The Trump administration is showing through words and deeds its disdain of the way previous administrations have pursued human rights for the last half century, but it has sent different signals about how it wants to change course. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued, in the foreign policy “realist” tradition, that human rights are a moralistic distraction from substantial interests such as great-power advantage, pursuit of resources, or control over critical geography, or that human rights factors simply get in the way of doing deals with undemocratic but friendly governments. Others, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, advocate for human rights but define them in novel ways, focusing their ire on practices of democratic European governments while giving autocrats a pass.
In both cases, the Trump administration’s approach to human rights ignores the real-world downsides and missed opportunities of setting aside human rights as a U.S. foreign policy interest. More profoundly, the result of the Trump administration’s approach to human rights threatens to weaken the solidarity of the free world, the core set of U.S. allies with which it shares fundamental values and, derived from that, pursues shared strategic interests.
The ‘Realist’ Critique of Human Rights
Let’s start with the “realist” critique of human rights as a U.S. foreign policy object. In a speech in Singapore on May 31, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued that the United States should take its friends as it finds them, without regard to their domestic practices. He announced that “the United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past. We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace or adopt policies or ideologies…We respect you, your traditions, and your militaries. And we want to work with where our shared interests align for peace and prosperity.” Hegseth cited — and his argument elaborated on — President Donald Trump’s Riyadh speech earlier that month, in which the president stated that “Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately come not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions.”
Trump and Hegseth thus assert that particular national values take precedence over universal or, as such rhetoric sometimes goes, “globalist” principles. They have a point: nations do have different traditions and cultures. The United States, however, was itself founded on universal principles, dedicated to the proposition of human equality as written in the Declaration of Independence, a principle that President Abraham Lincoln insisted applies to “all men and all times.” By contrast, the argument of Trump and Hegseth that national tradition trumps universality ironically parallels the Chinese communist line that “Democracy has a variety of applications around the world, and its values are rooted in the history, culture and traditions of each nation.” In any case, Hegseth makes clear that, in U.S. relations with a given country, alignment on concrete interests will be more important than alignment on deeper values like human rights.
Other senior administration officials also have argued in favor of a realist approach. In an interview just before the 2024 election, Elbridge Colby, now undersecretary of defense for policy, made a sophisticated point about the need to judge humanitarian intentions by their real-world results. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has made blunt points on realist grounds against U.S. support for Ukraine or U.S. pressure on Middle East tyrants like Bashar al-Assad, arguing that the former would provoke Russia and the latter would lead to instability and U.S. involvement.
Cautionary Lessons
Hegseth, Colby, and Gabbard all have a case. Such doctrinal realism in its various forms has a venerable tradition in U.S. strategic thinking, especially in times when the United States believes it is overextended. Past applications of this approach, however, can provide cautionary lessons.
As President Richard Nixon and his strategic right-hand, Henry Kissinger, sought to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War — a past generation’s version of a frustrating “forever war” — they developed a strategy, the “Nixon Doctrine,” according to which the United States would offer less unilateral leadership and military protection of friends around the world. Instead, U.S. foreign policy would rely more on reliable regional strongmen as partners to do heavy lifting. The poster child for that policy was the Shah of Iran, who had fashioned himself as a modernizing authoritarian, a model regional ally, and an eager customer for U.S. arms.
The application of the Nixon Doctrine to Iran — a realist foreign policy gambit if ever there was one — was in full swing by the mid-1970s. There was a case for it: Iran was a reliable supplier of crude oil (which was particularly welcome in Washington after the Arab oil embargo of 1973) and, it seemed, a regional stabilizer. As a junior officer in the U.S. Foreign Service at the time, I recall the enthusiasm about strategic American investment in Iran and the arguments that the repressive nature of the Shah’s rule, complete with the U.S.-trained Iranian secret police notorious for mistreatment of political dissenters, had to be understood and accepted in light of Iran’s traditions and without preachy lecturing.
