Trump, Human Rights, and the Myth of Western Complicity

By James Ron

In 2011, I teamed up with a talented survey researcher, David Crow — then a professor at CIDE, a top social service research outfit in Mexico City — to conduct representative surveys around the world, asking questions about public attitudes towards human rights organizations, policies, and principles.

One of the issues we were most interested in was the claim that human rights groups were somehow working as the tools of powerful states, with special emphasis on the US.

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, human rights became a particularly fraught topic. Trump openly advocated torture, Muslim registries, restrictions on birthright citizenship, and silencing the press.

Trump’s disdain for fundamental rights principles, however, had one unintended effect: it made it much harder for critics to accuse organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of acting as handmaidens of U.S. foreign policy.

For decades, critics of Western-backed rights groups had argued that these organizations served Washington’s strategic interests. The critiques came in several forms:

• That rights groups struck a “devil’s bargain” in the 1990s by endorsing U.S. primacy in exchange for support of international norms.
• That, after Vietnam, U.S. policymakers replaced anti-communism with human rights as a justification for global intervention.
• Or that the principles of universal rights simply masked a uniquely Western worldview that normalized U.S. political dominance.

These critiques carried political weight. In countries like Ecuador, Egypt, India, Russia, and Venezuela, officials frequently accused human rights groups of doing Washington’s bidding, sometimes cracking down on their funding as a result.

What Ordinary People Believe

Our survey research, however, paints a very different picture. Between 2012 and 2014, we conducted face-to-face surveys with more than 9,000 people in six countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, India, Morocco, and Nigeria.

We asked whether respondents associated “human rights” with “promoting U.S. interests.” The average response, across all cases, was just 3.5 on a 1–7 scale — below the midpoint. In other words, most people did not equate human rights with American political agendas.

We also asked how much people trusted local rights organizations, international rights organizations, and the U.S. government. On a 0–1 scale, average trust in local rights groups was 0.54, in international groups 0.52, and in the U.S. government just 0.46. There was no statistical evidence that trust in human rights groups correlated positively with trust in Washington.

The Real Divide

These findings suggest that accusations of complicity reflect the concerns of political leaders and some academics, rather than ordinary citizens. People generally see human rights organizations as independent of U.S. foreign policy — or, in some cases, even in opposition to it.

Trump’s presidency only widened this gap. By openly rejecting international rights norms, his administration undercut the claim that Washington and the rights community were aligned. In practice, it made rights groups appear more distinct and credible than before.

Why This Matters

The global human rights movement has long been accused of being an extension of Western power. But our evidence shows that people in diverse societies recognize the independence of rights organizations. Trump’s rhetoric and policies only reinforced this perception.

Read the original version of this op-ed in The Washington Post.
Read the full scholarly article at https://www.academia.edu/42632506/Do_Global_Publics_View_Human_Rights_Organizations_as_Handmaidens_of_the_United_States

About the Authors

James Ron is an author and social scientist. He has published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Le Monde, and leading academic journals. Learn more at jamesron.com, jamesron.org, and jamesron.net.