Mark Tooley: Our next speaker is a wonderful friend, a new member of the Board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a professor at Liberty University, and someone who got her PhD in International Relations from George Mason University. Becky Munson, thank you so much for joining us.
Becky Munson: Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you to Mark Tooley and Providence Magazine for having me. It’s a privilege to speak with such a bright audience, and I’m grateful to the many brilliant speakers that you’ve already heard from for laying the groundwork and building towards what I think is appropriate and hopefully useful for us to talk about and think about now, which is how future American foreign policies can and should be used to advance human rights and address moral wrongdoings.
Let me start off by observing that we live in a day and age where justice seems categorically more important than any other social consideration. Justice, it seems, is now a higher moral good than liberty—at least, I think you can make that argument.
Human rights, in particular, have now become the ultimate expression of this ultimate good. There are many reasons for this, and the point today is not to unpack how we arrived at this place. Rather, I want us to consider what this means from a national security perspective and try to answer the challenging question of how future American foreign policy can and should be used to advance human rights and address moral wrongdoings.
The timing for this conversation also seems appropriate because, right now, the U.S. is trying to figure out how to engage simultaneously in three different theaters. Rebecca talked about this a lot. We’re trying to engage in the Indo-Pacific, in Europe, and in the Middle East. What are the implications of such an undertaking from a human rights perspective? And is it even possible to morally justify such an ambitious goal?
These are critical questions for whoever is coming into office soon. Given society’s elevation of justice, whoever is shaping American foreign policy needs to be able to explain and sell their strategy to the American public from a moral standpoint, especially through the lens of justice. I think this gets to what Rebecca was touching on earlier in her talk about that gap between the professional class and Americans. This might be one way for us to start thinking about how we can close that gap.
What I’d like to persuade you of is that a good strategy for confronting revisionist powers is synonymous with a good human rights foreign policy—and that you should support such a strategy, no matter who is leading it.
Right now, human rights are seen very much as an add-on to strategy. There tends to be a divide in how Americans think about a national security priority versus how they think about a human rights issue. But the number one human rights priority today is figuring out how to effectively engage and win in three theaters simultaneously.
I didn’t always think this way. I came to understand many of the deep connections between human rights and great power competition through a study of U.S. foreign policy on human trafficking, and also my interest in formal IR theories—very, very dorky theories—of how norms diffuse internationally and then internalize into and embed within domestic contexts.
After a couple of years of talking with diplomats and scrutinizing hundreds of communications between the U.S. State Department and embassies around the world, I discovered very obvious correlations between the level of effort that governments put towards compliance with their international anti-trafficking commitments and the broader economic and security realities that were pressing on those countries at particular times. This opened my eyes to how critical it is for strong state actors to ensure that the right baseline conditions are in place if we want to see serious improvement on human rights.
So, three parts to what I’m going to cover today:
The first part outlines a bit of how Americans ended up at a place where we think about human rights as an add-on to strategy. The second part touches on the consequences of this for how the U.S. has tried in the past—and in recent years especially—to promote human rights. Finally, I’m going to touch on what a good future foreign policy on human rights might look like for whoever is in the Oval Office next, one that is rooted in the idea that respect for human rights is deeply connected to great power politics.
How has the U.S. managed to end up in a place where it tends to see human rights as an add-on to foreign policy? A focus on basic, fundamental human rights is no longer in fashion in the United States. In domestic politics, Americans are now confusing second-order or subjective rights—such as certain kinds of economic or social rights—with basic human rights, such as the right to life or freedom from slavery. Domestic policy preferences are now often portrayed as fundamental human rights, and many Americans are falling prey to the illusion that individual preferences and choices have no effect on the collective health of society. A “me first” individualism and moral relativism have taken hold and led to dramatic expansions in the very definition of what constitutes a human right.
As Chicago ethicist Jean Elshtain rightly pointed out, all human rights violations are not equal. Think about it for a moment: If all human rights issues are equal, then this leads to an absolutist standard of justice. But even ethnic cleansing—which is possibly the most egregious state-sponsored human rights atrocity—is not automatic grounds for armed humanitarian intervention. No actor has the capability of responding every time there is any kind of human rights violation.
Economic and social rights, which in many ways are the bedrock for modern expansions in the definition of human rights, were really cemented both internationally and domestically by FDR through the Atlantic Charter and then through the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Importantly, they were seen at that time to be critical for preventing another Great Depression—the kind of domestic woes that were blamed for the rise of Hitler. Many people in the 1940s believed that avoiding another Great Depression would mean avoiding another Hitler, and world peace was tied to governments guaranteeing a certain level of individual economic security.