As it turned out, a shallow faith in Iran’s “traditions” as guarantee of stability under the Shah did not work out well. Some of my Foreign Service colleagues who accepted assignments in the rapidly growing U.S. Embassy in Tehran ended up being taken hostage. In fact, greater attention to human rights in Iran might have tipped off the United States to the weakness of the Shah’s rule and the gathering strength of forces that would overthrow his regime. Earlier and stronger advice to the Shah about addressing these forces, pointed if not “preachy,” might have served U.S. interests better.
Foreign policy “realism,” applied rigidly, can lead to blindness; attention to human rights can be an early warning sign.
U.S.-Soviet Détente’s Shrug Toward Human Rights
Nixon and Kissinger also applied their realist approach to relations with the Soviet Union: this was the policy of détente. As with Iran policy, détente took place in Vietnam War era when the U.S. foreign policy community was full of self-doubt and fears of U.S. weakness and felt a need to retrench. The 1972 U.S.-Soviet “Basic Principles” document signed by Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev – essentially détente’s mission statement — spelled out the axioms of the concept, chief among them arms control and mutual restraint in conduct of U.S.-Soviet global rivalry.
There was a case for détente, and the Nixon-Kissinger Soviet policy accomplished a great deal, including advancing strategic stability through arms control. But it gave short shrift to human rights concerns inside the Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated Europe. There is nothing in the Basic Principles document about human rights. Nor was there anything about the sovereignty of the many nations then under Soviet domination. Détente tacitly accepted both Soviet repression at home and the Iron Curtain — Soviet domination of Europe’s eastern half. Little wonder that, during the better years of U.S.-Russia relations in President George W. Bush’s first term, Russian officials and others connected to the Kremlin expressed to me while I was in that administration their appreciation of the Nixon administration’s approach to the Kremlin and advised that we learn from it.
Nixon and Kissinger resisted efforts by Congress to introduce human rights considerations into the U.S.-Soviet relationship. The administration (unsuccessfully) fought the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (to the Trade Act of 1974) that put freedom of emigration from the Soviet Union on the front burner. Kissinger (successfully) argued against President Gerald Ford receiving exiled Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the White House. In both cases, the grounds were that such steps would needlessly antagonize the Kremlin and impede détente. The rising tide of democratic dissent in the 1970s throughout Soviet-dominated Europe and especially in Poland, meant little to the Nixon and Ford administrations. Their “realist” approach, which Hegseth echoes in his current call for a non-moralistic, non-preachy foreign policy, would have meant withholding support from Poland’s vast Solidarity movement that ultimately helped usher in freedom for an entire swath of Eastern Europe.
The author during a May 14, 2025 expert panel on “What’s Next for U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Assistance,” convened by the Reiss Center on Law and Security and Just Security.
A Higher Realism
Fortunately, starting with President Jimmy Carter, successive U.S. administrations began to include human rights as a key U.S. foreign policy objective. Based on that, they took democratic and human rights movements in Soviet-dominated Europe seriously and supported them. Poland’s Solidarity, which grew from a convergence of the country’s democratic dissident movement with workers’ protests, began in 1980, and while it was suppressed under martial law in 1981, it remained intact. In 1989, Solidarity led Poland’s peaceful transition of power from communism to democracy. The shock of a Solidarity-based government in Poland in the summer of 1989 accelerated the collapse of the Soviet empire in Europe and the Soviet Union itself.
As it turns out, regard for and support of human rights and democracy is not mere moralistic and preachy cant that gets in the way of more substantive foreign policy interests; it can be a shrewd policy investment. Support for human rights can be a higher realism than placing faith in the durability of autocracy and spheres of influence maintained through force and fear.
This is not to dismiss the realist approach to foreign affairs. Human rights and democratic practices are not the only U.S. interest. There will be plenty of circumstances when U.S. interests are best served by working with the friends we’ve got rather than the friends we wish we had. Realism, especially as an operational guide, is always important. Rejecting in principle the values of human rights and instead elevating realism to doctrine or dogma, however, has downsides, as the examples from the Nixon administration suggest.
