Trump's Not-So-Great Retreats on Foreign Policy

      President Trump used his first overseas trip in May 2017 with its initial stop in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to signal a sharp break from the Obama administration policies aimed at using U.S. influence to promote human rights in the Arab world. Trump evidently relished the lavish ceremony his Saudi hosts put on for him and reciprocated by sidestepping any mention of such issues as the kingdom's repressive policies on political dissent. "We are not here to lecture," Trump declared. "We are not here to tell people how to live . . . "
      Trump also gave a shoot-out to the other major U.S. ally in the region by predicting improved relations with Bahrain in place of the strains created by Obama-era criticisms of the Sunni government's repression of its Shiite majority population. Seemingly emboldened, the Bahraini government followed only two days later with a raid on the home of the leader of the Shiite opposition that left five protesters dead and more than 50 arrested..
      The sequence of events is emblematic of what a leading human rights advocate calls the "complete sidelining" of human rights in U.S. foreign policy under Trump. Writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, goes so far as to call the Trump administration —  "and the president himself" —  "one of the greatest threats to human rights in decades."
     Margon notes in the article that Trump has not only backed away from criticizing foreign governments with spotty records on human rights but has gone further by actively encouraging repressive policies. One month before the overseas trip, Trump congratulated Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning a disputed referendum that fortified his authoritarian rule. In the same month, he called Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to congratulate him on his "unbelievable job on the drug problem" — a brutal crackdown of extrajudicial killings that has cost more than 12,000 lives.
      With the United States withdrawing from the field, human rights leadership is now passing to other countries, according to Margon. She cites two encouraging events from recent meetings at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. The Netherlands helped win approval of an independent investigation of the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen despite opposition not only from Saudi Arabia but also from the United States itself. Iceland took the lead in collecting support from 38 other countries for a joint statement condemning Duterte's war on drugs.
      Margon professes encouragement from the events. "We've seen some movement on issues without American leadership, which is important," she says. With Trump in power, "ad hoc coalitions of like-minded countries will need to become the norm," she writes in the article.
      Margon was one of two authors to appear at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington last week [April 6] to launch the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, with its provocatively titled collection of articles, "Letting Go: Trump, America, and the World." Human rights is not the only and perhaps not even the most important area of retreat that Trump is leading on U.S. foreign policy.
      In his article, Jake Sullivan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, laments Trump's backing away from what he calls "the post-World War II system of norms, institutions, and partnership that has helped manage disputes, mobilize action, and govern international conduct." Sullivan, who worked in Hillary Clinton's campaign after having served previously in the State Department and in Vice President Joe Biden's office, says these multilateral arrangements have been more successful, even in recent years, than detractors acknowledge.
      As examples, Sullivan cites the mostly successful efforts to contain nuclear proliferation and to recover from the 2008 financial crisis and worldwide recession. He counts as well the Paris climate agreement despite Trump's withdrawal from the accord. "All of these problems require some mode of international cooperation," Sullivan remarked from the stage. The United States, he added, "has been" and "has to be" the catalyst.
      Sullivan recalled in his remarks that he came face to face with one of the detractors while out on the 2016 campaign trail in Ohio. Speaking in Clinton's behalf, Sullivan spoke warmly of her support for "the liberal international order." His remarks finished, one woman in the audience approached him to say: "I don't know what that is, but I don't like any of those three words."
      Like Trump, that Ohio voter apparently sees the post-World War II order that won the Cold War and embodied the American century as more burden than benefit for the American people. Sullivan aptly remarked, on the other hand, that these systems "have served to the United States' advantage."
      Trump is a threat, in large part because of his basic misunderstanding of foreign policy in all its particulars — from trade to security. The threatened pullout from the North American Free Trade Agreement, Sullivan warned, would be "a huge self-inflicted wound." Even if some European countries have fallen short in their NATO obligations, several of them have provided critical support for U.S. policies not only in Europe, but also in, for example, Afghanistan and Iraq.
      In the end, Sullivan thinks the international order sufficiently resilient to withstand one four-year term for Trump, though not necessarily a second. Margon too expects human rights to remain on the international agenda even with Trump's retreat. At this point, one can say no more than this: Time will tell.