The Trump administration continues to abandon human rights and democracy as elements of its foreign policy. On July 17, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to stop commenting on the fairness of foreign elections, and to simply congratulate the winners. This reverses decades of U.S. practice, in which Washington regularly expressed its opposition to stolen or farcical votes.
The new policy follows other moves to eliminate tools that promote democracy and human rights. The administration has tried to end funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, established under Ronald Reagan. (Full disclosure: I’m on the organization’s board of directors.) It is also working to demolish Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (broadcasting to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East), Radio Martí (Cuba), Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America. All these organizations seek to advance U.S. interests by advancing U.S. values. High among these are democracy and human rights.
The Trump administration continues to abandon human rights and democracy as elements of its foreign policy. On July 17, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to stop commenting on the fairness of foreign elections, and to simply congratulate the winners. This reverses decades of U.S. practice, in which Washington regularly expressed its opposition to stolen or farcical votes.
The new policy follows other moves to eliminate tools that promote democracy and human rights. The administration has tried to end funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, established under Ronald Reagan. (Full disclosure: I’m on the organization’s board of directors.) It is also working to demolish Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (broadcasting to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East), Radio Martí (Cuba), Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America. All these organizations seek to advance U.S. interests by advancing U.S. values. High among these are democracy and human rights.
The administration instead seems to be returning to a narrow version of realism in foreign policy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summarized this thinking in a speech in Singapore on May 31. “[T]he United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past,” he said. “We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace or adopt policies or ideologies. … We want to work with you where our shared interests align.”
Pegging relations with countries based on shared interests and setting aside shared values—avoiding a “moralistic and preachy approach,” as Hegseth put it—attracts a strong following in the MAGA movement and beyond, including among progressives who consider U.S. efforts to promote democracy to be hypocritical—not least due to the failures and frustrations of supposed attempts to advance democracy by force in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hegseth, Rubio (despite his past support for human rights and democracy), and other senior administration figures, such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, all seem to be in retrenchment mode. Values are a luxury, their version of realism seems to say: The United States cannot afford universalist causes, such as democracy, but must look after its immediate strategic and economic interests in a rough world.
Members of the U.S. delegation, including Kissinger (front left), pose with Chinese hosts at the Great Wall of China on Oct. 22, 1971.White House via CNP/Getty Images
U.S. strategy has embraced this kind of retrenchment before. In a time of frustration over the increasingly disastrous course of the Vietnam War—a previous generation’s “forever war” that would end in demoralizing defeat in 1975—then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, backed by President Richard Nixon, developed a tough-minded, realist foreign policy to stem what they considered U.S. decline. It included detente with the Soviet Union, then still in full repressive mode; outreach to China, still under the violent tyranny of Mao Zedong; and the Nixon Doctrine, which posited that the United States would avoid direct involvement in conflicts around the world and delegate that work to reliable allies. The poster child for the Nixon Doctrine was the Shah of Iran, who had fashioned himself as a modernizing authoritarian who could help stabilize the Middle East (and was a major purchaser of U.S. arms) while ruling in repressive fashion.
Kissinger’s version of realism seemed to fit the times. U.S. military involvement in Vietnam had been sold to the American people in the name of a universal fight against communism, but by the late 1960s—with more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam and military casualties far higher than anything subsequently experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan—Americans were in no mood to follow President John F. Kennedy’s call to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe,” as he put it in his 1961 inaugural address.
Kissinger’s realism was certainly no “moralistic and preachy approach.” Detente with Moscow generated strategic stability through arms control, a significant achievement. But Kissinger was willing to accept the Kremlin’s terms: He and Nixon downplayed human rights in the Soviet Union and (unsuccessfully) opposed congressional efforts to pressure the Kremlin to allow limited emigration to the West. Even more, Kissinger tacitly accepted continued Soviet control of one-third of Europe. The 1972 U.S.-Soviet declaration that covered various aspects of their relations made no mention of human rights or the Iron Curtain. This was an excellent deal for the Kremlin.
Nixon showed little interest in Moscow’s repression of countries in its European empire—nor of its own people—and he was hardly alone. Lyndon Johnson had shown scant interest in Czechoslovakia, even when Soviet forces brutally invaded it in August 1968 to crush its reformist communist government. Dwight Eisenhower barely reacted to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Outside Europe, Kissinger opposed the spread of Soviet power in much of the world, although with mixed results: He deftly elbowed the Soviets out of the Middle East but over-invested in the shah, whose repression at home ultimately proved his undoing. Kissinger also encouraged the bloody coup in 1973 that ousted Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende.
Brzezinski holds a machine gun as he talks to a soldier at Pakistan’s Khyber Pass, near the border with Afghanistan, on Feb. 3, 1980.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
President Jimmy Carter and his chief foreign-policy strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, practiced a different sort of foreign-policy realism: a politics of power based on universal values. Like the Nixon-Kissinger approach, they supported arms control with the Soviet Union and deepened U.S. outreach to Beijing, including by normalizing relations and breaking formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. In perhaps their most Kissingerian realist decision—and, as it turned out, most catastrophic mistake—they maintained strong reliance on the shah, missing signs of his political weakness until it was too late. In Carter’s boldest and most successful gambit, he oversaw normalization of Israeli-Egyptian relations with the Camp David Accords.
