This might sound harsh to Biden stans. The president, after all, is an empathetic figure. He has
experienced personal tragedies, and he certainly talks the talk about helping the oppressed. Besides, doesn’t every president compromise on human rights? Especially in morally tangled cases that affect U.S. national security?
Since taking the Oval Office, Biden has often put his view of U.S. national security and the political scene ahead of rights’ activists demands, especially if he calculates he can weather the blowback. (See: his eventual willingness to engage with
Mohammed bin Salman despite the Saudi strongman’s poor rights record; his seesawing on whether to reduce
military aid to Egypt; and his early decision on where to set the
U.S. refugee admissions cap, a topic on which Biden miscalculated.)
Still, the past 4½ months have been shattering for many Biden supporters. After all, he had pledged to make human rights
a central part of his foreign policy and return the U.S. to the stronger global moral standing it had prior to Donald Trump’s presidency.
In talks with nearly a dozen activists in recent days, I’ve been struck by the sense of betrayal some — especially in Arab American and Muslim American communities — feel over Biden’s unwillingness to change U.S. policy to pressure Israel to stop its military operation in Gaza. As the humanitarian crisis there deepens, some accuse Biden of not valuing Palestinian lives. Many plan to express their anger at the ballot box, including
by not voting for Biden during Tuesday’s primary in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab American population.
“Maybe he was feeding us lies,” said Yasmine Taeb, an Iranian American and prominent progressive who has frequently engaged the Biden team on rights-related issues. “It’s very painful.”
But nobody should be surprised.
For decades, Biden has been willing to de-prioritize human rights, even if it means he looks uncaring. He’s often explained that he’s serving the U.S. national interest, but he also appears keenly aware of the politics involved: voters rarely reject a candidate over a human rights issue.
Politics do change, however, as can a politician’s base, and both those things may be happening now.
Biden has had skepticism of America’s duties to the world from early in his political career.
As a young senator in 1975, he insisted the U.S. leave Vietnam, despite concerns about abandoning America’s allies. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation,”
Biden reportedly said that year about sending aid to Cambodia. “There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.”
Biden supported going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But as those wars dragged on, Biden’s skepticism about U.S. obligations returned.
During the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, then-Vice President Biden opposed U.S. military intervention in Libya, despite dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s threats of mass slaughter. He also did not want President Barack Obama to side with protesters against Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak,
whom Biden considered a valuable U.S. ally. These past Biden positions still reverberate among Arab American and Muslim American activists now watching Gaza.
When he withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Biden knew he’d crush the educational dreams of Afghan women.
He nonetheless dismissed the idea that America owed them anything.
Biden aides point to his promotion of democracy, including hosting summits on the issue, in touting his human rights bona fides. They also note that he has often spoken out against genocide, such as in the case of
Sudan’s Darfur region, or
what befell the Armenians more than a century ago. He also supported military intervention in the 1990s to end
massacres in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Some observers believe that could be because he saw the success of the U.S. military effort in the first Gulf War — which he had opposed.)
His defenders argue, not unfairly, that ending the Afghanistan war has saved many lives — a human rights win.
Biden has “made human rights a centerpiece of our foreign policy,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, highlighting how, among other moves, he has used “executive orders to fight corruption and protect against misuse of commercial spyware.”
The problem with many of these arguments is that Biden has been inconsistent and his motivations aren’t necessarily about human rights.
Biden has been friendly to plenty of non-democracies as well as oppressive democracies. One big reason: China, whose rise has led Biden to make some contradictory choices on human rights.
As far back as the 1990s, he
argued against linking human rights to China’s trade status. Because Biden sees India as a bulwark against China, he’s muted criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s government is accused of oppressing Muslims and an
attempted assassination on U.S. soil. Biden
threw Modi a state dinner.
Biden has infused human rights into his messaging about the importance of supporting Ukraine against Russia. But he also sees deterring Russian aggression as a vital U.S. interest regardless of human rights.
Biden was quick to use the genocide label for China’s oppression of the Uyghurs, capitalizing on anti-Beijing sentiment during his 2020 campaign.
In contrast, as I’ve chronicled, his administration took an unusually long time to use the same label for Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya.
Few conflicts are as morally tortuous as the one that has pit Palestinians against Israelis for decades. For every angry statement about the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, there’s the counterpoint that Hamas militants kicked off this war by killing 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and taking more than 200 hostage.
Biden has never made a secret of his love for Israelis and the state they’ve built, and he focused almost exclusively on Israelis’ trauma in the early days of the war. He’s never had the same warm relationship with Palestinians.
The domestic politics involving Israel, which long had solid bipartisan support, as well as Biden’s personal affinity for the country, have been the biggest factors in his recent decision-making, a Biden administration official familiar with the Middle East told me.
But the official, granted anonymity because they lacked permission to talk publicly, insisted Biden doesn’t value Israeli lives over Arab ones. “I believe in the man enough to just kind of dismiss that, at the core, he cares less about any one life than another,” the official said.
Israel, though, has been shedding support among Democrats as it pursues its military campaign in Gaza, and Biden faces an election where Arab American and Muslim American votes could make a difference, not to mention many younger and progressive voters who feel sympathy for Palestinians.
He’s noticed the political danger.
Biden aides have traveled to Michigan
to mend fences with Arab American and Muslim American leaders. But the activists are not ready to forgive and forget, especially since they aren’t seeing policy changes, such as a stop to U.S. military aid to Israel.
It’s not that they want a second Trump era. But when they see Biden aides appear on their doorstep, some doubt it has much to do with the president’s concern for Palestinians.
“They need the Arab American vote to win in Michigan, and they’re not going to get it,” one activist in the state told me, having been granted anonymity to be candid.
For many in this crowd, their choices at the ballot box this year will come down to weighing human rights against political calculations.