This new receptivity to social and economic rights oiled expansions in the kinds of rights that people conceived of as fundamental. Those ideas gained more traction in the 1960s. Despite many good intentions behind ideas about economic and social rights, today there is a lot of confusion over what is a basic, first-order fundamental right and what is a second-order subjective right.
Second-order subjective rights, which are usually best expressed as political preferences and policy positions, are now talked about as if they are fundamental. The point is not to negate the complexities that come with trying to draw distinctions between different categories of human rights, but I think distinctions are needed to some extent to ensure we’re roughly all on the same page about what basic human rights are and what second-order rights are.
This is because we’re now at the point where confusion over categories of rights is contributing to Americans losing sight of the big picture when it comes to human rights. Importantly, this confusion has translated into how we think about human rights and foreign policy. If we do not immediately see our own social policy preferences reflected in a particular president’s foreign policy, we now quickly conclude that that strategy as a whole must not have any real benefit for human rights. Or, even more dramatically, we conclude that the policy as a whole is not moral.
But Americans need to be far more cautious in arriving at these conclusions. The presence or absence of specific human rights issues in a foreign policy does not determine if the overall approach is moral or immoral. This is because advancing specific domestic policy preferences or issues is simply not the point of foreign policy or national security, nor does it need to be in order for the approach to be moral.
So, what are the implications and consequences of some of these widespread illusions about human rights on American national security? While the language of human rights has helped to foster a noble kind of determination in many Americans to ensure that they are setting a high bar as a world leader, mistaking second-order rights for fundamental rights appears to be stoking a pervasive and damaging assumption. This assumption is that, in order for the U.S. to be legitimized and successful in her efforts to foster respect for human dignity internationally, she must first be perfect in her own example.
This current preoccupation with example-setting is tied to academic ideas about how to solve human rights problems. Since the 18th century or so, many intellectuals have viewed the path to human rights as one that can be achieved through persuasion, negotiation, example-setting, international agreements—agreements which rarely have any real enforcement mechanisms behind them—and an over-reliance on logics of appropriateness rather than logics of consequentiality.
This is partly why there is so much focus on making the U.S. perfect before legitimizing her to do anything else. But perfection is not a required prerequisite for progress on human rights. From a just war perspective, which you’ve been learning about at this conference, one can argue that it is downright morally wrong to wait for perfection before considering the well-being of your neighbor. From my own work on the human trafficking issue, I can tell you that victims of human rights atrocities really do not care who comes to help them, so long as that help comes quickly.
If good examples were sufficient to change autocratic behavior, then we would already see that playing out. The Soviets would have softened as a result of Carter’s insistence on cooperation and example-setting, and today, China would be liberalizing.
So, not only does example-setting have its clear limits, but I think there’s an argument to be made that the notion that the U.S. must first be perfect before she is at all qualified to act is slightly narcissistic, conveniently passive, and, at least in my own view as a Christian, downright unloving towards the millions of people around the world experiencing real abuses at the hands of their governments—including mutilation, sterilization, and extermination.
Yet another dangerous byproduct of domestic confusion over policy—of confusing policy preferences for fundamental rights—are ever-increasing equivocations of American inadequacies with the true barbarity of our enemies. Our enemies leverage these equivocations and attempt to diminish our country’s own moral authority. But it is simply not true that the American regime is suppressing human rights at the same level as China, Russia, or Iran.
The CCP is exterminating Uyghur Muslims. Russia has committed egregious war crimes in its attempts to conquer Ukraine. Iran is overtly supporting murderous terrorists. The rise of these countries is not morally neutral, and each will seek to impose its own definition of human rights into high politics—definitions that do not center on how individuals are each created in the image of God.
Oppressive autocratic regimes are not misguided. Strong examples of liberal societies do not motivate these governments to change. It usually takes some kind of material-based carrot or stick to get them to change if you’re trying to do it exogenously.
Thankfully, there is actually an increasing focus on this in some of the human rights literature. There is starting to be broader questioning of the underlying logics used to craft human rights law and other contents of the post-consensus international human rights regime. There is starting to be more acknowledgment of the role that states have to play in advancing human rights, as they are the ones actually equipped with the means necessary to provide tangible rewards and consequences.
There is less and less hope in the human rights literature being put on NGOs, which for several decades now have been framed as the main answer to human rights problems. These shifts in some of the human rights literature are happening quietly and cautiously, but remarkably, they are happening.
