Biden’s Routine, Unremarkable Saudi-Israel Trip and the Tedium of Western “Human Rights Concerns” Theater
Biden’s Routine, Unremarkable Saudi-Israel Trip and the Tedium of Western “Human Rights Concerns” Theater
If the U.S. “abandons its principles” on a daily basis, maybe they’re not really principles. Who benefits from the nonstop pretense of the reluctant “compromise” of “American values"?
Another American president, another trip to the Middle East where the “leader of the free world” reinforces the U.S.’s decades-long client-state relationship with first ballot hall of fame human rights abusers Israel and Saudi Arabia.
At this point, a rather unremarkable event except that the parallel professional hand-wringing and consternation from the “Liberal Rules Based Order” crowd is worth examining.
As I laid out last month, the fundamental relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has remained virtually unchanged since Biden took office in January 2021. There’s been a concentrated P.R. effort to make it seems as if there was a shift in the relationship, marked by a torrent of leaked “concerns” and cosmetic gestures. But these “shifts” were largely theatrical in nature. The U.S. continued to support Saudi Arabia’s never-ending string of war crimes in Yemen, as the Washington Post detailed in May of this year. The White House rubber stamped a $650 million arm sale to Saudi Arabia, with the administration making nonsensical claims the weapons were purely “defensive”—a claim anti-war activists debunked from the start. Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia today, therefore, is both consistent with longstanding U.S. policy, and with Biden’s own record on Middle East politics—empty primary campaign rhetoric about making Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state notwithstanding. Indeed, as Column contributor Sarah Lazare detailed in the American Prospect earlier this year, the Biden White House has hired upwards of 28 people with financial ties to Saudi Arabia, or its close ally, the United Arab Emirates, so this trip is both expected and consistent with bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.
But there’s tremendous incentive on the part of Western NGOs, editorial boards, liberal imperialist columnists, and Serious Thinkers in both parties to engage in what I call Human Rights Concern Theater. Doubly so, after Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine. A high horse must be maintained, no matter how much it contradicts the facts in front of our faces, because—above all—we must be morally superior to the hordes of the Orient. It’s essential to our national brand and self esteem. We make mistakes, we make compromises, we stumble, but, at the end of the day, we absolutely must be morally preferable to Those People Over There.
This is the most important ideological premise that must be upheld regardless of reality or inconvenient facts.
To do so, the game basically goes like this: The U.S. does something glaringly hypocritical and self-serving, wholly indifferent to human rights or any lofty goals of democracy and liberal, rules-based order: in this case, embrace Israel, a country even mainline groups now acknowledge is an apartheid state, and Saudi Arabia, hands-down the most consistent violator of so-called liberal values on planet earth. The square must be circled, the unpleasant must be made palatable, the pretense that the U.S. is motivated, at least in part, by lofty liberal values must be maintained. So how do we reconcile these obvious contradictions? On cue, enter Human Rights Concern Theater.
This performance has many actors, chief among them Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. His role in this performance is to act shocked and indignant every time the U.S. does the thing it’s been doing since the FDR administration:
This is the sentiment of a child. An adult would respond by asking Roth how can Biden “abandon core human rights principles” if neither Biden nor the U.S. ever actually maintained them? Every U.S. president for 80 years has reaffirmed and doubled down on the U.S. partnership with the absolute dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. How is anything being “abandoned”?
It’s not, of course, because America’s nominal principles are P.R. The point is to act like Biden visiting Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman is somehow a departure from the norm rather than entirely consistent with it. After decades of running Human Rights Watch and watching Presidents Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden all do these exact same trips, approve major weapons sales, and assist in military operations, at what point is someone like Roth perhaps not acting entirely in good faith when he feigns outrage at the U.S. doing the thing it’s always done? What is the P.R. value of constantly playing the role of bumfuzzled, disappointed U.S.-based human rights champion?
Why is it simply assumed that the U.S. can be a credible arbiter of human rights at all? Why is this assumption not afforded to other countries? Why does Roth never act indignant and disappointed when China or Russia “abandon” human rights? It’s been over 80 years since Saudi Arabia became a client state of the West. How many more decades does Roth need to figure out what’s going on?
Typically the thing being asked of the U.S. by people like Roth is to compel the release of a few token political prisoners or give some public dressing down for the cameras, nominally for the consumption of the local population. Which, in and of itself, is fine enough, but there’s a profound arrogance in assuming the U.S.—or its white majority European/Australian allies—get to exclusively play this role.
When Vietnam’s government visits the U.S., why does Roth not implore Vietnamese leaders to dress down U.S. leaders for our brutal border violence, or having the largest incarceration state in the world? When the government of Bolivia visits the UK, why does Roth not ask it to condemn Britain for patronage and support of Israel’s apartheid, or its outsized contribution to climate change? Has Roth ever asked a country from the Global South in bad standing with the U.S. State Department to visit a Western nation and publicly criticize its leaders over their profound human rights abuses? If a country, itself, having human rights violations does not prevent it from being an arbiter of human rights, as with the U.S., then why can’t anyone play this game? Why is it always assumed the U.S. can be a credibly global cop on the issue of so-called liberal values?
