• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Human Rights
• United States

July 24, 2025, 7:05 AM View Comments ()

Although U.S. President Donald Trump has said little or nothing in public about defending human rights and freedoms abroad, both of his administrations have taken steps to reform the way that the United States defines and upholds those rights. At the same time, cuts to foreign aid and other international outreach programs—as well as Trump’s attacks on constitutional governance and the rule of law—threaten to undermine the United States’ most effective means of promoting and defending basic rights and freedoms: its soft power and the power of example.

The first Trump administration denounced the United Nation’s hypocrisy on human rights, withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council when the call for reforming its autocracy-heavy membership was rejected. The U.S. State Department defended basic freedoms by confronting China, Venezuela, Syria, and other countries about abuses; leading a major international push for religious freedom; and promoting women’s economic empowerment.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charging it with “providing the U.S. government with advice on human rights grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and creating a “serious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders.” In announcing the project, Pompeo distinguished between fundamental rights enshrined by the country’s founders—including the famous right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—and a subsequent proliferation of “ad hoc rights granted by governments,” especially since the end of the Cold War.

More than 200 human rights organizations immediately denounced the project as promoting a hierarchy of rights and rejected the idea that the expansion and codification of rights had weakened protection of basic liberties. Activists were appalled by the State Department’s reference to “natural law and natural rights,” which they saw as code for a rollback of women’s rights and same-sex marriage.

The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects the principle that to be legitimate, human rights need to be seen as rising out of all the world’s traditions. It thus includes both negative liberties that require the state to abstain from restrictions—such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and equal treatment of all citizens—and positive “economic, social and cultural rights” that require government action—for example, to ensure access to food, education, medical care, clothing, housing, and an “adequate standard of living.”

All of these require the redistribution of wealth by governments. And new U.N. treaties are in the pipeline, including one on the rights of the elderly. The U.N. General Assembly has also made declarations regarding humanity’s right to a “healthy environment” and “stable climate,” and U.N. committees regularly produce proposals to codify more rights, such as a “right to sanitation.”

This vast profusion of positive rights reflects an ideological instrumentalization of the concept of human rights and is, arguably, incompatible with the classical liberalism that shaped U.S. democracy. Pompeo’s concern about the proliferation of new human rights suggested that the Commission on Unalienable Rights would recenter U.S. policy on fundamental civil rights and freedoms—and to question the validity of an ever-larger bouquet of economic and social rights as genuine human rights.

But the commission’s final report, surprisingly, endorsed the inclusion of economic and social rights in international legislation as fully consistent with the United States’ foundational creed. U.S. human rights policy has been ambivalent about economic and social human rights, assuming a range of postures; since 1948, it was the Reagan administration that most clearly articulated a principled definition of human rights that focused on inherent liberties. It is ironic that while conservative administrations have ensured that the United States has never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Pompeo commission’s report could provide support for its future ratification.

The second Trump administration is talking less about human rights than the first, but it is doing more to change U.S. policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is proposing to revolutionize Washington’s approach as one that defends basic freedoms and not the expansive notion of international human rights contained in the Universal Declaration, U.N. treaties, and soft law. Rubio’s State Department is setting up an Office of Natural Rights to support “values-based diplomacy in traditional western conceptions of core freedoms.” These values will no longer be promoted via multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, but through the State Department’s embassies and regional bureaus.

Like Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, Rubio’s proposals have aroused strong criticism from the human rights establishment—activists who have built careers linked to the vast international human rights bureaucracy and advocate for compliance with international law. Rarely do they reference the classical foundations of human rights, which support a much narrower range of inherent liberties.

Some took particular offense at the State Department’s mention of Western conceptions of freedom. Such language “is a complete gift to governments that commit human rights violations worldwide, who often resist U.S human rights efforts on the very basis that the U.S. is foisting foreign values on them,” according to Scott Busby and Charles O. Blaha, writing in Just Security. But in a statement commemorating China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, Rubio clarified that “the principles of freedom, democracy, and self-rule are not just American principles. They are human principles.”

But how will the United States actually promote and defend these principles that it holds universal? In defenestrating broadly conceived human rights in favor of a narrower core of natural rights—and bypassing international human rights legislation and institutions, Rubio’s proposals imply a return not only to America’s traditional concept of natural rights, but also a return to how U.S. leaders defended them throughout most of the country’s history. The new United States projected the ideals of liberty and democracy, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also.” After World War II, the liberal political system enjoyed by Americans became a model for Western Europe as it emerged from totalitarianism and war. The Reagan administration’s emphasis on political freedoms and their universal nature significantly undermined the Soviet empire, thus contributing to the West’s victory in the Cold War.

With authoritarianism on the march, promoting natural rights ought to mean more than schooling allied democracies about how their efforts to combat hate speech infringe on the freedom of expression. In 35 years working in the international human rights community, I have never heard any of its members mention “natural rights.” But the United States government should revive the concept, as the reported establishment of an Office of Natural Rights suggests may now be in the offing. It could promote natural rights abroad—not by lecturing other governments, but by projecting these principles through media and educational opportunities for civil society, incorporating American civilians in the process. Rubio’s initiative could help bring natural rights alive as a principle that can catalyze political change, as opposed to U.N.-defined human rights, which are often manipulated to support the political zeitgeist and various policy goals.

But to do so, resources would need to be devoted to U.S. soft power, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, whose funding has been cut. Voice of America would need to be retained as a voice for inherent, universal, unalienable rights. If the administration is serious about promoting and defending natural rights, then it will need to reinforce the distinction between liberty and tyranny in its dealings with other states, not shying away from telling the truth about violations of natural rights such as stolen elections.

And to effectively promote natural rights around the world, the administration itself will need to show more respect for fundamental constitutional principles including the rule of law, the separation of powers, and habeas corpus at home. That way, the United States’ example can be its most effective human rights policy.