“Bombs and bullets cannot defend against COVID-19 or its future variants.”
Who knew! Thanks for clarifying this, Mr. President.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only platitude in President Joe Biden’s Tuesday address to the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly. When it came to American leadership on human rights, what the president told the world was quite different from how the president has governed.
Biden challenged the U.N.: “Will we affirm and uphold the human dignity and human rights under which nations and common cause more than seven decades ago form this institution? Or will we allow these universal, those universal principles to be trampled and twisted in the pursuit of naked political power?”
Hmmm. Has the president forgotten what he just did in Afghanistan?
Biden says that it was time to end a war and withdraw all U.S. military forces. He leaves out the fact that those 2,500 forces were not regularly fighting and suffering near to zero casualties. Instead, they were providing key support in intelligence, morale, and logistics. However, I respect the argument that 20 years in Afghanistan meant it was time to go.
Biden, though, cannot credibly match his Afghanistan policy to his global human rights call-to-arms. After all, the president’s Afghanistan policy has clearly and undeniably allowed those “universal principles” he proclaims “to be trampled and twisted in the pursuit of naked political power.” Just look at what the Taliban are now doing: banning girls from school and purging any and all political opponents.
And the gap in Biden’s speech between his human rights rhetoric and reality extends beyond Afghanistan.
He added that the world “must call out and condemn the targeting and oppression of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities when it occurs in — whether it occurs in Xinjiang or northern Ethiopia or anywhere in the world.” He celebrated “the anti-corruption activists, human rights defenders, the journalists, the peace protesters on the front lines of the struggle in Belarus, Burma, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere in between.”
This rhetoric is good — on paper.
The problem is what it leaves out. Note that Biden does not refer to China’s persecution of the Uyghur people of Xinjiang for what it is: a genocide. Instead, he only references “Xinjiang” without any mention of China or the Chinese Communist Party. Nor does Biden include Russia in his list of those fighting activists, journalists, and protesters “on the front lines.”
This is a rather striking omission, considering that Russian President Vladimir Putin assassinates activists, kills journalists, and beats protesters. But perhaps the omission shouldn’t be surprising. After all, for all his 2020 campaign pledges to get tough on Putin, Biden has been a great enabler of the Russian leader.
Finally, there was Biden’s pledge that “we’ll work together with our democratic partners to ensure that new advances in areas from biotechnology to quantum computing, 5G artificial intelligence, and more are used to lift people up to solve problems and advance human freedom, not to suppress dissent or target minority communities.”
Again, it sounds good. But if it’s for real, then why is Biden’s Treasury Department giving a free pass to Chinese technology firms that seek U.S. technology for purposes of oppression?
As Bloomberg reported in June, and senators warned this month, Biden’s sanctions regime targeting the Chinese security industry has been weak. The president has balanced sanctions against mitigating Beijing’s aggravation. That’s a legitimate strategy, but it’s not what Biden presented on Tuesday.
The president needs to recognize that rhetoric divorced from reality does not a policy make.
