The recent address by U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power at Freedom House was just the latest attempt by the Biden administration to articulate its agenda of democratic renewal. This commitment to democracy promotion and the protection of human rights marks a profound shift from the Trump era but is not a new theme in U.S. foreign policy. Power’s decision to build her speech around the 40th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s Westminster Address on this topic emphasized the long, bipartisan history of promoting democracy.
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Yet, while Power tapped into the rhetoric and ideas of John F. Kennedy and Reagan — exemplifying how deeply rooted this agenda is in American history, as well as its bipartisan appeal — Biden’s agenda also has a unique twist designed to suit our moment. It recognizes that promoting democracy and championing human rights should not just be tenets of U.S. foreign policy, they also need to be modeled at home.
In her speech, Power quoted Kennedy, who as a U.S. senator said in 1959: “The free world cannot shame Russia and China into freedom — but it can inspire democracy to enrich its own freedoms.” Advancing freedom required not just military strength, but a “dedication to advancing the hopes of new nations” and a “determination to prove that freedom can lift the haggard burden of poverty from desolate lands.”
Kennedy saw democracy promotion as crucial to winning the Cold War. But human rights activists suggested that waging the Cold War with authoritarian but anti-communist allies had actually come to threaten the United States’ commitment to democracy — both domestically and internationally.
American policy debates in the 1960s over issues like civil rights, the Vietnam War and U.S. support for dictators abroad shaped activists’ thinking. They wanted to restore democratic principles to U.S. policies and to protect human rights internationally. But these activists also saw their agenda as reflecting long-held tenets — most especially the United States’ commitment to a liberal democratic order.
They sought to spread the United States’ political model abroad, particularly in the wake of the civil rights movement. As democracy expanded in the United States because of the greater fulfillment of civil and political rights, activists aspired to internationalize those successes. Human rights advocates in these years trumpeted their commitment to democracy, both at home and abroad. Over the next decade, they — along with sympathetic members of Congress such as Donald M. Fraser (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) — worked to institutionalize attention to human rights in U.S. foreign policy and target undemocratic regimes on both sides of the Iron Curtain, such as the governments of the Soviet Union, Greece and Chile.
Despite these efforts, by the early 1980s U.S. officials expressed anxiety about the future of democracy internationally. This concern stemmed in part from the Polish government’s imposition of martial law in the face of the rise of the Solidarity movement and the re-intensification of Cold War hostilities.
To address these concerns, the Reagan administration and members of Congress collaborated to create the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization funded by the U.S. government that would support democratic institutions around the world. One element of the bipartisan support for democracy promotion was a belief, espoused by Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under Reagan, that “democratic institutions … are the only guarantee of human rights over the long run.”
Yet, Abrams’s neoconservatism and the ideological tenets subscribed to by others in the administration influenced their approach; Reagan, Abrams and their allies saw communism as a greater threat to democracy and human rights than right-wing authoritarianism. They did share Kennedy’s view that democracy promotion presented a means to wage the ideological Cold War, including through support to the Polish underground. But unlike those on the left, many on the right, including the Reagan administration, only slowly and belatedly pressed Cold War allies, like apartheid-era South Africa, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, on the need for greater democracy and protection for human rights.
Even so, bipartisan support for the endowment and the meaningful level of financial grants it disbursed demonstrated the degree to which the U.S. government united behind democratization as a significant project — one that proponents thought could facilitate transformation internationally.
This joint political and financial commitment to the stated agenda of democracy promotion explains why Power’s address echoed both the 1960s-era activists and 1980s-era government officials who thought that the United States could facilitate fundamental international change in a way that other actors simply could not. Despite abundant evidence of the perils facing democracy in 2022, including 16 years of Freedom House’s assessment that democracy is declining around the world, Power articulated an optimistic vision in line with the American exceptionalism trumpeted by both groups.
Importantly, in these contemporary efforts the United States is partnering with the United Nations, civil society and democratic allies. Power’s address and the agenda she unfurled demonstrate a belief in strong links between economic and political development as well as a potential broadening of the idea of political development or “democratic development,” to use Reagan’s term.
Even more significantly, the programs Power outlined are not just international, but many have a domestic focus, underscoring the work the United States needs to do on its own democracy to lead abroad. Too often Americans have treated human rights violations as something that only happens elsewhere, but of course that is not the case.
It was significant that the administration’s Summit for Democracy, held in December 2021, included state-level leaders and prominent activists. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) emphasized the value of the democratic system and the practices — listening, behaving civilly and considering other perspectives — necessary to keep democracies functioning well. Sherrilyn Ifill, then-president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, spoke frankly about the country’s mixed record on achieving full democratic rights and norms. Featuring these speakers revealed the ways in which protecting human rights is increasingly recognized as essential for the future of American democracy.
Americans have long seen support for democracy as consistent with American values and ideals. Indeed, a recent Pew Research Center poll showed that 20 percent of Americans asked think “promoting democracy in other nations” should be given top priority, and 58 percent would assign it “some priority.”
The Biden administration’s decision to outline its democracy promotion agenda at an event hosted by a historically conservative nongovernmental organization and with a speech that explicitly honored Reagan’s legacy marks a deliberate effort to maintain the project’s long-standing bipartisan support, after Donald Trump and his acolytes called it into question. The comprehensive program Power outlined is intended to “foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means,” as Reagan put it 40 years ago.
Biden’s commitment to democracy promotion and the protection of human rights marks a revival of the purported idealism of Cold War-era U.S. foreign policy. His resurrection of this agenda telegraphs the values on which he thinks a post-Trump foreign policy should be based. It is also crucial to safeguarding democracy and human rights at home — an often overlooked element of U.S. human rights policy that Biden is now moving to spotlight.
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