The president said that “our collective future will hinge on our ability to recognize our common humanity and to act together.” The nations of the world—all of them—form a “global community…. Our security, our prosperity, and our very freedoms are interconnected, in my view, as never before.”
The president said the world was at an “inflection point.” “Instead of continuing to fight the wars of the past, we are fixing our eyes on devoting our resources to the challenges that hold the keys to our collective future,” and “opening a new era of relentless diplomacy; of using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world; of renewing and defending democracy.”
Biden stressed his commitment to placing the intellectual, political and economic resources of the United States at the service of the United Nations, and pledged to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council.
In the 1990s, many shared a similar confidence in international institutions and laws. Numerous formerly dictatorial states were showing a willingness to reform on the basis of common human rights and democratic governance standards. The UN human rights bureaucracy was tasked with a wide range of objectives, many of them extending into the economic and social realm. And the United States was the sole superpower. Its championing of a liberal “rules-based international order” had triumphed.
But this speech at the UN makes one wonder: where has Joe Biden been, while regimes hostile to democracy and human rights—and to the interests of people everywhere, including Americans, who seek to live by those principles—have taken over numerous UN institutions, and indeed, turned the noble ideals of the UN on their head?
Is Biden aware that anti-democratic states have developed and promoted a twisted definition of human rights that justifies the denial of basic political freedoms in the name of economic development, “tolerance” and security? Is he aware that the core principle of universal inherent freedoms has been thoroughly hollowed out in the morally empty technocratic language of UN human rights institutions? Will the presence of the United States somehow cure the hypocrisy of the Human Rights Council, which numerous human rights-abusing regimes have joined to prevent exposure and condemnation of their own practices?
After China manipulated the World Health Organization’s response to COVID-19, resulting in perhaps millions of needless deaths, are we sure the UN is capable of dealing with international public health challenges?
Biden piously claimed the United States had closed its “period of relentless war” in favor of diplomacy. That must sound good to aggressors whose ambitions have previously been deterred by American power. He added, “There’s a fundamental truth of the 21st century within each of our own countries and as a global community that our own success is bound up with others succeeding as well.” It is painful to contemplate how those words must sound to people in Afghanistan.
Fortunately, the president’s promise to mire American influence in the UN’s corrupt collectivism morphed into a different approach later in his remarks, one that suggests his administration is taking more realistic steps toward defense by way of selective partnership. Biden said we must rebuild our alliances with other states that truly share our basic principles and are ready to join with us to confront common challenges—alliances like NATO and the “Quad,” consisting of Australia, India, Japan and America. To its credit, the administration is already sharing defense technology with Australia and the U.K., with the aim of countering Chinese aggression. Selective engagement is different than acting through the UN, where undemocratic states thwart meaningful initiatives that threaten their power.
America’s founding political creed affirms the universality of natural rights. Our Founders understood that the capacity for rational moral choice is common to all humanity, and is what makes us human. But they also knew that this truth is not appreciated by all; respect for universalism is not—and never will be—universal. Proponents of global institutions have often confused moral universalism with universal membership, making inclusive, collective processes the be-all and end-all of international politics. Yet this approach too often results in a destructive moral equivalence. We need to recognize the limits, and even dangers, of multilateralism in human rights and other fields, and not let it hobble principled unilateralism. This is what people around the world need from America, and what Americans need from their leaders.
Aaron Rhodes is Senior Fellow in the Common Sense Society, and President of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
