By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How Biden Failed on Human Rights

If Donald Trump’s second term is anything like his first, the incoming U.S. president will not advance the cause of human rights. His foreign policy is more likely to harm democratic values around the world than it is to protect them. But as bleak as the next four years may become, the past four have hardly been a boon for human rights. President Joe Biden, who came into office promising that his administration would be different, ended up chipping away at these ideals himself.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden disparagingly quipped that Trump had embraced “all the thugs in the world,” from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier, in 2019, Biden had pledged to make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” for the part that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, played in the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. When he entered the Oval Office, Biden claimed he would match his words with actions by making human rights a foreign policy priority. In his second week as president, Biden told staffers gathered at the State Department that “upholding universal rights” was the “grounding wire of our global policy, our global power”; rights, he said, were the United States’ “inexhaustible source of strength.” Biden was a seasoned politician, and he knew that the world was complicated. But he didn’t present rights as values to be promoted only when world events allowed. Instead, in his view, advancing them was itself a way to meet the country’s greatest foreign policy challenges.

Biden initially lived up to his promises, issuing dozens of executive orders in just his first month to reverse steps Trump had taken to diminish the United States’ commitment to international human rights. Biden rejoined the UN Human Rights Council and the Paris climate accord. He removed Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court. He directed federal agencies to promote protections for LGBTQ people abroad and issued the first comprehensive U.S. strategy to prevent atrocities.

Then something changed. Instead of treating the U.S. commitment to its values as a source of strength, the administration behaved as though its stated principles were an albatross around its neck. Instead of leveraging U.S. power to advance human rights abroad, Biden hesitated to confront allies about their abuses. The administration downplayed concerns about international legal norms, and by the end of his term, Biden was sending antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine—even though a global ban on the weapons had been in place for decades—and sending arms to Israel’s government despite its serious violations of the laws of war in Gaza.

U.S. President Joe Biden and other senior officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2022

Biden returned to themes of human rights and justice in two notable cases—when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and when Hamas and other armed groups killed more than 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023. Both events warranted Biden’s condemnation. Yet although he remained outspoken in his criticism of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, supporting efforts by international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to intervene, he ignored or defended similar conduct by Israel as it launched a military campaign in Gaza, and he blocked international efforts at accountability. Biden’s inconsistent application of purported U.S. values did not go unnoticed. Neither did the seeming disappearance of human rights, once a central component of Biden’s stated strategy, from the administration’s rhetoric.

U.S. presidents often fall short of their human rights commitments. Some outside the United States—especially in non-Western countries that have long seen hypocrisy in Washington’s promotion of liberal values—will even find it refreshing if Trump drops the pretense of caring about those ideals. But excising human rights from U.S. foreign policy—as many of Biden’s decisions have done and as Trump has proved willing to do even more decisively—will seriously damage U.S. interests and the international system. When the United States selectively applies internationally accepted rules, it undermines its credibility and loses influence in the rest of the world. And because Washington has been the architect of the modern global order, its behavior carries extra weight. If the United States flouts the rules, authoritarians and other illiberal leaders need no further excuse to break them at will, inflicting horror on their own people and inciting instability beyond their borders.

The damage Trump may do to the cause of human rights could create a temptation to look back on the Biden era with nostalgia. But those rose-colored glasses would obscure the real picture. As global power shifts, democratic values are the United States’ enduring comparative advantage. Biden claimed to understand this, but he abandoned his own strategy at a critical time. In doing so, he paved the way for a race to the bottom, as future U.S. presidents and their foreign counterparts, democrats and autocrats alike, face fewer consequences for disregarding international law and degrading human rights.

 

Dangerous Bedfellows

States that deny human rights often create chaos. They can be unstable partners. Their populations eventually agitate, sometimes violently, for freedom. When human rights abuses go unchecked, they precipitate cycles of conflict that disrupt the global economic system and make defense efforts such as countering terrorism more difficult. Biden, at first, seemed to recognize this, criticizing Trump’s penchant for dictators and pledging to create a stronger alliance among democracies. He famously vowed to shun the Saudi crown prince for his rights abuses.

