Donald Trump has repeatedly complained that no one is investigating the people investigating him, and that no one is trying to jail his political enemies. On Sept. 10, national security adviser John Bolton did his boss one better. Rather than whining, he threatened. In a speech to the Federalist Society attacking the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, Bolton said:
We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.
There’s nothing new in Bolton’s hostility to the ICC. He's mentioned it many times before. He previously waged war against it as a top official in the George W. Bush administration, and was rewarded with appointment as Bush’s UN ambassador. But there is something new in the scope of havoc his hostility could bring. As a New York Times headline put it, “U.S. Attack on I.C.C. Is Seen as Bolstering World’s Despots.”
Bolton’s speech underscores that Trump’s lawlessness is not just a matter of his own individual character but a governing principle of his regime, reflecting his long-time reliance on mob ties, both foreign and domestic, as well as his well-advertised affinity for authoritarian strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte and Kim Jong-un. The world has changed enormously since America first declared its hostility to the ICC, with the “Hague Invasion Act” of 2002, while John Bolton has not. America’s split with its Cold War allies has grown more profound, the very concept of a law-based global order is being thrown into doubt, and the president he now serves has more obvious and dangerous ends in mind.
In short, Trump’s lawlessness is institutional, not just personal, and it’s not his alone, it’s now encoded in Republican DNA. That’s not to say Trump doesn’t take it much farther than others before him have, shedding fig-leaves along the way. But it’s where they’ve been headed for a long time. Democrats’ equivocating responses have done precious little to stop them.
While Bolton’s focus may have remained relatively narrow, the Trump administration’s lawlessness has not.
“My guess is the family separation policy figured into this too,” historian William Bush tweeted, “since it violated multiple international treaties the US has signed, and one it helped create but then refused to ratify (Convention on Rights of the Child).”
“Like other observers, I’m not sure Bolton’s comments really depart all that much from past U.S. statements about the ICC,” Bush told Salon. “The family separation policy, however, does represent a brutal departure from past immigration and refugee policy – as bad as that policy has often been in the past.”
Bolton’s blunt threat reinforces earlier Trump administration statements. “Consider that in early June 2018, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for an ‘immediate halt’ to family separation, describing it as ‘an arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life’ and ‘a serious violation of the rights of the child,’” Bush pointed out. “U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley denounced the statement but no action was taken.”
Haley responded with typical Trumpian what-about-ism: “Once again, the United Nations shows its hypocrisy by calling out the United States while it ignores the reprehensible human rights records of several members of its own Human Rights Council,” she said in an official statement.
But the family separation policy was sharply at odds with 70 years of international agreements.
“The most fundamental document is, of course, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in December 1948,” Bush said. It creates a whole framework of rights that transcends national borders ("Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." — Article 6), protects immigrants ("Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." — Article 13), and asylum-seekers ("Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." — Article 14), and specifically protects mothers and children ("Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance." —Article 25).
“But I was specifically referring to the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child," Bush continued. The 1948 declaration is very broadly worded rather than a ‘binding treaty’ style document, and was intended that way by Eleanor Roosevelt, who as you know chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights that drafted the document.”
Roosevelt’s role in helping to draft that document, and subsequently spreading its message, makes it particularly illuminating to consider her as a political figure who’s the polar opposite of Trump in virtually every way: a hereditary elitist “do-gooder,” who consistently raised up the voices and concerns of those normally excluded from political power, working in collaboration with others to empower ordinary people and create enduring protective frameworks. She also — contra Trump — knew how to share or even avoid the spotlight, as in perhaps her most-remembered public act, her role in facilitating Marian Anderson’s epochal Lincoln Memorial concert, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her perform at their Washington auditorium.
“Conservatives generally viewed documents like the UDHR with suspicion, especially after the start of the Cold War,” Bush said. “Southern Democrats were especially worried about the potential application of human rights standards to the treatment of African-Americans.” But internationally-conscious leaders in both parties took a different view. “In the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Eisenhower’s DOJ submitted a briefing urging the court to consider the case ‘in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny,’” he pointed out.
