The Human Rights vs. National Security Dilemma Is a Fallacy

Advocacy organizations can't protect human rights without challenging U.S. military support for tyrants and the corrupt influence of the defense industry and foreign governments.

Insisting that Washington put human rights first is premised on the notion that governments have to balance the competing interests of human rights and national security interests and then choose (or prioritize) one or the other.

Either the United States must secure its interests by protecting the rights and security of U.S. citizens—so the argument goes—or choose to respect the rights of citizens of other countries. This false choice is sometimes presented as a dilemma, but if the choice is framed this way, there's really no contest: It's any government's primary duty to protect the security and interests of its citizens. And, as a result, demands to prioritize human rights fail out of the gate.

Of course, the U.S. government is perfectly capable of ensuring the security of its own citizens without befriending tyrants, selling arms to autocrats, and trampling on the human rights of others—but advocates rarely make this argument.

Instead, the human rights advocacy community has internalized this manufactured dilemma in its rhetoric and writing. Amnesty International "calls on Congress to prioritize human rights in National Defense Authorization Act legislation" in a September 2021 press release, while another missive to the U.S. government argues "no government should sacrifice people's human rights in the name of national security."

The Carnegie Endowment issued a thoughtful paper on U.S. support for abusive governments but framed it in the context of the "democracy-security dilemma" where "confronting partner governments over their political shortcomings risks triggering hostility that would jeopardize the security benefits that such governments provide to Washington."

To the apparent surprise of some, the Biden administration has very rapidly broken its own oft-repeated pledge to put human rights at the "core" of its foreign policy, inviting a tsunami of critical op-eds and letters from rights groups. But there really was no reason to believe the administration would do otherwise, faced with the unquestioned "national security" interests, the sirens of lucrative arms sales, and global military domination.

U.S. President Joe Biden's promise wasn't really about prioritizing human rights against traditional rivals and enemies, where there's little to give up by doing so. Sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and even Russia and China (to name just a few of the at least 25 countries the U.S. government sanctions), along with congressional resolutions and State Department condemnations, are beloved by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

The heart of the contested sphere in the supposed rights versus interests dilemma is Washington's military and political support to brutal governments, most prominently in the Middle East (described as America's "partners," "friends," and sometimes even "allies"), that citizens are told serve U.S. interests.

Only by challenging the validity of these claimed national interests—and the credibility and legitimacy of those championing these interests—do rights advocates stand a chance of changing dangerous and harmful U.S. policies that wreak havoc on human rights around the globe. The advocacy community must affirmatively opt in to the political debates about U.S. security interests, military hegemony, and warmongering—and openly challenge the double-dealing government officials who direct U.S. policy in the service of foreign and domestic lobbying interests.

These U.S. wars were failures not just because of bad civilian policy decisions to go to war but because of flawed military execution, command, and control. What's worse is the evidence of decades of lies from U.S. military commanders about how badly the wars were going: lies the world heard about Iraq, including claims of weapons of mass destruction in the country by the late Gen. Colin Powell, then secretary of state and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and lies about how well things were going in Afghanistan, year in, year out, from the likes of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus.

More recently, the New York Times documented how the Pentagon dismissed evidence of civilian casualties during the war against the Islamic State in 1,300 confidential assessments of airstrikes, the vast majority of which were apparently bogus; the evidence in these strikes in fact revealed "patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution" that the Pentagon was only too eager to brush aside.

It's also hard to understand the persistent deference to military and security experts given the increasing corruption and conflicts of interest that compromise the trustworthiness of their advice. The influence of the military-industrial complex has been around for a long time, but the expansion of defense industry lobbying spending—totaling over $108 million in 2020 and $2.5 billion in the last two decades—is breathtaking. Around half of the ever-expanding budget for defense is spent on the very companies doing the bulk of the lobbying, a testament to their success.

At the same time, a virtually unregulated revolving door to the defense industry means U.S. military and security officials plan future careers at Raytheon and General Dynamics while holding their budgeting pens in the Pentagon. A stunning 73 percent of the 663 lobbyists employed by defense companies in 2020 formerly worked for the federal government.

While that revolving door previously opened only to American defense contractors, there's now a growing group of U.S. security officials finding more lucrative foreign government paymasters, selling their tradecraft of warfare, surveillance, spying, and sabotage to Arab monarchs and emirs, who then seek to target, harass, and even murder lawyers, journalists, and activists, even inside the United States.

Proposed amendments to the 2022 Intelligence Authorization Act would include some limits, such as, for example, barring senior intelligence officials from working for foreign governments for 30 months after leaving their jobs and requiring they disclose their new jobs. But this will do little to curtail the bad behavior.

In the face of such questions, the human rights community prefers to yield to supposed military and security experts, reserving intervention only for the inevitable human rights violations that follow flawed policy decisions. But there is no reason why the advocacy community has, or should have, any less expertise on these questions; there's really no special science to the answers. Yet dodging the discussion means being perpetually absent at the decision-making table with no systemic strategy to address the country's broader policy flaws.