The better, common-sense approach is to incorporate human rights criteria as one factor in policymaking, and to take it seriously, though not necessarily the sole deciding factor. Operationally, that means that U.S. agencies, especially the State Department, need to have structures and people responsible for human rights and democracy support with input into the policy process. As my long-time colleague and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Tom Malinowski put it to me while we were in government and has articulated so well elsewhere, the champions of human rights inside any administration should have a place on a policy decider’s right shoulder, whispering warnings and opportunities. An administration’s leadership can make the calls about when and how to integrate their input.
An Odd Direction for Human Rights
Secretary of State Rubio and his team’s approach to human rights, however, goes in a different and odd direction. Rubio and his team do not reject human rights as such but define it in a strange way, focusing on grievances against European democracies, complaints rooted in real but second-order policy differences, such as regulatory measures to limit the spread of disinformation or specifics of how to restrict protests at abortion clinics.
In his April 25, 2025, presentation outlining his planned State Department overhaul, Rubio claimed that the Biden administration’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) in the State Department “became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against “anti-woke” leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil.” Such priorities seem contrary to long-held American interests. Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is currently on trial for seeking to overturn Brazil’s 2022 election result. Hungary’s Victor Orban has been introducing restrictions on basic democratic rights since he first took office in 1998 and most vociferously since returning in 2010. Poland’s conservative government, voted out of office in 2023, introduced controversial draft legislation in 2021 intended to put pressure on Poland’s independent television network, TVN, and made drastic changes that raised concerns about the independence of the judiciary. The Biden administration was concerned about both developments, though the State Department’s human rights report on Poland for 2022, the last full year that the right-wing government was in office there, accurately described the country as Poland a “multiparty democracy.”
Why would Rubio, who has long been critical of repressive actions by the regimes in China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and Cuba — countries both autocratic and hostile, sometimes violent and bloodthirsty — start by defending Bolsonaro, Orban, and backsliding actions of Poland’s previous government?
A piece by Samuel Samson, a Trump administration appointee in DRL, helps clarify what’s going on. Drawing from Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February, Samson accuses European governments of becoming a “hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.” As evidence of Europe’s “democratic backsliding,” he cites the European Union’s Digital Services Act that is intended to improve transparency in social media in the face of foreign malign information operations. He goes on to excoriate the U.K. for “arresting Christians…for silently praying outside of abortion clinics,” criticize Germany for characterizing the rightist Alternative for Germany Party as extremist and speak of a “global liberal project…trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.”
There is plenty of room to debate the efficacy of the Digital Services Act, or Germany’s laws against extremism (that are rooted in reaction to its Nazi past), or issues of protests outside abortion clinics. But Samson’s examples do not constitute evidence of general European backsliding on democracy. His argument against European democracies sound both preachy and moralistic, to repurpose Hegseth’s speech, but also partisan: he seems to define human rights in ways that advance a right-wing agenda and the agendas of ideological allies such Orban and Bolsonaro. That seems to be a rightist counterpart to some occasional leftist redefinitions of human rights: he’s outlining a narrow focus on particular and complex issues at the expense of broader criteria such as general freedom of speech, free and fair elections, and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s reorganization plan for DRL appears to weaken the bureau and, thus, State’s capacity for general human rights monitoring and policy input. The Trump administration’s approach to human rights is internally inconsistent – sometimes arguing against preaching or moralism and sometimes preachy indeed – but, however the policy settles, the United States may prove less interested in and less capable of advancing core criteria human rights concerns and democracy than at any time in the past 50 years.
When President Jimmy Carter established the DRL bureau in 1977, the Foreign Service establishment at the time, steeped in a realist tradition, derided it as a nuisance. But human rights proved itself a sound policy objective. The details of how to define human rights will evolve, and debating that evolution is a good idea. But weakening the U.S. commitment to human rights and the tools to advance them undoubtedly will prove costly.
