Tillerson should listen to McCain on human rights – Washington Post (blog)

In a brutally direct piece in the New York Times on Monday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) let Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have it for a speech he gave to the State Department in which he argued that national security must take precedence over human rights.

McCain, who grudgingly voted to confirm Tillerson, explained:

Secretary Tillerson sent a message to oppressed people everywhere: Dont look to the United States for hope. Our values make us sympathetic to your plight, and, when its convenient, we might officially express that sympathy. But we make policy to serve our interests, which are not related to our values. So, if you happen to be in the way of our forging relationships with your oppressors that could serve our security and economic interests, good luck to you. Youre on your own.

McCain made a primarily a philosophic argument against Tillersons view. America didnt invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: nations, cultures and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them, he wrote. He continued: We are a country with a conscience. We have long believed moral concerns must be an essential part of our foreign policy, not a departure from it. We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values. We have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules. More of humanity than ever before lives in freedom and out of poverty because of those rules.

McCain suggested that far from being realists, those who dismiss human rights put U.S. national security at risk. (To view foreign policy as simply transactional is more dangerous than its proponents realize. Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in. It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.)

In more concrete terms, Tillerson and apparently President Trump is giving up a huge advantage on the international stage (our commitment to universal human rights) and handing our enemies a free pass. Didnt Republicans excoriate President Barack Obama for failing to seize the initiative during Irans Green Revolution an effort that might have damaged the regimes credibility and claim to be just another normal nation-state pursuing its own interests? Didnt Republicans blame Obama for failing to stand up for human rights in China, thereby giving up a critical aspect of soft power?

Rex Tillerson on Feb. 1 pledged to "represent the interest of all of the American people" shortly after being sworn in as secretary of state. (The Washington Post)

Frequent Trump critic and former State Department official Eliot A. Cohen provides a guide for Tillerson and others, writing:

One can accept that Egypt will not adopt New England town meetings, but still persistently call out corruption; one can work with Recep Tayyip Erdogan while making clear American abhorrence of what he has done to freedom of the press in a country drifting into Islamist authoritarianism. Indeed, the case of Turkey helps illustrate why the United States should pressprudently but persistentlyfor open and law-abiding societies. They make infinitely better allies in the long run than thugs sitting on powder kegs. . . .

It was an intellectually shallow performance. In many respects, Tillerson said, the Cold War was a lot easier than the world of today. No it was notnot if you worried about nuclear war, were involved in two hot wars that cost an order of magnitude more casualties than the United States suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, or had to cope with decolonization, local communist movements, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s.

We won the Cold War, Tillerson should recall, with human rights as a main pillar of our strategy in containing and eventually bringing down the Evil Empire. Human rights was a banner used to rally dissidents and Warsaw Pact countries under the Soviets thumb. We were stronger and the Soviet Union was weaker because of the fundamental difference in outlook with regard to human liberty.

As Cohen warns, support for human rights, In the absence of historical perspective and understanding, foreign policy degenerates into crisis management; in the absence of values-informed and in some cases values-driven policy it can easily slip into short-sighted tactical accommodations, the equivalent of playing chess one move at a time, which is a good way to get mated. He added that it is not any more reassuring that the secretary thanked those sending him one-page memoranda because Im not a fast reader. That is becomingly modest, but the truth is, it is no great qualification for an office that demands intellectual depth.

McCain and Cohen should keep up the tutorials for the benefit of the administration, but its also just as important for the voters and Congress, who must in the absence of presidential leadership continue to defend the United States commitment to universal human rights.

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Tillerson should listen to McCain on human rights - Washington Post (blog)