There's also something more profound at play in the reluctance of human rights groups to fundamentally question purported U.S. national security interests. When the collective starting point is a realpolitik acquiescence to global U.S. military supremacy in a world of superpower rivalry, it's hard to dispute an arguable national security interest in any dark alley of the planet. When no organizations question why the United States has troops in 159 countries around the world as part of their human rights advocacy, there's little space to challenge the conflicts those troops precipitate and prolong, the local political and cultural destabilization they incite, or even the security harms they create by endangering U.S. soldiers.

If the U.S. military carries out a particularly egregious abuse against civilians, human rights organizations will certainly condemn it, like the recent drone attack on a car full of children in Afghanistan, but there will be no questioning of the justification for the presence of U.S. drones there in the first place.

There's a parallel dereliction of duty when it comes to addressing the corrosive influence of lobbying for foreign government interests in the U.S. political system. The pro-Israel community funds elected officials across the country, both Republicans and Democrats, at the state and federal level. Meanwhile, former senior U.S. government officials now serve as Egyptian government lobbyists. And there is persistent petrodollar lobbying and elections infiltration from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's top weapons clients.

Alongside the defense industry, these countries' official lobbyists and their unofficial allies manufacture the notion that billions of dollars in military support to these abusive governments and entanglement in their costly and destabilizing conflicts—even going so far as to propose a defense pact with the UAE late last year—is somehow in the United States' national security interest.

But the human rights community looks away from these systemic issues, inexplicably deeming them outside its mandate, keeping its attention focused narrowly on where the bombs drop and how many civilians are killed and injured, year in, year out, with no discernible impact beyond the passing headlines and no questioning of why the planes and bombs were there to begin with and whether they should have been.

The least plausible, sometimes comic, justifications the lobbyists gin up, dutifully echoed by Washington's foreign-government-funded think tanks, are often accepted without challenge. Washington needs to give Egypt billions of dollars because it's "in a tough neighborhood" and played an "effective" role in the last Gaza cease-fire. Billions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia's reckless and murderous crown prince will counter Iran's influence, maintain U.S. leverage over the Yemen war, and keep oil prices down. The UAE is vital because it helped resettle many Afghans and is a vital partner in regional stability.

Israel tends to escape the national security rationale entirely; there, the explanation is that Americans supposedly share Israel's values despite its apartheid rule over millions of Palestinians, endless theft of their land and resources, and relentless bombardment of their communities, but Washington's commitment is "unbreakable," "sacrosanct," and "unquestionable."

Put aside for the moment that these exact arguments could be used to justify a close alliance with any country in the world, whether Iran (which is also in a "tough neighborhood," has housed millions of Afghan refugees for decades, and has oil), or Venezuela (which has oil and gas), or Cuba (with its unrealized trade and tourism potential). But since the human rights community never questions the proffered security interests, all that's left is a futile plea to "prioritize" human rights over interests.

In fact, though some advocates pretend otherwise, human rights and humanitarian law deliberately grant plenty of room for flexible, politically motivated interpretations. There is extensive scholarship on how the laws of war were drafted effectively to protect the ability of powerful states to wage war as they see fit, with little beyond victor's justice for accountability. There's also no paucity of laws that purport to restrict the transfers of weapons to abusive governments or limit the U.S. government's ability to wage war, which rights groups rarely invoke.

Furthermore, human rights groups could demand "objective" laws to regulate lobbyists and legislators, which would impose constraints on their work if it harms human rights. In the end, the reason that even clear-cut human rights treaties and laws of war are often ignored by governments, including in the United States, is precisely due to the broader political questions that advocates imagine they can avoid.

The idea that human rights advocacy is free from politics is far-fetched. The idea that advocates can ever win on the law without addressing the political questions that underlie national security calculations is pure fantasy.

A better strategy would recognize, and argue, that promoting rights-respecting policies and national security interests are not separate buckets of competing priorities, but fundamentally interlinked. Human rights groups can't take on the human rights harms the United States causes without challenging the supposed security interests used to justify these harms.

The American people will forever be entrapped in wars that butcher civilians abroad and wound the country's soldiers so long as Washington remains allied to aggressive rulers who seek to dominate and destroy threats to their unjust rule. It will never be enough to argue that the U.S. government should merely conduct its wars humanely. Americans will remain complicit in the brutality of rulers who rely on both U.S. weapons and political protection to avoid accountability for their misdeeds. There is no leverage to be had with rulers who will sooner burn their bridges with America than undertake what will always be zero-sum reforms that threaten their rule.

So long as human rights advocates allow U.S. government officials to sell their support and eventually their labor to the highest bidder, no one should ever expect them to prioritize the interests of the American people, much less the human rights of people impacted abroad. Reforming lobbying laws, conflict of interest laws, and revolving door laws are more essential to U.S. national security and the human rights of billions of people abroad than advocating for any new human rights treaty.

The human rights community can continue to opt out of these so-called political discussions—but they should then be prepared to see continued failure when it comes to their pleas to "prioritize" human rights. The costs of this failure—by way of U.S.-sponsored death, destruction, and terror—are borne primarily by millions of people abroad who have little say at all in the debate, but they are also borne by millions of Americans whose government has surrendered to rampant corruption.