Things were different after the Cold War ended. “In 1995, President Clinton signed the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, but Republicans in Congress refused to vote in favor of ratifying it, expressing concerns about US sovereignty,” Bush recalled. “As a result, the U.S. is the only nation in the world that has not ratified this critical and really very common-sense document,” he noted.
Even though the Reagan administration had helped craft it, Gingrich-era Republicans refused to sign on. “This was also the decade when the US was in the grip of a moral panic over 'superpredators' [an alleged epidemic of teenage criminals] and federal and state laws were being passed making it easier to try juveniles in adult court and subject them to adult punishments, including capital punishment,” Bush said.
As for today, he pointed out, “Two sections of this treaty stand out for their relevance to the Trump administration’s family separation policy: Article 7, which states that a child ‘has the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents,' and Article 9, which calls on member states to ‘ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will.’”
Conservatives in both parties have long “tended to opposes international human rights agreements citing infringements of U.S. sovereignty,” Bush summed up. “This has been a common theme running all the way back to Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge’s opposition to the League of Nations in 1919, which of course the US never joined, helping set the stage for the rise of Nazism and the Axis powers. There are important nuances of difference in each of these situations, but the general theme is consistent.”
Dan Nexon in as an expert in nuances when it comes to approaches to foreign relations. He’s the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly, and a Georgetown professor of government and foreign service. Where others speak glibly of an “international liberal order,” Nexon sees something far more complex, which in turn helps make sense of differences in how Americans — from conservative to progressive — have argued over it as well.
In a blog post this summer, working through ideas for a forthcoming book, Nexon wrote that trying to identify ‘the essence’ of liberal order is “a misguided, even counterproductive, approach,” simply because liberalism itself “has developed into many different flavors,” from economics to intellectual foundations to “a wide range of ways of organizing politics,” all of which carries over into the international realm.
One way of sorting through all this variety, Nexon suggests, starts with “one of the core documents of liberal international thought: Immanuel Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.’ In it, Kant concerned himself with the conditions that, he thought, would consign war to the dustbin of history,” which boil down to three factors: “a world of republics based on the rule of law that represented the interests of the middle class, robust international trade among those republics, and the formation of a federation of republics: a ‘league of nations.’”
There’s a self-reinforcing logic to how these interact, but also a basic tension between two extremes, one focused on the internal character of states (aka “liberal enlargement"), the other on the order among states (aka "intergovernmental liberalism"). Quoting from a paper he co-authored with Paul Musgrave, Nexon writes:
Whatever Kantians might think about the direction of historical processes, in practice these two extremes generate tensions with one another. For example, a commitment to intergovernmental liberalism—in the form of such principles as the recognition of sovereign equality, mutual self-restraint, and multilateral decision-making—effectively shields autocratic regimes against international pressure to liberalize their policies and institutions. A robust commitment to liberal enlargement, on the other hand, implies a relaxation of state sovereignty.
This analysis helps make sense of a wide range of specific disputes and interpretative arguments about them, and makes clear that many different sorts of “liberal order” are possible — as well as pathways in not-so-liberal directions. For example, autocratic regimes grow increasingly powerful, they may alter the intergovernmental realm, taking Russia’s recent cyber-war attacks on Western democracies as an example.
Turning back to Bolton’s speech last week, Nexon sees it as “a continuation of the stance taken by the Bush administration,” pointing to the Hague Invasion Act, and explaining, “There’s a stream of neoconservative thought that holds that the U.S., as a ‘liberal hegemon,’ cannot be bound by the same rules as other states. Those rules easily become ‘weapons of the weak’ to undermine the ability of the U.S. to uphold liberal order.” At the same time, he notes, “There’s also a strain of conservative nationalism which rejects outright perceived infringements on U.S. sovereignty.” So-called paleoconservatives, roughly in line with Steve Bannon, have traditionally taken this view.
