In a week or so, a delegation from the U.S. State Department is going to lurch off to Russia with a number of U.S. experts on the American prison system in tow, to talk about human rights with Russian officials in the city of Vladimir. If we don't want this road trip to turn into a freak show on Fox like this China expedition did, the U.S. has to work some of their social media magic not to gush about how fabulous social media itself is, but to talk turkey on real human rights problems in Russia. Trust me, the Russians and the rest of the world can handle it, and it isn't "lecturing" with any sort of "arrogance" to depart from Obama's strangely overly-cautious script for how to address human rights around the world, which is pissing off freedom and human rights activists right and left; the Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens asked if Obama even believed in human rights, and if in fact he thought it interfered with other causes he promotes like responding to climate change.

I've been a huge critic of the so-called McFaul-Surkov Commission formed in conjunction with Obama's "reset" summit on Moscow last July and I've answered all the fatuous silly notions about why we supposedly "need" such an approach. I found it truly awful to be engaging in this kind of moral equivalence with a Russian official notorious for justifying "managed democracy" and the stifling of dissent and actively calling for the removal of the free media and even intellectual freedom in Russia's new "Silicon Valley". I think the U.S. should never have gotten itself mangled in this apparatchiks' apparatus, should have avoided completely the construction of a moral-equivalency machine of this nature serving only Russian authoritarianism, and simply met with Russians, official and unofficial, when and as needed, to talk about various topics.

It's not just the Russian policy, however; Obama's entire concocted policy on human rights doesn't cut it. It is so unlike the policies of Jimmy Carter, who will go down in history as making human rights a central part of foreign policy, or Bill Clinton, who kept human rights on the world map (women's rights in particular were upgraded mainly through Hillary's work).

Obama's policy, by contrast, is misuided; defeatest; quietist; and ultimately even sinister in the way it undermines years of hard work by foreign service professionals in this difficult area of diplomacy.

When Obama raised the Khodorkovsky case in Moscow last year, he continued in a fine tradition of Americans leaders standing up for universal principles. To be sure, he was somewhat clumsy in describing the outrageously manipulated charges against Khodorkovsky as "a bit odd" and then overpraising the Russian President Medvedev's "courageous" work against "legal nihilism", and adding rather disingenuously that America and Russia have a common interest in the rule of law.

But then Russian intellectuals with whom he met, and those Americans who follow the intricacies of human rights diplomacy had to wince. Because then he said in written answers to the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (so this isn't a microphone or translation problem) that because we had to respect the independence of the Russian judicial system (sic):

“Nonetheless, I think it is improper for outsiders to interfere in the
legal processes of Russia.”

Ouch –  in a statement just as clumsy as the incorrect translation of "reset" as "overload", Obama set back more than 30 years of progress made since the 1975 Helsinki Final Act first validated the concept that human rights are *not* the internal affair of any country. Raising grave due process violations of the sort that routinely happen with Khodorkovsky's case isn't "interference"; it's invoking a higher law of justice to which Russia is bound by its adherence to international human rights treaties.

In fact, in the Helsinki process and under UN international treaties by which both Russia and the U.S. are bound, human rights are universal and a legitimate topic of diplomacy. We are very far from Westphalia — or should be.

I thought at the time that this was Obama's inexperience with Russian affairs and not indicative of the usual ideological hangover of the left's soft approach to the Soviet Union — and simply not realizing just how much "internal affairs" is a term resonating with every victim of Soviet injustice who could not find support from doves for fear of harming nuclear disarmament talks. Helsinki changed that; Helsinki made it ok to talk about human rights *and* peace; human rights *and* economic affairs. They were pronounced, as Sakharov had long ago pronounced them in his 1968 essay "Thoughts on Peace, Progress, and Intellectual Freedom" as inextricably linked, as interdependent.

Sadly, I came to find out that Obama wasn't just messing up in Moscow — this was a mantra, this was regretably the outcome of a seemingly positive wider mantra which runs like this:

o "We're here to listen".

o "We no longer lecture other countries."

o "We admit we're not perfect".

o "We have problems in common and can learn from each other."

This would be great if you were actually dealing with interlocutors in good faith who also held those same four values. But you're not, in the real world, and furthermore, the architecture of human rights defense at home and abroad doesn't require that you be.

George Packer takes up in the New Yorker this troubling Obama concept of "not lecturing", what I call "the buddy system", highlighting what a bad idea this is with Egypt. What's happening is that because Obama lieutenants don't think they should lecture anyone about human rights; because they are supposed to be beating their chests with guilt over Guantanamo; yet because they are pragmatists that are keeping the existing government in power by agreeing not to fund NGOs that might contain a variety of dissenters, (including radical Muslim believers), they are silent about human rights. Silent about the kind of torture that happens in Egyptian jails and sends victims straight into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they despair that anyone will get their oppressive government to stop — least of all America, propping it up. Packer quotes Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski on this policy, aptly noting that the intellectuals in a country like Egypt (and I could say Uzbekistan is no different) both hated Bush and the war on terror's effects on their countries and wanted him to come to their aid.

