Earlier this month, the Biden administration appointed Elliott Abrams to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The position is obscure but Abrams is not. During the last cold war, Abrams — more than perhaps any other U.S. official — used the language of human rights to excuse the crushing of those same rights. Now, as America descends into a new cold war, the Biden administration seems poised to do the same thing.
Abrams grew up a Democrat. He left the party after Vietnam, when Democrats like President Jimmy Carter began to question whether the U.S. should continue arming dictators, orchestrating coups and waging wars in the world’s poorest countries to prevent leftist movements from taking power. Carter, who had been deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, tried instead to promote human rights in countries across the ideological spectrum. He did so inconsistently, and with mixed results. But he was the first U.S. president to try.
While traditional conservatives distrusted the new focus on human rights, Abrams urged Republicans to turn that language into a weapon against communism.
Horrified, Abrams joined the Reagan administration and formulated a plan to fight back. While traditional conservatives distrusted the new focus on human rights, Abrams urged Republicans to turn that language into a weapon against communism. As the American University political scientist William LeoGrande has explained, Abrams believed that “communist governments were the worst human rights violators in the world” and thus “virtually anything done to prevent communists from coming to power (or to overthrow them) was justifiable on human rights grounds.”
Abrams ascended the ranks of Reagan’s State Department to become assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs. The job gave him dominion over Central America, a region long controlled by tiny elites of European descent that treated their country’s Indigenous and mixed-race populations like chattel. But that deeply rooted oppression wasn’t Abrams’ concern. For him, every peasant rebellion was a potential beachhead for Moscow. And virtually anything the region’s oligarchs did to put those rebellions down constituted a victory for human rights.
In Guatemala, Abrams argued for resuming arms sales to President Efraín Ríos Montt because he had “brought considerable progress” on human rights. Mott was later convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court for his effort to wipe out his country’s Maya Ixil Indians. Abrams also urged policymakers to go easy on Honduran Gen. José Abdenego Bueso Rosa, who was arrested for trying to overthrow the country’s civilian government, and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who’d ordered the decapitation of activist Hugo Spadafora. Why? Because both men supported the anti-communist Contra rebels in nearby Nicaragua. (When Noriega later fell out with the U.S., Abrams pushed for the invasion that overthrew him.) For Abrams, the logic was simple: If despots like Bueso Rosa and Noriega were helping America fight communism, they were ultimately on democracy’s side.
Nowhere was Abram’s twisted logic more clearly on display than in El Salvador. In December 1981, an American-trained unit of the Salvadoran military murdered — often in grotesque ways — 800 people in the village of El Mozote. Abrams called reports of the killings “not credible.” The Reagan administration tried to discredit the reporters who had broken the story. Aryeh Neier, vice chairman of the activist human rights group Americas Watch (which later became part of Human Rights Watch) called Abrams “an apologist for gross abuses of human rights, particularly in El Salvador.”
Later in the 1980s, Abrams concluded that certain dictators were so illegitimate that supporting them actually increased the chances of communist revolution. In 1986 he pushed the Reagan administration, which had initially embraced Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, to oppose bank loans to his government. But this was the exception. For the most part, noted Patricia Derian, who was Carter’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, Abrams used human rights as “propaganda” for America’s cold war allies.
Abrams remains unrepentant. He has called Reagan’s El Salvador policy a “fabulous achievement.” His argument is that because El Salvador never went communist and held democratic elections, U.S. policy there constituted a triumph for human rights. But many countries — including many former communist ones — embraced democracy during the “third wave” of democratization that swept the globe in the 1980s and ’90s. And they did so without the horror that El Salvador endured along the way, in large part because of the policies Abrams promoted. The country’s civil war took the lives of 75,000 people, 95 percent of them killed by government forces. And as the Migration Policy Institute has observed, “The civil war left behind a militarized society” whose chronic violence haunts the country to this day.
What does all this have to do with the Biden administration? Unfortunately, quite a lot. The United States is entering a second cold war, this time against China. The Trump administration announced as much when it declared in its 2017 National Security Strategy that “great power competition” has “returned.” But Trump didn’t cloak that great power competition in the language of human rights. At times, he even derided the notion that America was morally superior to its adversaries. (“You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump scoffed at Bill O’Reilly after the then-Fox News hosted called Vladimir Putin a “killer.”)
As president, Biden has instead followed Abrams’ strategy: Embrace any regime that can be lured to America’s side.
Biden and his team consider that a grave mistake. They believes that in a contest against authoritarian powers like Russia and China, democracy and human rights constitute a key U.S. advantage. Biden has repeatedly said that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.” His administration hosted a “Summit for Democracy” to which Moscow and Beijing were pointedly not invited.
But there’s a clear tension between supporting democracy and fighting cold wars. If you try even tepidly, as Carter did, to support human rights in friendly countries, you risk alienating or undermining their governments. At first, Biden seemed willing to take that gamble. On the campaign trail, he pledged to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and treat the regime’s despotic government as a “pariah.” He said there would be “no more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator,’” Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sissi. The 2020 Democratic platform pledged to “ensure that our alliances with Thailand and the Philippines live up to the values that our peoples share.” But as president, Biden has instead followed Abrams’ strategy: embrace any regime that can be lured to America’s side in the cold war, no matter how many people it imprisons and kills, while simultaneously trumpeting America’s moral superiority over its great power foes. Biden last year broke his campaign pledge and approved the sale of more than $3 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. In 2021, he bypassed instructions from Congress and refused to withhold $300 million from America’s annual aid package to Egypt, even though El-Sissi has imprisoned an estimated 65,000 people for political offenses. Biden has placed no restrictions on arms sales to the Philippines, even though, according to Amnesty International, “repression of dissent” has “intensified” under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. And most recently, Biden last month held a state dinner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who is turning the world’s largest democracy into its largest autocracy. When asked at their joint news conference about Modi’s “targeting of religious minorities” and “crackdown on dissent in India,” Biden praised the country’s “open, tolerant, robust debate”— even though Modi’s allies recently engineered the conviction of India’s opposition leader. The reason is simple: Biden sees India and the Philippines as useful partners in America’s effort to contain China. He worries that Riyadh could tilt toward Beijing. The administration believes it has no alternative: Arming and feting autocrats is unfortunate but besting China comes first. The assumption — which generally goes unstated — is that America’s new cold war is a necessity, forced upon Washington by Beijing or by the iron laws of international affairs. It’s not a choice. And since the cold war is inevitable, almost anything America does is morally justified so long as it helps us win. I suspect Elliott Abrams will enjoy his service on Biden’s public diplomacy advisory commission. Given the president’s approach to human rights, he should feel right at home.
Peter Beinart
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. 