Part of the impetus for these shifts is a widespread agreement among a diversity of human rights scholars that, in the absence of a liberal international world order, many modern human rights accomplishments, programs, and agreements will quickly cease to have much value at all.
Misbehaving governments usually need to be given a tangible reason to change. While it is naive to think that the mere existence of an international liberal order is itself sufficient for making recalcitrant regimes change, a liberal international order can indeed help to hold these regimes to account through a variety of mechanisms. But more broadly—and far more critically—it offers a baseline of stability that helps people to demand more from their own governments.
We often hear well-meaning advocates and human rights practitioners talk about sustainable solutions to human rights problems. Well, the most sustainable solution is one where people have a path to hold their own governments to account for serious human rights abuses and deter them from committing those major atrocities in the first place. That’s the most sustainable solution to egregious first-order human rights problems.
When human rights advocacy campaigns for individual issues, they have their place and time. But allow me to gently suggest to you that the best human rights advocacy campaign we can support today is synonymous with a national security strategy that pushes revisionist, expansionist powers back to where they came from. Winning in this era of competition—that’s what we need for a human rights advocacy campaign right now. The U.S. and her like-minded allies need to realize the potential they have to continue to create stability that is the baseline condition needed for people to demand justice.
So, what might this approach look like in practice? From a human rights standpoint, what does a good human rights foreign policy look like in today’s geopolitical realities? I’m going to suggest three things.
The first is that we need to move away from crisis-driven reactionism. There is a time and place to be reactionary, and the just war framework helps us navigate those moments and decisions. But right now, we need a deterrence-focused foreign policy, and our next president needs to find ways to explain the humanitarianism and morality of a deterrence-focused foreign policy—one that stays relentlessly focused on the big picture.
Fixing the illusion that human rights is an add-on to strategy is a key part of moving away from crisis-driven reactionism. The Biden administration attempted to do this in some ways by highlighting democracy promotion, but in practice, the administration focused and portrayed its human rights agenda in a way that ended up enhancing unhelpful thinking about human rights as an add-on to foreign policy. It fostered continuing confusion over basic and second-order human rights.
Importantly, the Biden administration did not harness the wide consensus over the moral claims that the U.S. is seeking to advance abroad. Instead, it fractured that approach with its insistence on using foreign policy to advance domestic social policy preferences. The next president should think of human rights as a tool to be used in an ideological battle.
The tool loses its sharpness when party politics and domestic political preferences and priorities are confused for basic human rights issues and pasted onto the sides of foreign policy. Reagan did not win the Cold War through deterrence alone. It was the allure of widely agreed-upon ideas about liberty and personal sovereignty that gave everyone something to strive towards and built American moral authority.
The good news is that today our enemies don’t have anything like this to offer. Keeping the big picture at the forefront tends to empower countries to do great things. And we can do great things at this moment in history if we do the second thing that is needed for a better human rights foreign policy: staying focused on winning in decisive theaters. What does that focus on winning entail? Well, when it comes to allies—which we will absolutely need to win—we should buckle up and get ready for some distasteful partnerships.
Why do I say this? Well, think about the kinds of partnerships that were needed to win in World War II and the Cold War. We were able to fight as well as we did in World War II in no small part thanks to a rapid and enormous expansion in military-industrial production here in the U.S., an expansion facilitated by reliance on Soviet forces to assist us in the destruction of the German army.
Manufacturing military necessities ultimately positioned the U.S. to do what she had to do: fight in two theaters at the same time. Importantly, this capacity to fight in multiple theaters was due also to high levels of unity across the Allies—a level of unity that was so strong it surprised and thwarted the Germans.
And let’s not forget that a lot of Reagan’s most controversial decisions about alliances were critiqued in the name of human rights. Reagan, though, understood the big picture. His partnerships became a place for critique because he prioritized alliances over specific human rights abuses.
It’s said that Reagan told his staff that a person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend, not a 20% enemy. For some, this was a step too far. But in the end, Reagan’s strategy won out, and what we saw over the years following his administration were expansions in basic political rights and corresponding human rights across a range of countries. The third wave of democracy—if you want to embrace Huntington’s thesis—was much of that, due to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The U.S. cannot go at it alone on multiple fronts. Unity with allies will be critical, but it will not always be easy. India, for example, is increasingly a critical partner for us, but India does not have a great track record when it comes to human rights. Human rights defenders are often silenced and targeted. Last year, Indian intelligence agencies tried to assassinate a critic who was here on American soil.
So, to successfully engage in three theaters simultaneously, we will not be able to hold each of our allies to the fire on all of their problems. This is because we need our allies—every single one of them—as the U.S. takes on the challenge of countering influence in three parts of the world.
