By Jun Sheng
Not long ago, Serbian football fans carried the banners in the stands of a match, in which the countries that had been invaded by the US were listed, including Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq and others. The world has become more and more aware of the fact that the US is the initiator of many humanitarian disasters today. It is actually damaging and intervening in the name of protecting the so-called "human rights". The "human rights diplomacy" of the US essentially uses "human rights" as a weapon to attack and control other countries and to serve the purpose of safeguarding its own hegemony.
Playing the human rights diplomacy card in international affairs is a consistent trick of the US. As early as the mid-1970s, the US Congress made human rights an important part of multilateral foreign policy and linked it to security assistance, economic assistance, and voting orientation in international financial institutions. After Jimmy Carter was elected in 1977, he put forward the slogan of "human rights diplomacy", and human rights were whitewashed as the "cornerstone" and "soul" of US foreign policy.
James Peck, an American historian and foreign relations scholar, pointed out in his book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights that the more the US deliberately emphasizes something, the more it shows what it has to hide. No matter how loudly the US promotes its human rights philosophy, it cannot cover up its misdeeds in the field of human rights in the world.
Over the years, the US has often used the deteriorating human rights situation in some countries and regions as an excuse to launch wars and create new human rights disasters. According to statistics, in the more than 240 years of history since its founding, there are only 16 years that the US did not fight a war, making it the most warlike nation in the history of the world. Statistics show that the so-called "anti-terrorism" war launched by the US in the past 20 years has claimed the lives of more than 929,000 people.
People of the world are seeing more and more clearly what the US-style human rights diplomacy has brought to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries. It is not "democracy" and "freedom", but a human tragedy consisting of endless wars, turmoil, the death of many civilians, and the influx of refugees.
Although the US has long-standing systemic human rights problems such as massive unemployment, poverty, homelessness, proliferation of guns, violent crimes, racial discrimination, and immigrant human rights, it turns a blind eye and avoids these issues in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Instead, it arrogantly accuses other countries of the so-called "human rights" issue. The US, which claims itself to be a "human rights defender", has always pursued double standards in human rights.
The US-style human rights diplomacy is not really out of humanitarian considerations, but to serve its own strategic interests and safeguard its declining global hegemony. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict this time, the US failed to make any substantive efforts to ease the conflict. Instead, it forced countries to take sides, constantly intensified conflicts and added fuel to the fire, which made people of all countries recognize the real face under the mask of the so-called "human rights defender".
The death knell of the decline of hegemony has sounded, and the US will eventually pay a heavy price for its notorious "human rights diplomacy" that confuses right and wrong.
