In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.
In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.
These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.
That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.
First, under the guise of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls streamlining, the administration plans to eliminate two offices, one that oversees grants, the other focused on promoting internet freedom in closed societies and on championing human rights in corporate conduct and international bodies like the United Nations. As part of a departmentwide downsizing, the bureau’s overall staff will also be cut by at least 15 percent.
While modest streamlining might make sense, these sweeping cuts will severely compromise Democracy, Human Rights and Labor’s ability to act as a counterweight to regional State Department bureaus and U.S. embassies, which by design give precedence to diplomatic relationships over human rights. Mr. Rubio has said that he wants to give regional bureaus more power to decide when human rights issues should be considered or ignored.
Inevitability, the effect of this shift will be to relegate human rights to the sidelines of U.S. foreign policy. During the first Obama administration, I was able to focus U.S. attention on issues that regional bureaus or U.S. embassies had chosen not to prioritize, including extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, restrictions on civil society in Cambodia, increasing authoritarianism in Hungary, security force abuses in Nigeria and the broad denial of rights of the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara by Morocco. Senior U.S. officials still need to hear about such issues to make informed policy decisions. A diminished Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor will prevent this from happening.
It will also undermine the government’s ability to act when opportunities for human rights progress arise. Take Myanmar, for example. In 2011, Myanmar’s military leaders signaled an interest in opening to the West. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on the bureau to lead an effort that freed more than 1,100 political prisoners and negotiated access to prisons by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The bureau’s expertise makes these kinds of interventions possible.
Second, the Trump administration’s plan will significantly narrow the scope of the annual human rights reports. This year’s reports will no longer include sections on freedom of assembly, free and fair elections, gender-based violence, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, or violent crimes targeting vulnerable populations. The administration has not offered any justification for deleting these sections, which will deprive the entire world of important information about human rights abuses.
Finally, the Trump administration’s proposed restructuring will eliminate the Human Rights and Democracy Fund, the primary funding source for the bureau’s democracy promotion programs, which provide a lifeline to embattled human rights defenders worldwide. Oddly, the bureau is planned to be housed within the State Department’s budget office, even though it will almost certainly no longer have any funds to disburse. While administration officials suggest that future funding could flow through regional bureaus, given the Trump administration’s approach to date, that possibility is highly unlikely to materialize.
In 2020, Joe Nye poignantly wrote, “human rights should not be framed as pitting values against U.S. national interests, because values are part of America’s national interest.”
We may learn more this week about when the administration plans to carry out its overhaul, as Mr. Rubio is slated to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lawmakers from both parties need to stand up to him and demand that the State Department continue to support the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which is an essential engine of soft power in U.S. foreign policy. It is in our long-term national interest that they stop it from burning out.
Michael Posner is the director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at N.Y.U. Stern School of Business and the author of “Conscience Incorporated.”
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