We could debate the merits of this buddy policy, and the hewing to the soft topics like women's health, science, and business in dealing with very closed oppressive regimes. Egypt has a vibrant intellectual community, however, and frankly, given all the aid it gets, the Egyptian government could be prodded a lot more with criticism and demands not block aid to NGOS (USAID programs to support democracy are very mild things anyway, despite the common misbelief that they fueled colour revolutions in Eurasia.)

But Russia? There is no need to be playing the buddy game in Russia whatsoever. Russians can handle it; despite a very suppressed media and brutal discouragement of human rights activists, including even negligence in bringing to justice their murderers, Russia hears a lot of human rights criticism at home and abroad, and despite bristling, can take it.  While some officials will speciously troll and invoke American problems in the old "your Indians!" gambit, most are more bored than annoyed by the topic of civil and political liberties — they don't see them as helpful to their pressing political issues of solving social injustices in Russia yet keeping themselves in power.

Leftists and liberals will watch the O'Reilly clip and think indignantly that it is just witch-hunting and crazyiness and smearing with guilt-by-association. But in fact, O'Reilly is reacting to a truth that, despite the tendentious packaging, is a legitimate problem with this Administration. 

O'Reilly found it outrageous that Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State would raise the Arizona law in discussions with China about human rights. Frankly, I do, too, even while deploring any law that would incite anti-immigrant hatred in the U.S. That's because the human rights situations are very different, comparisons invidious, and self-flagellation on our part is pointless with people who themselves don't think they have a problem.

Under this buddy system, the gimmick is supposed to work like this: "I'll talk about our racist new anti-immigrant Arizona law, then it will be your turn to describe persecution and torture of Tibetans and Uighurs." Oops, see, that's the problem. It's not just a moral equivalency issue — China is way beyond the Arizona law in the way it harms minorities and has nothing remotely like a liberal immigration or nationalities policy — and offering the "give to get" method (as O'Reilly suggested) doesn't work. The Chinese don't seem to spontaneously grab this meek liberal offering and say, "Oh! Yes, totally! We totally get it. And yes, we'll release that human rights lawyer that we've disappeared in our prison system now that you've come clean on your problems. Let us mutually promote human rights together always, comrades."

If the buddy system really worked as planned, it might be worth scraping and groveling and admitting U.S. faults as if they were equivalent to the gross and systematic problems of an Egypt or Russia. But it doesn't work. These authoritarian governments don't buy it, aren't impressed, and only exploit the situation to distract from their own human rights crimes.

Obama needs to junk this sort of rhetoric fast. I thought at first it might be fixable by getting officials not to keep harping on this "we won't lecture" stuff and turning them to a different act, which wasn't lecturing from a position of superiority, but advocating from an invocation of universality.

Unfortunately, I'm finding in talks with U.S. officials lately that they've grasped the universality problem, and perhaps have an inkling they've been undermining it the "we won't lecture" mantra, but now they've twisted that into yet another version of the buddy approach, which says, "We are all sinners under the law. Here's our violations of the law. Now over to you. Let's work together."

This seeminly nice, positive, diplomatic approach winds up doing a grave disservice to victims of human rights awaiting American public diplomacy on their plight, and it really damages universality in the end. The notion that Americans "lectured" China or Russia or Egypt during the Bush administration is also skewed — if anything, the U.S. was terribly silent on human rights in that period, and seldom even used quiet diplomacy; on one dramatically rare occasion when Powell did raise problems like unfair elections and Chechnya with the Russians, in fact, his counterpart took it very calmly without complaining about lecturing.

O'Reilly goes off on a wild tangent blasting Posner for supposedly being a "radical leftist" and "getting a million dollars from Soros". Posner isn't a radical; his past organization's grants from Soros aren't the lurid unpatriotic outrages that O'Reilly paints them to be.

It's too bad he didn't stick to the real problem here: the moral equivalency disease of the left that Obama imbibed in the 1980s that saw nuclear weapons as isolated mechanical devices that one could work to remove without regard to the nature of the governments holding them, and that saw raising human rights problems as antithetical to "peace talks". The lessons of the toppling of Communist regimes in the late 1980s and 1990s was precisely that it wasn't nuclear pressure that forced them to change, but internal movements for human rights inspired by Helsinki. It wasn't silence on the gross human rights abuses of the Soviet era that brought about the dismantling of nuclear weapons in the end; it was outspoken, persistent, and principled raising of human rights concerns by the U.S. and other Western allies.