But by 2022, halfway through his presidency, Biden was flying to Saudi Arabia and offering MBS a fist bump. The visit was intended to convince Riyadh to lower oil prices amid a global energy crunch caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Biden came home empty-handed. And even though Biden said human rights concerns would be “on the agenda,” autocrats aren’t swayed by quiet conversation. They need to face serious consequences, which Biden was unwilling to impose. In fact, after Biden’s visit, the Saudi government increased its repression, imposing measures such as decades-long prison sentences for online activism. And far from keeping Saudi Arabia at arm’s length, the Biden administration hitched the United States’ reputation to the autocratic state. By 2023, Washington was negotiating a defense alliance with Saudi Arabia that would pledge U.S. resources and forces to protecting the country, similar to U.S. commitments to NATO. Saudi Arabia would have been the first nondemocracy invited into the club of U.S. treaty allies in decades.

Biden’s recent dealings with the United Arab Emirates struck a similar chord. For years, the UAE government has fueled what the U.S. State Department has called genocide in Sudan by sending weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, one of the factions in the country’s civil war. But in September, Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed was welcomed to Washington on a state visit; during MBZ’s trip, Biden announced an upgrade to Washington’s bilateral defense cooperation with the UAE. As MBZ dined at the White House, Biden’s special envoy to Sudan was desperately but fruitlessly trying to stop Sudanese generals from massacring civilians with Emirati weapons.

Washington may well have strategic interests in reinforcing the U.S.-Emirati defense relationship, but the UAE’s desire for a deal also gave the United States leverage—leverage Biden did not use by, for instance, conditioning new terms on the UAE stopping its flood of weapons into Sudan. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes little sense for the United States to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid to contain the fallout of a festering conflict when it could prevent further starvation and suffering through less costly diplomatic means.

What makes Biden’s unwillingness to use such leverage particularly disappointing is that when he did take a tough stand on human rights, he got results. After he labeled Saudi Arabia a pariah and subsequently got elected, MBS implemented some reforms during the transition period, including the release of political prisoners such as women’s rights defender Loujain al-Hathloul. In 2021 and 2022, after Biden withheld a small amount of security assistance from Egypt for failing to meet congressionally mandated human rights benchmarks, that country released political prisoners, too. But in 2024, Biden used a waiver to reinstate the full $1 billion in U.S. assistance to Egypt to reward the country’s humanitarian efforts in Gaza—efforts Egypt may have undertaken regardless, as they were in its interest. At home, meanwhile, the Egyptian government’s human rights record is the worst it has been in a decade.

 

The Cost of Great-Power Politics

Biden’s desire to draw middle powers away from China and Russia also came at the expense of human rights. Even as governments in places such as India and Thailand committed rights abuses, Washington avoided expressing serious disapproval, fearful that they would turn to Beijing or Moscow for defense, development, and trade deals. And these countries, knowing how the game was played, carried on with domestic repression while keeping channels open to the United States’ great-power rivals.

The White House rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023, even after U.S. intelligence had implicated Indian government agents in a conspiracy to kill a Sikh separatist activist on U.S. soil. At home, Modi’s government has discriminated against and stigmatized religious and other minority groups, leading in some cases to communal violence and the bulldozing of Muslim family homes. Yet Modi has faced little public criticism from U.S. officials. Other parts of the U.S. government have raised the issue of rights abuses: in both 2021 and 2022, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that India be listed as a “country of particular concern,” which is a status that triggers sanctions under U.S. law. Both times, the State Department declined to follow the recommendation, and in early 2024, the Biden administration cleared a $4 billion drone sale to India as part of a broader effort to keep a geopolitically important country onside. U.S. overtures, however, did not stop Modi from visiting Putin in Moscow a few months later, frustrating American officials.