More importantly, who benefits from this theater?
In his essay imploring Biden to run through the motions looking upset about Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, but calling for no broad sanctions, or cessation of arms deals, Roth writes a very curious clause:
Second, Biden should resist further blackmail. It is too early to resume the sale of offensive weapons to the Saudi military, given that little stands in the way of renewed bombing of Yemeni civilians, and there has been no accountability for past war crimes.
If it’s “too early” to resume offensive weapons sales to the Saudi military, does this not imply that Roth thinks there is some good time to resume weapons sales to an absolute dictatorship that commits mass beheadings and bone-saws Washington Post columnists? At the very least, this statement reinforces the premise that the current arms sales are not offensive, which is a vulgar act of water carrying given that we know this is a myth.
It’s all so technical and hair-splitting.
What is the point of it all, if not to keep reinforcing the dubious premise that the U.S. has axiomatically good intentions but simply runs astray? This is why, as I detailed last month, the talking point that Biden is “reluctantly” allying with Saudi Arabia due to domestic pressure around gas prices is so essential. It provides a cover for an alliance that is, again, entirely evergreen and banal. It must always seem shocking and new. If it doesn’t, then this invites much bigger and more troubling questions.
Reporters also play a leading role in Human Rights Concern Theater. Today, just to cite one of dozens of recent examples of feigned incredulity, the New York Times auctioned off new spin. Clearly laundering a White House talking point, Times Reporter Ben Hubbard, citing unnamed and mysterious “Scholars of the Middle East,” attempted to make the claim that the U.S. is allying with dictators because it lets them change things from the inside, man:
Scholars of the Middle East point out that the United States has a long history of doing business with autocrats, including every Saudi king, and that engagement could more effectively shape their behavior than ostracism.
Perhaps, they argue, a closer American relationship can cultivate the good and discourage the bad in how Prince Mohammed wields his tremendous wealth, power and ambition.
Which scholars argue this? What does this even mean? How does forfeiting all leverage and giving Saudi Arabia everything it wants lead to better human rights outcomes? Would Hubbard ever indulge a “scholar of the Middle East” who claimed Russia had to sell weapons and warplanes to Iran and Syria to “cultivate the good and discourage the bad”? No, they’d—rightly—be laughed out of the room.
Then we get into utterly inane parsing over hand-gestures, as part of some inscrutable Council on Foreign Relations quasi-religious moral workaround.
Like Thomas Aquinas distinguishing between investments and usury to avoid the church prohibition against the latter, or an 18th century arch bishop charged with finding a pretext for a royal marriage annulment, the clerics of our 21st century civil religion, American Exceptionalism, are hard at work explaining why none of this violates our nominal opposition to dictators:
Ah, it’s not just a fist bump. But a chilly fist bump.
But such is the nature of Human Rights Concern Theater. It’s fundamentally about reinforcing the premise that the U.S. promotes human rights abuses not because it’s central to achieving their foreign policy goals, but as a misstep, a reluctant compromise, a heavy-hearted departure from our otherwise noble goals. Human rights abuses by enemy states are painted as existential to the regime. Human rights abuses by the U.S. and its allies—including cartoonishly brutal Saudi Arabia—are mere bumps on a good faith road to “reform”.
Note Human Rights Watch’s now infamous headline upon the death of Mohammed bin Salman’s murderous predecessor, King Abdullah:
Saudi Arabia’s “reform agenda” is taken at face value. And, we are told, it is simply left “unfulfilled,” rather than a fake thing that is not a real agenda.
Compare this to Human Rights Watch’s obit of Hugo Chavez, who had died two years prior:
No good faith is assumed. Chavez is painted throughout the obituary as a petty despot begging to be overthrown.
This double standard is endemic throughout the Human Rights Concern Theater. Saudi Arabia can commit countless more human rights abuses than Hugo Chavez ever did, but be said to be on an aw-shucks road to “reform,” only needing some friendly chiding and scolding. But regimes hostile to U.S. interests are provided no such slack, are never said to have any real “reform agenda,” and are painted as categorically illegitimate.
The point is not to sow cynicism. The negative rights championed by Western Human Rights Concern actors—freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, due process—are indeed very important. Just as positive rights like healthcare, food, and labor rights are—despite these being axiomatically stripped from Human Rights Watch’s founding charter. (HRW founder Aryeh Neier wrote in his memoir that “the concept of economic and social rights is profoundly undemocratic... Authoritarian power is probably a prerequisite for giving meaning to economic and social rights”) And it makes sense that U.S.-based organizations would hold our lofty-sounding leaders to a high standard. But after decades and decades and decades of this credulous routine, all operating under the assumption that anyone in Washington actually cares about high minded liberal values beyond their marketing value, it’s reasonable to ask: What is the point of all of this? What does this routine achieve, and more importantly, what messy and difficult conversations is it putting off?