In two critical areas, however, Carter and Brzezinski broke with Nixon and Kissinger. One was Carter’s emphasis on human rights as a core U.S. interest; the other was Brzezinski’s use of human rights and democratic freedoms to challenge the Soviet Union and the Soviet empire. Some of this was symbolic: At Kissinger’s recommendation, President Gerald Ford had not met with exiled Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which might have antagonized Moscow. Carter, however, followed Brzezinski’s advice early in his presidency and met with Vladimir Bukovsky, another exiled Soviet dissident.
Beyond such symbolic gestures, the shift to a values-based realism had profound consequences. Carter’s presidency coincided with the rise of democratic dissent in the Soviet Union—including in the Baltic republics and Ukraine—and Soviet-dominated Europe, especially Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Poland’s Solidarity movement sprang up in 1980, when democratic dissidents joined with striking shipyard workers and soon had millions of members.
Carter and Brzezinski, unlike their predecessors, supported these movements. They backed Solidarity and, through that support, showed their active interest in Poland’s ultimate liberation from Soviet rule. When the Soviet Union appeared on the verge of invading Poland to put down Solidarity, Brzezinski orchestrated warnings to the Soviet leadership that the United States would react, and he worked with Pope John Paul II, a shrewd and charismatic Polish cleric who was highly popular in his home country, to that end.
This was a profound break from the Nixon-Kissinger policy: Washington would no longer tacitly recognize a Soviet sphere of domination but would support those challenging it from within. Later, President Ronald Reagan’s full-throated support for Solidarity and Polish freedom, as well as his famous 1987 exhortation in Berlin—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—have rightly captured admiration. But it was all a continuation of the democracy and human rights policy Brzezinski had put in place.
Brzezinski and Kissinger at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Oslo on Dec. 11, 2016. Terje Bendiksby/AFP via Getty Images
By the end of the 1970s, there were many comparisons made between Kissinger and Brzezinski, two great U.S. statesmen of that generation. Edward Luce’s masterful new biography of Brzezinski, Zbig, covers some of that ground. I was a student of Brzezinski’s in the mid-1970s and worked closely with him while I was in government (a tenure that spanned from the Carter administration to the early weeks of Trump’s first term, including as U.S. ambassador to Poland) and can add to the comparison.
As refugees from European tyrannies, both Kissinger and Brzezinski were outsiders to the then-WASP foreign-policy establishment. Both became passionate patriots who believed in U.S. power and leadership in the world. And both were realistic about need for hard power and hard choices.
Their differences, however, were profound. Kissinger placed his trust in order and the regimes that would maintain it against chaos, violence, and the virulent ideologies that brought them about. His famous 1957 book, A World Restored, was an homage to the 19th-century Austrian statesman and strategist Klemens von Metternich, who loathed patriotism, national self-determination, and the other forces unleashed by the French Revolution. Kissinger’s grand strategy seemed infused with a historical pessimism about the United States’ chances in its struggle with communism, the staying power of democracy, and the value of human rights.
Brzezinski was closer to the Polish political tradition, which first emerged at the close of the 18th century and linked Poland’s national cause with the struggle for democracy at home and abroad. The brilliant Polish military engineer, general, and statesman Tadeusz Kosciuszko fought in the American Revolution because he identified its cause with that of his own country, which was then under threat from Austria, Prussia, and especially Russia. For similar reasons, Polish General Jozef Bem fought with the Hungarians in their 1848-49 national uprising against Austria, until his defeat by the Russian troops that Vienna had invited to crush the rebellion. The Polish slogan from that era—“for your freedom and ours”—encapsulates a tradition of solidarity with nations struggling for freedom. It is still being used today, including in support of Polish aid to Ukraine.
If Polish longing for universal democracy is sometimes dismissed as a particularly Polish version of romantic idealism, Brzezinski was anything but an idealist. He believed in power. But he respected the power of universal values linked with national patriotism to help nations resist Soviet power in a way that Kissinger did not seem to. Brzezinski wielded values as an instrument of U.S. power against Soviet communism and, as a result, started going on the ideological offense in the Cold War.
Kissinger and Brzezinski represented two versions of realism. Kissinger’s was the realism of respect for immediate power, and he tended to defer to it. Brzezinski’s was a realism that recognized the longer-term power of human aspirations for both national and individual freedom. Kissinger seemed to get the better of the argument for many years, and his approach still resonates with today’s skeptics of U.S. power and values. But Brzezinski’s approach of backing human rights and national aspirations in the face of Soviet communism proved prophetic and ultimately effective. His and Carter’s views on democracy and human rights in foreign policy easily crossed party lines into Reagan’s agenda of promoting freedom. Their backing of patriotic movements tied to democratic values proved more realistic than Kissinger’s assumption that the oppressive Soviet empire had to be accommodated indefinitely.
Brzezinski’s realism informed by universal values seems closer to the United States’ political creed as a nation founded on the basis of principles that apply “to all man and all times,” as Abraham Lincoln insisted. Eschewing the foundational principles of the United States as “moralistic and preachy” and embracing power as the only tool of U.S. foreign policy may suit the cynical and transactional temperament of the times. But a foreign-policy realism informed by respect for what the hero of this summer’s blockbuster stands for—“truth, justice, and the American way”—seems as appropriate and promising as it was in Brzezinski’s day.
