by Richard Balzano
The United States is often called the “world police,” and with reason. Washington tries to police the globe with decreasing success and a brutality that mirrors its own police state, yet framing U.S. foreign policy in legal terms implies, absurdly, that those subjected to “justice the American way” are criminals. Western media backs this up across a spectrum from overt jingoism to reluctant nuance, but the hyperbolic accusations railed against our caricatured adversaries almost always include the charge of human rights violations. Hypocrisy abounds, and the U.S.’s relationship with human rights casts an irony so dark it may yet kill us all.
There is much chatter about Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela’s human rights records, but the U.S. is unqualified to claim moral high ground. Its relationship with human rights since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been contemptuous at best—the United States rejected and continues to reject most internationally recognized human rights. A segregated society with a vast wealth inequality, the U.S. scoffed at social, economic, and political rights revered by the Global South. Washington spun self-serving pseudo-human rights ideology that political scientist David Forsythe coined Dullesism—“[t]he moralistic preoccupation with Soviet-led communism solidified the notion that by contesting the USSR one was contributing to human rights.” Intoxicated with American exceptionalism and innocence, and the belief that what was good for America was good for the world, the U.S. waged the Cold War, pursued global hegemony and economic primacy, obstructed self-determination, and wrote off collateral damage—all under the auspices of defending human freedom.
Post-colonial nations embraced social and economic rights that challenged colonialism’s inequitable legacy, and political rights—democracy and self-determination—provided the mechanisms for change. These nations often looked to the socialist camp or threatened western interests by exercising resource sovereignty. In the American mindset, these economic rights sounded like communism. “Real” economic rights meant (Americans’) right to profit. Washington and Western European allies clinging to their empires obstructed Global South self-determination through subversion, destabilization, and regime change.
Washington maintained a paradoxical relationship with political rights. Respect for national self-determination was off the table; the U.S. repeatedly rejected that principle at the UN. Postwar decolonization was welcomed so that Washington could claim the spoils, but coups or boots on the ground appeared when states flirted with Marxism. Individualistic Americans argued that real self-determination took place at the ballot box. This stance enabled Washington to denounce the global left’s alleged totalitarianism, and later to denounce theocratic governments. Fraudulent elections were fine if “our guy” won; ousting democratically elected leaders was fine if American interests were at stake.
Security interests cast a wide net. The postwar Paley Commission enshrined critical resources as national security objectives, and the relationship between extractive corporations and government became intrinsic. Ousting democratically elected leaders, obstructing self-determination, and controlling critical resource flows were justified as national security pursuits… in the name of democracy.
The U.S. entertained human rights in the 1970s. Rights-minded Congress introduced provisions into foreign assistance legislation to prevent the White House from aiding nations committing “gross and consistent human rights violations.” Jimmy Carter made an inconsistent but comparatively noble attempt to reconcile rhetoric with reality. Then Reagan happened.
Reagan initially rejected human rights, but Congress prohibited him from partnering with rights-abusing pariah states, forcing a pivot. Future-war criminal Elliot Abrams at the Human Rights Bureau crafted a “conservative human rights policy,” institutionalizing neo-Dullesism and re-igniting the Cold War under the veneer of democracy promotion—Reagan pursued human rights once he’d changed their definition to accommodate pre-existing policy goals. The New Democrats spent the 1990s demonstrating that Democrats can be Republicans too on economic and foreign policy, canonizing “democracy promotion” as moral cover for imperialism. Human rights provisions in foreign assistance legislation have died on the vine every time.
Americans are denied basic human rights at home, thrown to the wolves of the profit motive. We’ve hypernormalized dystopia: the world’s largest prison population—an incarcerated class, daily police killings long before the ICE brownshirt epidemic, failing public education, poison food, an inaccessible healthcare racket where most Americans are one medical bill from homelessness, which is itself an epidemic. Whoever said “America is the richest country in the world” doesn’t understand the difference between mean and median income, and conflates debt with ownership. In 2017, the UN investigated American poverty and was shocked. It hasn’t gotten better.
Washington brands its adversaries as human rights violators, but the phrase “every accusation is an admission” has entered the lexicon of those who have ingested enough atrocity gore and contradicting discourse to reach such conclusions. Many can spot foreign policy contradictions, but how bad must it get at home before they realize the imperial boomerang has come around?
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.