Human Rights and Washington's Corrupting Client Relationships

The key problem here isn’t just the hypocrisy on display, but the complicity of the U.S. in providing significant support and protection to abusive client governments.

Matt Duss wonders what happened to the Biden administration’s pledge to put human rights at the center of its foreign policy:

Since taking office he has repeated the refrain that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.”

Not only has Biden not honored this promise, day by day, his administration seems to be moving further and further from it.

The administration’s movement in the opposite direction is part of a pattern that we have seen with Biden’s foreign policy over the last two years. The president and his officials lay out what they want people to see as the core of their foreign policy vision, and then they proceed to undermine and reject the very things that they said they wanted. So they say that “diplomacy is back,” but then make very little effort to pursue diplomatic engagement with adversaries and pariahs. They talk about a “foreign policy for the middle class” and then pursue a series of costly policies that do absolutely nothing to benefit most Americans, middle class or otherwise. The backtracking on human rights is probably the least surprising of all, but it represents another about-face from what the administration claims to be at the heart of its approach to the rest of the world. It shines a light on the corrupting effects of Washington’s client state relationships.