Secretary of State Antony Blinken is poised to further aggravate the controversy over racism and human rights in U.S. foreign policy that he stirred this week.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is poised to further aggravate the controversy over racism and human rights in U.S. foreign policy that he stirred this week. Earlier today, according to Politico, he issued a cable to American embassies worldwide, encouraging diplomats to reckon honestly with the darkest chapters of U.S. history. “That means we acknowledge our imperfections. We don’t sweep them under the rug. We confront them openly and transparently,” he reportedly wrote.
It’s only the latest episode in a months-long debate about how Blinken and his colleagues talk about racism and discrimination on the world stage, including when face-to-face with authoritarian adversaries who have weaponized American history to their own ends. On Tuesday, he invited “all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human rights issues,” as he put it in a statement on Tuesday, to visit and investigate racism and discrimination in the United States.
Naturally, this has drawn fire from conservatives, who view the move — and U.S. support of a resolution on racial discrimination at the U.N. Human Rights Council last week — as an unnecessary act of self-flagellation. “Biden’s Secretary of State is inviting the U.N. to investigate human rights in the United States — the freest, fairest country in the world. This is INSANE,” former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley told Fox News.
The most pertinent objection to this move, as Haley explained, is that authoritarian regimes will exploit the opportunity to weaponize the reckonings with slavery and other historical ills, as they whitewash their own abuses. Otherwise put: Such a move is an act of unilateral disarmament at the U.N. and in other settings. All of this rings true, given the capture of the Human Rights Council, and the U.N. human-rights system more broadly, by human-rights abusing regimes.
Conservatives criticizing Blinken’s move should also acknowledge, however, that there’s a method, one that could sound solid in principle, but is being undermined by the Biden administration’s execution of its strategy.
While this approach to discussing human rights sounds exclusively like an ideologically fashionable effort to talk down on America (it is certainly that), it can also be understood to be something like a high-stakes wager. Blinken hopes that by frankly addressing America’s own historical injustices, Washington’s authoritarian competitors will look far worse by comparison when they stonewall efforts to highlight their myriad, ongoing, human-rights atrocities. This approach, he writes in the cable reported on by Politico, might be “painful, even ugly,” but it serves to “disarm critics and skeptics who would use our imperfect record at home to undercut our global leadership on these issues.”
Blinken’s not completely wrong about this. When the Chinese Communist Party absurdly uses Canada’s treatment of indigenous people (for which the Canadian government has profusely apologized and disavowed) as a rebuttal to allegations that it is committing genocide, it of course raises questions about its own actions. As Kelley Currie put it in the current issue of National Review, “In their eagerness to accuse the West of hypocrisy, the Party’s propagandists have highlighted the equivalence between the Chinese Communist Party’s deeply racist, neocolonialist policies in Tibet and Xinjiang and Canada’s long-discredited and abandoned racist policies toward indigenous people.” Western openness on these issues makes for an implicit parallel that reveals authoritarian depravity for what it is.
But acknowledging that in principle, and among friends, is different from doing so at the den of dictatorships that is the U.N. Human Rights Council. Since taking office, the Biden administration has dived headfirst into the body’s proceedings, announcing that it would become an observer and eventually seek a seat once again, for the first time since 2018.
The Trump administration had departed from the body because it is compromised by its authoritarian members and because it exhibits an anti-Israel bias. More quietly, however, American diplomats griped that Western European countries had failed to heed their calls to fight resolutions presented by China aimed at inserting the party’s preferred language into the international human-rights lexicon.
Of course, none of this has changed since the Biden administration “rejoined” the council. (Though the U.S. left in the middle of its membership term, it continued to participate in council-related activities on the side.)
At the most recent session, which ended this month, the Biden administration hailed the passage of a resolution on police brutality and discrimination against Africans and people of African descent, including in the United States (hence Blinken’s invitation of U.N. experts to America).
The problems with this are many, overlapping, and obvious. The council’s authoritarian members continue to play a significant role in its proceedings. Last year, amid the worldwide protests for racial justice sparked by the killing of George Floyd, they took the occasion of a council debate to castigate Washington’s human-rights record. The new resolution passed this week is the outgrowth of that effort, made by a fundamentally flawed body.
For many of the same reasons, Blinken’s “standing invitation” to all human-rights experts is a disaster waiting to happen. Several years ago, authoritarian council members banded together to pass a resolution creating a special expert role on sanctions. Alena Douhan, the current office holder, has shown time and time again that she understands her job to be to cover for the most abhorrent regimes on the planet — Belarus, Venezuela, Syria, and others. They can’t be perpetrators of grave offenses, she often argues, because they themselves are victimized by Western unilateral sanctions. Presumably, Blinken’s invitation applies to her as well.
There’s nothing wrong with America’s top diplomat speaking honestly about his country’s history. But where he does that matters, and with whom he does that can either show weakness, or be an effective strategy with which to promote human rights in the world. Blinken has made his bet, but it’s an unnecessary risk.