes soured on US practices during the Cold War that disregarded human rights, US presidents have maintained that the protection of rights and the promotion of democracy were key objectives in their foreign policies. This was often more rhetorical than operational, and interpretations of a values-based policy often varied from one administration to the next.

At the urging of Congress, President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) created human rights infrastructure in the government, including a human rights bureau in the State Department in 1977 and an annual report on the rights practices of every country. Carter put greater pressure on allies for their human rights practices than on adversaries, on the theory that Washington had more leverage over them.

President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) reversed that order and focused on the rights violations in US adversaries, particularly the Soviet Union, while taking a less demanding approach with allies. Moreover, Reagan prioritised democracy promotion over human rights protection.

Bill Clinton, the first post-Cold War president (1993-2001), aspired to expand the number of democracies in the international community; however, his administration was forced to grapple with failed new democracies, such as Bosnia and Rwanda, which had fallen into catastrophic communal violence. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, President George W Bush sought to counter the authoritarian tendencies of extremist groups and their state supporters -- the "Axis of Evil." Although President Donald Trump often expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders, his administration did pursue a human rights agenda, albeit one that focused primarily on conservative concerns for religious freedom.

Seeking democratic consensus

Despite this difference in emphasis, every administration has sought to build coalitions with allies and other like-minded countries in the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad. This cooperation expanded after the Cold War, on the assumption that democracies shared common traits. Economic blocs such as the EU and security alliances such as NATO required new members to have legal systems that generally tracked with democratic principles.

However, efforts to form political blocs based solely on democratic government have generally failed. The Clinton administration's 'Community of Democracies' (COD), brought together established democracies to support societies in democratic transition. The COD took seven years to organise and had a single meeting in the final months of Clinton's presidency. It foundered because member governments were under pressure to include countries that were often half-democracies at best, for political or other reasons.

In the two decades since the COD experiment, think tanks and other private sector groups have organised constellations of democracies but with overt political agendas, such as opposing Islamist extremism. One of the more durable efforts has been the D-10 process, organised by the Atlantic Council, which UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering as a model for convening ten leading democracies -- the current G-7, plus South Korea, India and Australia -- to shape a post-COVID international community.

A Summit for Democracy

Biden's vision of a democratic group, both while campaigning and now in office, is focused on the principles and functions of democratic government. As such, it has drawn criticism from some quarters since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, on the grounds that Washington now lacks the authority to hold up the United States as a beacon of democratic values. Others have suggested that a domestic summit on aspects of democracy would be a necessary precursor to an international event (see UNITED STATES: Congress's foreign policy role to grow - January 15, 2021).

Biden has responded by presenting his idea of a summit as an opportunity to demonstrate humility by laying bare the United States's problems. To that end, the administration has employed a subtle change of preposition in the name of the group. During the campaign, Biden often referred to a 'Summit of Democracies'; in the face of post-election turmoil and the January 6 events, it has been recast as a 'Summit for Democracy'.

Pragmatic advantages

Addressing the January 6 attacks and related incidents at the Summit for Democracy will enable the administration to control the narrative and emphasise more positive aspects. such as the fact that the results of the 2020 election were ultimately upheld. Recasting the summit also offers some other practical political advantages:

• It provides a venue for Washington to renew relations with its traditional allies. However, with the democratic criteria this would not apply across the entire spectrum of US allies; in Asia, for example, it would include Japan and South Korea but not Thailand.
• It may help facilitate new patterns of linkages between leading democracies. Apart from the change of administrations in Washington, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the EU, a general election in Japan later in the year and a political transition forthcoming in South Korea will all affect cooperation among the group.
• It may subtly enable the West to address its own drift into populism and even authoritarianism. Trump's political rise was aided in part by the movement in the United Kingdom toward Brexit; several EU governments face serious challenges from their own far-right movements.

No date has been set for the summit but Biden remains keen on the idea, as he reiterated in his first major foreign policy address as president (see UNITED STATES: Biden stresses foreign policy pledges - February 5, 2021). In the meantime, Myanmar presents an early test in reconciling human rights and democracy promotion. Strong pressure on the regime to halt violence against the Rohingya people in Rakhine State could encourage the junta to entrench its control of the country, since military leaders fear international prosecution over the Rohingya.