In the case of Thailand, the Biden administration considered the country to be so indispensable to U.S. military planning in the Pacific theater that Washington could do no more than offer mild rebukes in response to the Thai government’s rights abuses. The abuses thus persisted without any consequences. Thailand used to be a safe haven for dissidents from Cambodia, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam, but no longer. The Thai government either ignores the threat of transnational repression or actively helps foreign governments target their citizens who have fled to Thailand. A former Cambodian opposition lawmaker was gunned down in Bangkok just last week. The administration has taken no meaningful action in response. Nor did the United States act when Thailand’s Constitutional Court disbanded the opposition party Move Forward, even though Washington had repeatedly urged the Thai government not to dissolve the party. The U.S.-Thai relationship is hardly a fragile one; Thailand has had diplomatic ties with the United States for more than a century and is unlikely to walk away now. Washington may not want to criticize Thailand so severely that it undermines U.S. military operations in the Pacific, but surely the Biden administration could have said and done more about human rights abuses than it did.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to his credit, raised human rights concerns in every diplomatic engagement, even if the autocrats he chastised knew there would be little pressure behind his words. Other senior officials and staff also tried to live up to Biden’s original vision of advancing human rights. There are former political prisoners in Vietnam who are free today because U.S. diplomats were willing to fight for them. The State Department cut U.S. assistance to Tunisia by nearly half when the president there dialed up his repression, and it created new sanctions against foreign companies that sell spyware to dictatorships. Guatemala is on a path to reform, albeit a steep one, because U.S. diplomats helped head off a coup before the swearing in of the president-elect. Courageous U.S. ambassadors, such as David Pressman in Hungary, took personal risks to challenge repression. And the administration levied sanctions on rights abusers in Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, and Uganda, as well as on violent settlers in the West Bank.

But many of these efforts were of relatively low geopolitical consequence. When policy decisions had higher stakes, members of Biden’s senior team who tried to prioritize human rights were consistently overruled. At times no one was even in the room to remind the president that human rights were supposedly part of the administration’s strategy. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor lacked an assistant secretary, its most senior position, for the first three and a half years of Biden’s term.

Without high-ranking officials to make the case for protecting human rights, even faltering progress was undermined by policy decisions at the top. The State Department, for instance, issued a formal atrocity determination in 2023 that named Ethiopian forces responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. U.S. officials undermined the determination just three months later by allowing foreign economic investment in Ethiopia and failing to issue alternative measures to address the abuses—even though some of the same forces remained engaged in atrocities. The White House also sought to tackle transnational repression by issuing a travel ban on Saudi citizens connected to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and by tasking federal agencies to reach out to diaspora communities across the United States. But senior decision-makers never held countries such as Egypt, India, or Rwanda accountable for targeting their critics inside the United States or for punishing those critics’ families at home.

 

Bending the Rules

The hypocrisy of Biden’s policies came into sharpest relief in his responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. International law was applied only in some cases, not all. When the president wanted to pursue justice for abuses, he could and did. His administration led the charge to kick Russia off the UN Human Rights Council and supported the International Criminal Court’s efforts to gather evidence of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. In February 2023, a year into the war, Blinken powerfully detailed to the UN Security Council how Russia had violated international norms as it killed and displaced civilians, destroyed half of Ukraine’s energy grid, and used starvation as a weapon.

But the administration did not treat other injustices with the same clarity. Biden’s fervent support for the Israeli government’s campaign in Gaza was perhaps his most hypocritical position—and the one most damaging to international law. The UN secretary-general, world leaders, and human rights organizations accused the Israeli military of committing the very same war crimes in Gaza that Blinken charged Russia with committing in Ukraine. Yet Biden insisted on shipping weapons to Israel without imposing conditions on their use, declining to use the most powerful tool at his disposal to change the Israeli government’s conduct.

Biden’s State Department was able to consistently identify and publicly condemn specific Russian war crimes. In March 2022, just one month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an official assessment reported that more than 2,400 civilians had been killed in Mariupol and detailed a Russian strike against a theater in the city that was marked with the Russian word for “children.” Yet eight months into the gut-wrenching conflict in Gaza, and despite extensive evidence of the Israeli government’s war crimes documented by human rights and humanitarian groups, the State Department said it could not verify any particular instance of Israel violating international law.

With the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world, the Biden administration appeared to not register what the rest of the world could see. Gaza has been destroyed more completely than almost any urban area in the history of modern warfare. Nearly 50,000 Palestinians are dead because of Israeli military operations, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and many more are injured and traumatized. More than 90 percent of the population is displaced. Israeli authorities and forces have stopped the water piped into Gaza from Israel, cut off the territory’s electricity, and destroyed its essential infrastructure.

Even as evidence piled up showing the Israeli government’s disregard for the laws of war, Biden refused to use U.S. weapons shipments to Israel as leverage to change its behavior. Instead, he enabled persistent human rights abuses in Gaza and violated U.S. law to do so; several statutes, including Section 502B of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, prohibit arms transfers to countries that do not adhere to the laws of war. Another section of the same U.S. law bars the United States from sending weapons to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” In April 2024, Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, sent a memo to Blinken stating that Israeli authorities had interfered with the agency’s efforts to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza, including by killing aid workers, bombing ambulances and hospitals, and repeatedly delaying or turning away trucks full of lifesaving supplies. But the Biden administration continued to transfer weapons, with seven shipments arriving in Israel the following month alone.

