We must support human rights

Some years ago, I heard Natan Sharansky, the human rights icon, recount how he and his fellow refuseniks in the Soviet Union took renewed courage from statements made on their behalf by former United States president Ronald Reagan. Word had reached the gulag that the leader of the most powerful nation on earth had spoken in defence of their right to self-determination. America, personified by its president, gave them hope, and hope is a powerful defence against oppression.

As I listened to Sharansky, I was reminded how much it had meant to my fellow prisoners of war and me when we heard from new additions to our ranks that the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, had often defended our cause, demanded our humane treatment and encouraged Americans not to forget us. In their continuous efforts to infect us with despair and dissolve our attachment to our country, our North Vietnamese captors insisted the American government and people had forgotten us. We were on our own, they taunted, and at their mercy. We clung to evidence to the contrary, and let it nourish our hope that we would go home one day with our honour intact.

That hope was the mainstay of our resistance. Many, maybe most of us, might have given in to despair and ransomed our honour for relief from abuse, had we truly believed we had been forgotten by our government and countrymen.

In a recent address to US State Department employees, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said conditioning our foreign policy too heavily on values creates obstacles to advance our national interests. With those words, Tillerson sent a message to oppressed people everywhere: Don’t look to the US for hope. Our values make us sympathetic to your plight, and, when it’s convenient, we might officially express that sympathy. But we make policy to serve our interests, which are not related to our values. So, if you happen to be in the way of our forging relationships with your oppressors that could serve our security and economic interests, good luck to you. You’re on your own.

There are those who will credit Tillerson’s point of view as a straightforward if graceless elucidation of a foreign policy based on realism. If by realism they mean policy that is rooted in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, they couldn’t be more wrong.

I consider myself a realist. I have certainly seen my share of the world as it really is and not how I wish it would be. What I’ve learned is that it is foolish to view realism and idealism as incompatible or to consider our power and wealth as encumbered by the demands of justice, morality and conscience.

In the real world, as lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty is reality. By denying this experience, we deny the aspirations of billions of people, and invite their enduring resentment.

America didn’t invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: Nations, cultures and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them. Human rights exist above the state and beyond history. They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. They inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be abridged, they can never be extinguished.

America is a country with a conscience. It has for long believed that moral concerns must be an essential part of its foreign policy, not a departure from it. It is the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from its political and economic values. America has grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules. More of humanity than ever before lives in freedom and out of poverty because of those rules. For Americans, their values are their strength and greatest treasure. They are distinguished from other countries because they are not made from a land or tribe or particular race or creed, but from an ideal that liberty is the inalienable right of mankind and in accord with nature and nature’s Creator.

To view foreign policy as simply transactional is more dangerous than its proponents realise. Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in. It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.

Were they not, America would be one great power among the others of history. It would acquire wealth and power for a time, before receding into the disputed past. But America is a more exceptional country than that. It saw the world as it was and made it better.

— New York Times News Service

John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona.