The Atlantic:
Kathy Gilsinan is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs.
The horrifying numbers are still trickling in: Anywhere from 200 to more than 1,000 people dead. Seven thousand people in prison. The full human cost of Iran’s recent crackdown on protests that started last month is only now coming into focus, as the demonstrations taper off and more details come out of an opaque country where authorities shut down the internet during some of the worst violence. And suddenly, the Trump administration spoke out on human rights.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said today that the United States is “proud to be the world’s leading advocate on human rights,” shortly before his administration put financial penalties on a number of individual human-rights abusers, including officials in South Sudan, Slovakia, and Saudi Arabia. But when it comes to condemning entire governments, he has put particular emphasis on Iran. “This administration has taken a completely opposite view of the important political protests, the freedom-seeking, the freedom-loving people of Iran, than President Obama and his administration did,” Pompeo said in one interview, referring to Obama’s reluctance to speak out in support of Iran’s Green Movement protesters in 2009. “These people are simply asking for a basic set of freedoms, and the Iranian leadership—that regime should change in a way that reflects the desires of their own people,” he said in another one.
As part of a foreign policy that Pompeo has described as one of “realism and restraint”—which recognizes that the U.S. cannot remake other societies in its own image—this administration has been selective about where it seizes on the suffering of the masses. America always aims to support regimes it sees as friendly and weaken the unfriendly ones; Trump’s is by no means the only administration to criticize enemies more vigorously than allies when it comes to human rights. In Iran’s case, the administration has found that condemning violence and suffering and pushing for human rights can also serve a much bigger agenda.
“Allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries,” one top State Department official explained in a memo early in the Trump administration, noting that maintaining good relations with allies such as Saudi Arabia entailed “difficult tradeoffs” with regard to human rights. Trump would later veto a bill requiring him to cut off military support to Saudi Arabia’s disastrous air campaign in Yemen, which has contributed to the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world, in order to avoid antagonizing an ally.
But Iran is no ally. The administration has waged a campaign of “maximum pressure” against the Iranian regime that has helped devastate the country’s economy. The protesters’ revolt—over gas-subsidy cuts imposed by a financially desperate regime—has created another source of pressure, this one from within the country. “We should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” the official wrote, not just out of moral concern, but because “pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
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