Bolton’s ICC attack is less novel than it might seem, Nexon thinks. “It might feel more disruptive because it’s not paired with other commitments to international liberalism, as it was in the Bush administration, which also ripped up treaties and tried to impose tariffs, but did have the freedom agenda,” Nexon said. “So it’s ‘Bolton unleashed’ on his hobgoblins without much to restrain him.
“Bolton’s fiercely opposed to international organizations, laws, and agreements that he sees as infringing on sovereignty,” he added. “I’m not an expert on his worldview, but he strikes me as more of a conservative nationalist than a neoconservative.”
In fact, there was more of an intermixture of those two perspectives under George W. Bush than anyone seemed to realize. Tellingly, while Bush himself went out of his way not to demonize Islam — having strong family ties with the Saudi royal family — the neocon endless war he launched helped fuel the growth of a vast demonizing network, as described by Christopher Bail in his book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream” (Salon interview here). Bolton was far from being the only figure who seemed able to make sense to both factions, to varying degrees.
One framework for considering Eleanor Roosevelt’s contribution is the moral dichotomy social scientists call “harm/care.” The study of moral development began with Lawrence Kohlberg’s justice-based stages of development, which had Kantian roots. Motivated by gender differences, Carol Gilligan’s “In a Different Voice” introduced a second, care-based framework. Jonathan Haidt subsequently added three more frameworks, advancing a modular view of morality. More recent work by Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray shows that perceived harm underlies moralizing across values. Thus, harm — and care, its prevention or redress — is central to human morality, without denying the diversity of moral concerns.
That outlook can be directly observed in the content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was articulated by Eleanor Roosevelt in “This Troubled World,” before the outbreak of World War II, and “The Moral Basis of Democracy,” before America’s entry into the war. The book’s description explains:
With the threat of the Third Reich looming, Eleanor Roosevelt employs the history of human rights to establish the idea that at the core of democracy is a spiritual responsibility to other citizens. Roosevelt then calls on all Americans, especially the youth, to prioritize the well-being of others and have faith that their fellow citizens will protect them in return. She defines this trust between people as a trait of true democracy.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of anyone as opposite to Donald Trump as Eleanor Roosevelt. What’s more, by articulating a reciprocity of care she put forth an even stronger foundation than Kant. If we continue to let ourselves lose touch with that vision, there's a serious possibility of a dramatically different world order emerging — one much closer in spirit to Putin and Trump than Kant and Roosevelt. So I asked Nexon, “How seriously should we take that possibility?”
“Pretty seriously,” Nexon said. “Trump’s created more distrust in U.S. commitments to key institutions and democratic allies than people may realize. He’s emboldening factions within Europe that would like to play off Russia against the Western European democracies and the U.S..”
But that may only be the beginning, Nexon warned. “He can do a lot more damage if he decides to let loose. The result could be that he at least accelerates a return to spheres of influence within a system that retains elements of liberal multilateralism,” he said, adding, “China’s likely to be a much more important player in global ordering than Russia over the next 10 to 20 years.”
As dire as this future might turn out to be — not just eroding US power, but diminishing personal freedom across the globe — there is another possibility: that developments under Trump help make a very different future more possible.
Nexon recently wrote a piece in Foreign Policy called "Toward a Neo-Progressive Foreign Policy", which suggested that by focusing forward rather than backward on these post-World War II era disputes, it's possible to conceive of a more unified progressive foreign policy that overcomes long-standing deep divides (Cold War liberals vs. anti-interventionists, in simplistic shorthand).
I asked him how a response to the Trump administration's lawlessness — as represented by Bolton, for example — might play a role in clarifying or helping to develop that more unified view.
“I think that Trumpism highlights how the alternative to some kind of liberal (or, better, progressive) internationalism is likely to be very bad for progressive values,” Nexon said. “More militarism, more imperialism, more oligarchy, more inequality and less respect for international law, human rights and so forth. It’s no longer about neoconservatives, but about conservative nationalism and ‘America First.’ At the same time, the more aggressive forms of liberal internationalism and the more “neoliberal” variants of liberal internationalism are looking less attractive. This provides some room for a progressive internationalist alternative. I hope.”
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