Joe Biden took office with human rights campaigners breathing a sigh of relief that the Donald Trump years were over.
But he will leave office accused of promoting human rights only where they coincide with Washington’s strategic interests, according to a damning new assessment.
‘Instead of treating the U.S. commitment to its values as a source of strength, the administration behaved as though its own stated principles were an albatross around its neck,’ writes Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, in Foreign Affairs.
‘Instead of leveraging U.S. power to advance human rights abroad, Biden hesitated to confront allies about their abuses.
‘The administration downplayed concerns about international legal norms, and by the end of his term, Biden was sending antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine—even though a global ban on the weapons had been in place for decades—and sending arms to Israel’s government despite its serious violations of the laws of war in Gaza.’
Biden leaves office on Monday, at the end of a 50-year political career in which he often emphasized his expertise in foreign policy.
Trump will take his place, raising concerns that human rights will take second place (if that) to his America First agenda.
But with conflict still raging in Gaza and Ukraine, Biden’s scorecard is little better, according to Human Rights Watch.
President Joe Biden delivered a major foreign policy speech at the State Department on Monday, when he said he left the nation in a better place than when he took office
Smoke rises from a building destroyed in Israeli airstrike at the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on January 12, 2025
On Monday, he delivered a valedictory foreign policy speech, saying that the nation was in a better place now than when he took office.
‘The United States is winning the worldwide competition compared to four years ago. America is stronger,’ he said.
‘Our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We have not gone to war to make these things happen.’
He delivered his words at the State Department, where he set out his plans four years earlier at the start of his term.
Back then he told staffers that ‘upholding universal rights’ was the ‘grounding wire of our global policy, our global power’; rights, he said, were the United States’ ‘inexhaustible source of strength,’ points out Yager.
Initially he lived up to those promises, she continues, rejoining the UN Human Rights Council and removing Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court.
Then something changed. By 2022, Biden was travelling to Saudi Arabia, which he had promised to make a ‘pariah’ state for murdering a Washington Post columnist, to give its autocratic de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, a fist bump.
And while the State Department has designated the war in Sudan as a genocide, Biden has cozied up to leaders in the United Arab Emirates who are accused of supplying arms to the most brutal side in the conflict, the Rapid Support Forces.
Biden’s decision to greet Mohamed bin Salman with a fist bump in Saudi Arabia horrified campaigners who point out his role in the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi
A US CBU-89/B Gator Mine, a 1000lb cluster munition containing anti-tank and anti-personnel mines of the sort in US stockpiles
‘From a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes little sense for the United States to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid to contain the fallout of a festering conflict when it could prevent further starvation and suffering through less costly diplomatic means,’ says Yager.
And having campaigned on a promise to move on from the Trump years with a strong commitment to human rights, she continues, he flunked the opportunity once he was in power.
‘The damage Trump may do to the cause of human rights could create a temptation to look back on the Biden era with nostalgia,’ she writes.
‘But those rose-colored glasses would obscure the real picture.
‘As global power shifts, democratic values are the United States’ enduring comparative advantage. Biden claimed to understand this, but he abandoned his own strategy at a critical time.’
