ON APRIL 29th Donald Trump rang Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines. According to a leaked transcript, he said: “I just want to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Since Mr Duterte was elected in June last year, his anti-drugs campaign has led to the killing of around 9,000 people, mainly petty dealers and users. A couple of weeks earlier, Mr Trump had called the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to congratulate him on winning a referendum granting him sweeping new powers. Since an attempted coup last year, more than 100,000 Turks have been arrested or detained: the judiciary has been shredded, journalists jailed and media outlets shut down.
Last week, in Saudi Arabia on the first leg of a nine-day foreign trip, Mr Trump praised Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (pictured). “Safety seems to be very strong” in Egypt, he gushed. Mr Sisi’s regime has locked up tens of thousands of dissidents. Not once in Saudi Arabia did Mr Trump raise the kingdom’s habit of flogging, torturing and not letting people choose their government, preferring to trumpet a $110bn arms deal: “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Mr Trump’s meetings later in his trip with NATO and G7 heads of government were, by contrast, sour affairs. The pattern is clear: this is a president who gets on better with authoritarian regimes than America’s traditional democratic partners.
Mr Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, conveyed a similar impression to his department’s employees on May 3rd. He used the loaded phrase “America First”—coined by isolationists seeking to keep America out of the second world war—to define the new administration’s foreign policy. Central to his theme was that the pursuit of interests must take precedence over the promotion of values. Diplomats could express support for democracy, the rule of law and human rights, but only if that did not put an “obstacle” in the way of national-security and economic interests.
This represents a rupture with at least four decades of bipartisan consensus in favour of liberal internationalism. Far from conflicting with America’s interests, argues Ted Piccone, a former foreign policy adviser in the Clinton administration now at the Brookings Institution, advancing normative values is essential to those interests, and is the basis for America’s national prestige and international legitimacy.
In a recent article Eliot Cohen, an adviser to the State Department under George Bush junior, observed that open societies governed by the rule of law “make infinitely better allies in the long run than thugs sitting on powder kegs”. America has always based its foreign policy on national interests, says Shannon Green of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, but until now has seen advocating human rights as complementary to those interests. It had relationships with dictators, for example to co-operate against terrorism, but it also criticised them.
John McCain, the Republican candidate for the White House in 2008, who was tortured while being held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese, has condemned the purely “transactional” approach to foreign policy as “dangerous”. Responding to Mr Tillerson’s speech, he wrote that “Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in.” He knows from experience that jailers often say to prisoners that they have been forgotten. Soviet dissidents such as Natan Sharansky have told of the courage they drew from Ronald Reagan repeatedly calling for their release.
Good deeds in a naughty world
Mr Trump’s hostility towards refugees has dashed the hopes of vulnerable people, says Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International, and his refusal to raise concerns about human rights signals to authoritarian regimes that they can oppress with impunity. She fears that if America no longer speaks up for human rights in international forums, the consensus on such things will be at risk. Ms Green points to people-trafficking as an issue where American engagement has made a big difference. Since 2000 America has produced a “Trafficking in Persons” report each year, which it uses to lobby other governments. In 2001 only 12 countries met the highest “tier 1” standard; now 36 do, and 169 are party to a UN protocol on trafficking.
America has had close relationships with odious regimes in the past, and has on occasion offered hypocritical justifications for self-interested policies. But the guiding principle, articulated by Woodrow Wilson a century ago, that it should use its power for good in the world has endured.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the early 1950s, described “the American idea” as an inspiration to people who could only “dream of freedom”. But he knew that dream was constrained by a nuclear-armed communist Russia. In reality, says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a British strategist and historian, the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union took precedence over human rights. A description of Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s dictator, sometimes attributed to Harry Truman—“He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard”—was often cited to excuse poor company. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger put reaching detente with the rival superpower ahead of what they saw as grandstanding on human rights.
A turning point came in 1975 when President Gerald Ford refused to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an author who exposed the evils of the Soviet gulag. Conservative Republicans, such as Reagan, Jack Kemp and William Buckley, accused him of appeasement, as did Democrats, including Henry Jackson and Jimmy Carter. In a speech in 1977 Mr Carter marked a return to Wilsonianism: “It is a new world that calls for a new American foreign policy…We have reaffirmed America’s commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”
Although Mr Carter ran into difficulty over America’s support for the Shah of Iran, his vision was shared by his successor, Reagan. Liberals and conservatives had found something they could agree on. Human rights also helped win the cold war. The part of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 (an accord between East and West) covering human rights did much to legitimise dissent in the Soviet empire.
In the early 1990s, with the cold war over, values-based foreign policy went into overdrive with what Tony Smith, a historian at Tufts University, calls neoWilsonianism. He argues that it rested on three ideas shared by neoconservatives and neoliberal interventionists. The first, “democratic peace theory”, held that as democracies did not wage war on each other, the more countries had democratic institutions, the more peaceful the world would be. The second, “democratic transition theory”, postulated a great global momentum towards democracy. The West, with its free-market economic model, primacy in multilateral organisations and human-rights pressure groups could accelerate the spread of democracy even in places with few of the institutional underpinnings. The third was “responsibility to protect” (known as R2P), a reworking of just war theory developed after the world’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Duterte: the wrong sort of friendTogether, these formed the framework for interventions in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Kosovo. Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, a keen advocate of the new interventionism, laid out its principles in a speech in 1999 co-authored by Sir Lawrence. But early success spawned hubris. Combined with the “global war on terror” launched by George W. Bush after September 11th 2001, it led to flawed attempts at “nation-building” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sir Lawrence says: “R2P pushed us into doing more than we reasonably could.”
Barack Obama did not resile from the human-rights agenda. But he became increasingly doubtful about using military force to buttress it. Ms Green, who served in the American agency for international development under Mr Obama, says he set great store by “civic-society engagement” to push authoritarian regimes towards international norms. He also believed that speaking out on human rights when meeting autocrats boosted campaigners, even when his lecturing grated.
Mr Obama was more of a Wilsonian than a neo-Wilsonian; his idealism tempered by a cool realism that verged on cynicism. For him the Middle East, exemplified by Libya, was a “shit show” that America could do little to change. But critics saw his reluctance to intervene in Syria as an abdication of American responsibility.
Mr Obama reflected a loss of confidence in the certainties of the neolibs and neocons. He may have allowed the pendulum to swing back too far, but he reflected the mood of war-weary voters. Mr Trump stands for something different and darker: a contemptuous repudiation of the use of American strength in the service of anything other than self-interest. His enthusiasm for a brute like Mr Duterte gives heart to brutes everywhere. The consequences for America’s power and influence are likely to be grave.
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