The goal is to win. This does not mean winning by any means, but it will entail some unpleasant decisions. Christians are sometimes torn over these kinds of decisions. Making them may feel like a betrayal of our values.
This is why the just war framework and Christian realism, which you’ve been learning about in this conference, are so useful and important. They give you some parameters for making these decisions—some principles, some structure for weighing hard choices. And you might find some comfort in remembering that many Christians before you have wrestled with similar questions.
And finally, I think the third ingredient for a better future human rights foreign policy is patience—patience coupled with expectations of limited success. It took years for the many benefits of winning the Second World War and the Cold War to come to fruition. It takes time for new conditions to settle in and for people to see that there might be new pathways to demanding more justice and political rights from their own governments.
As we wrap up, I want to say that I am not suggesting that the U.S. try to create a perfectly moral world. To do this would be falling prey to idealism, to the notion that we can manage the destiny of history, and to the admonishments that thinkers like Niebuhr—who you just heard about—supply for us.
On the other hand, I am also not saying that we shouldn’t ever be single-issue focused or reactionary, or even occasionally consider armed humanitarian intervention. Sins of omission can be worse than sins of commission, and Christians should not stop advocating for the vulnerable. The Book of Psalms especially is littered with calls to defend and stand up for the oppressed.
There is a time and place for reaction, and the just war paradigm acknowledges the need for reaction to address grave moral evils. At the same time, if we are truly committed to seeking justice—which is important to the American people—I would press you to consider how now is the moment to become deterrence-focused. This can create the overall conditions needed for liberty and justice to grow in all corners of the globe.
In my view, it is those conditions that we should be looking to cultivate above all else. A focus on individual human rights issues is really a bit of a luxury that we cannot afford right now. That does not mean, however, that we can’t have a foreign policy that is still fundamentally centered and focused on human rights promotion.
That approach is one that embraces the idea that good human rights foreign policy is synonymous with good strategy for confronting aggressive powers seeking to revise the post-war consensus that gave us the modern international human rights regime in the first place. That consensus is deeply rooted in Christian ideas and thinking about individual human dignity.
Deviation from the big-picture purpose of a deterrence-focused strategy is not only imprudent in today’s geopolitical realities, but I think we might also be able to call it downright inhumane.
Thank you.
Q&A
Question: Hi, I’m Shawn Maguire at Cairn University. You’re talking about holding our allies’ feet to the fire and curtailing their own human rights abuses. That made me mindful of a story coming out of the UK, where we’re seeing more abuses of conscience—rights of conscience. I know these are not first-order human rights abuses; they’re second-order. But when it’s a really close ally, should we at least talk about it or call them to account on it? How would you address that in a foreign policy consideration?
Answer: That’s a great question. There is no clear answer. I think it’s a case-by-case basis. I think that if a strong state is trying to be a moral actor, it should do as much as is prudent to hold others to account on individual issues—as much as is prudent at a given time, depending on the circumstances.
That’s the tough thing about these questions—there is no clear answer. It requires wisdom on the part of the statesman to make these calls. That’s why I’m so happy that you all are learning about Christian realism and the just war framework, because they can help you make those hard choices.
Let me add one more thing: human rights, like all rights, are property rights. And freedom of conscience is the baseline from which all of this stems. I mention that because you brought up freedom of conscience in the beginning of your question. Thank you.
Question: Hello, my name is Maria Barnell. I’m from Wyoming Catholic College. I was wondering—you say that human rights need to be partnered up with foreign policy. How does that apply to a nation like China? You also said we need to advocate for human rights, specifically first-order human rights like life. How do we actually apply that realistically to a nation like China, which definitely has a lot of human rights violations? Is it just tariffs? How do we help their population address their own human rights within their nation without us stepping in or betraying our national security?
Question: That’s a great question. I think this is why I’m focusing on how winning in this era of great power competition is the best thing we can do for human rights.
For example, in China, we’ve done—not everything we can—but we’ve done a lot, and it hasn’t made a difference. So I’m trying to shift the mentality from thinking about human rights as an add-on to strategy to realizing that good national security strategy is ultimately the best hope we have for helping people, like the Uyghur Muslims.
This creates pressures on countries like China that, in some ways, make it easier for people to hold their own governments to account. People holding their own governments to account for justice and for all kinds of political rights—that is ultimately the most sustainable solution to human rights problems.
Does that help? Does that answer your question? We’ve got to stop thinking about human rights as being something we’re doing in addition to good foreign policy. A moral actor’s good foreign policy is inherently a human rights foreign policy.
