Nikki Haley has a point, we aren’t getting it

From Day One, the Trump administration has been at loggerheads with itself.

It needn’t have happened this way. The United Nations Human Rights Council, created in 2006, has not exactly had cosy relations with the United States. There have been instances where critics of the US and the hegemony it represents have called out on its whitewashing of the atrocities that country has perpetrated across the world and there have been instances where those who side with the US have called out on its singling out of US allies like Israel for censure. The Trump administration coming out against the Council just weeks after it concluded talks with North Korea, in Singapore, presents something of a conundrum. I’d like to suggest here that what is perceived to be a conundrum is actually a simple paradox: in the United States, there is a rift between what the president and his cohorts wish and do, and what apex bodies under him, left to their own devices, wish and do. That the American Embassy here took the trouble to inform our Government that they are committed to the resolution which we cosponsored with them, last year, is an indication that those apex bodies are rattled.   

From Day One, the Trump administration has been at loggerheads with itself.This is nothing new. The United States has always been at loggerheads with itself ever since it was created. As Malinda Seneviratne so cogently argued years ago, the founding fathers made a fundamental mistake when they wrote the Constitution: they managed to separate the Church and State in a way which never really separated them, thereby unleashing an almost-haphazard process of self-identification which led the world’s youngest democracy to define itself against the “Other”. Liberals I have talked with, who hold that age-old notion of Manifest Destiny high, I feel, subscribe to the problem at the heart of the liberalism which the founding fathers imbibed from Locke and all those other Enlightenment era philosophers: it was a blessing for the few, and a curse for the many. It is this split which spilt over to foreign policy as well, i.e. promote democracy abroad while shielding domestic interests. Closet realpolitik at its best.   

Whatever said and done, as history has shown, the liberal leadership in the US has not been as congenial to these highbred notions of decency as one might suppose. That’s what makes Nikki Haley’s comments on the Human Rights Council all the more pertinent, particularly for Sri Lanka’s liberals

American president 
Donald Trump is the most unique president the Americans have got for quite some time. He is a phenomenon in himself. On the one hand, he promotes what liberals call out as racist invective. On the other hand, he maintains links with what those same liberals like to identify as mass murderers and despots, Putin and Kim Jong-Un along with the Chinese leadership being just three examples. It’s fair to surmise that on both counts, he irritates the liberal left. But to assume that the liberal left discourse is unconditionally right is to assume that their narrative, i.e. one in which America is a beacon of freedom, in which men and women are judged according to the content of their character, has proved to be right for the conduct of American domestic and foreign policy over the years. Whatever said and done, as history has shown, the liberal leadership in the US has not been as congenial to these highbred notions of decency as one might suppose. That’s what makes Nikki Haley’s comments on the Human Rights Council all the more pertinent, particularly for Sri Lanka’s liberals.   

Haley called the Council a “cesspool of political bias.” She is correct, but also wrong as to the content of this bias. She contended that US calls for reform were not heeded (the point that the United Nations as a whole needs reform has been emphasised again and again over the decades, especially from the time of Boutros-Boutros Ghali). She argued that certain countries, especially Israel, were singled out. She announced that human rights abusers continue to serve on and be elected to the body. Well, one can argue that the biggest abuser of human rights is the same country which Haley happens to represent, but for the moment let’s forget that. Let’s concentrate instead on the crux of Haley’s argument: that the Council has been diminishing in scope and significance. Here’s my reply to that: as a body, it’s been losing its sacrosanct streak.   

Just what were those human rights that the Council was defending? The Council was premised on the assumption that objective truth, not subjective bias, would guide its path to securing those rights in the world. What happened was the obverse: when atrocities were being perpetrated on parts of the world which harboured no hostility towards their perpetrators, it issued token condemnations, while when dubious report after report inflated figures of murdered citizens, inflating figures which themselves were not verified properly (I am, of course, talking about Sri Lanka immediately after the Civil War), it badgered us to punish a democratically elected government. The Trump administration, at its head, has not sought to issue condemnations on flimsy evidence like this, but its apex bodies, as I mentioned before, continue to do so. This is the real cesspool at the heart of the Council, and both Haley and Mike Pompeo, by calling out what was obvious, though not confirming the real truth (which is that their country shares the blame for that cesspool), has done what was needed to be done.   

Hypocrisy 
As Sri Lanka’s former ambassador in Geneva has argued, more than 80% of the Human Rights Council’s funding requirements come from countries like the US, as well as its allies. If we consider here the relationship between a donor and a donee, with the fact that the latter has to be a virtual slave to the demands of the former, then it’s reasonable to suppose that the Council has become a slave to the interests of those who lavishly fund it. That the US defied even this position it held in the Council to rant and rave about the latter’s hypocrisy, leaving it effectively in the hands of allies whose powers have vastly diminished (thanks to the economic crisis and the rise of rightwing oppositions), speaks volumes about where the world order is headed to.   

The Trump administration operates on two layers: the centre and the periphery. The American Embassy here belongs to the latter category. If not literally, then at least theoretically. We do not know if Mr Trump is planning on isolating the US. We do not know if he is planning on promoting his variant of Manifest Destiny by resorting to a culture of trade wars and inward looking policies which hearken us back to the 1920s (back when the US was at its most isolationist). What we do know is that the writing is on the wall, that no matter how pathetically servile we may be to the apex bodies which make up the current US administration, the centre of that administration has long since discarded the philosophy which kept the world glued to its interests.