Defense

A Strategic Human Rights Agenda for the Tillerson State Department

Foreign Policy: During his Senate confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rightly identified China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and militant Islamism as his priorities for the threats they pose to American interests. He also declared that “supporting human rights in our foreign policy is a key component of clarifying to a watching world what America stands for.” While Tillerson did not explicitly connect that general conviction with his specific statements on his priority countries, it was a promising insight. Bringing human rights back to the forefront of America’s diplomatic agenda offers a rare opportunity to regain the initiative and strategic advantage.

One regrettable legacy of the Obama era is the relative neglect of human rights and democracy promotion in American foreign policy. Arriving in office with a reflexive, ideological rejection of anything associated with its predecessors in the Bush Administration, the Obama team ostentatiously marginalized human rights in its efforts to pursue a “re-set” with Russia, an economic partnership with China, a rapprochement with Iran, and “strategic patience” with North Korea. Setting aside the relative failures of those policy initiatives on substantive grounds, the abandonment of human rights was a missed opportunity, especially as reformers and dissidents in nations such as Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia implored the Administration for support that either arrived too little, too late, or not at all. The Obama Administration did make some gestures towards recalibrating this in its second term, especially with the appointments of principled professionals like Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights, and Labor (DRL) Tom Malinowski and Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein.

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