Overruling U.S. legislation gives future presidents license to do the same. The international rules designed to protect civilians are degraded, too, when a close U.S. partner can breach them and face few consequences. In an interview with The New York Times in January 2024, Blinken refused to answer repeated questions about whether Israel had followed international law in Gaza. Notably, the administration has all but stopped publicly condemning Russian war crimes, perhaps recognizing that it can no longer do so credibly.

The Biden administration’s decision to send antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine in November 2024 was another case of the United States disregarding supposedly universal norms. Because this type of weapon cannot discriminate between civilians and combatants, a ban has been in place for 25 years under a treaty negotiated among 164 countries. The United States never signed the treaty, but in 2022 the Biden administration prohibited the use of antipersonnel land mines outside the Korean Peninsula. When Trump in his first term lifted a previous U.S. ban, Biden had even called the move “reckless.” Biden defended his recent decision to export the weapons as breaking one rule to save another—specifically the right to sovereignty, which is now at risk in Ukraine. This was the same rationale the administration used in July 2023 when it started to send Ukraine cluster munitions, which are also banned by an international treaty (another that the United States has not signed). But neither weapon was going to be a game-changer for Ukraine, so Biden’s disregard for both treaties will only put more civilian lives at risk and further erode humanitarian norms.

By ignoring the law in some areas, the Biden administration also undermined its own efforts to strengthen protections elsewhere. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, tasked the Pentagon with developing an infrastructure to mitigate civilian harm in conflict, drawing on the lessons of the United States’ 20 years of counterterrorism operations. The Department of Defense now includes a staff fully focused on civilian protection and a new center created to develop training, doctrine, and investigation procedures to minimize and recognize civilian harm caused by U.S. operations. It is a historic effort that could save many lives in conflicts that involve either the United States or its partners. Austin aimed to bring U.S. security partners on board, too, to adopt a similar civilian protection ethos and set of standards. But after Washington overlooked war crimes to support Israel’s campaign in Gaza, other countries may no longer take the United States seriously on matters of civilian protection and adherence to international humanitarian law.

All conflicts have seen some violation of the laws of war. The United States itself has a checkered history, including most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the rules are worth preserving, even if their defenders do not always live up to the standards of conduct they espouse. These guardrails are meant to save lives and to hold violators accountable. Biden could have fortified these protections, using the United States’ influence and meeting its responsibilities as a superpower, one of the founders of international humanitarian law, one of the world’s largest arms suppliers, and the UN’s largest contributor. But he squandered the opportunity and allowed the norms that protect civilians in war to break down.

 

A Tarnished Legacy

Why Biden abandoned human rights as a tenet of U.S. foreign policy will be a question for historians and biographers. It could be that he never truly believed that protecting human rights abroad was a central U.S. interest—but he did make the issue a centerpiece of his presidential campaign and his promises after inauguration. Perhaps he arrived in the Oval Office only to realize the world was even more complex than he expected and decisions harder to make. But after decades working on foreign policy, he must have known the realities.

Whatever the reason, Biden’s inconsistencies on human rights and the rule of law have left these principles vulnerable to further erosion under future presidents and other world leaders. If the United States continues to lower the standards to which it holds its partners, allowing many of them to commit human rights abuses and face no repercussions, there will be few defenders of the rules-based order left. This outcome plays right into the hands of China and Russia, both of which have been trying to pry open cracks in the rules-based international system. Washington’s comparative advantage has been its willingness to throw its weight behind the defense of human rights and thus keep intact a global order that is highly favorable to U.S. interests. By declining to deploy U.S. power when it counted most, Biden ceded that advantage.

The forfeit brings the United States down to the level of its adversaries, relying on economic and military deals to shape outcomes abroad and minimizing the very democratic values that Biden himself said make the United States what it is. It endangers people both in the United States and around the world who are supposed to be protected by the web of norms that make up the international system. After a long career of public service, Biden made his bid for the presidency with pledges to mount a strong defense of human rights. Yet when he reached the United States’ highest office and took charge of the power it holds, Biden backed away from the fight for a more principled foreign policy and a more humane world.

 

 

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