The Ministry of Peace

The new State Department is structured to promote internecine conflict and endless and meaningless wars. Because we have always been at war with Eastasia.

By Bama Athreya

Is the US State Department on the verge of becoming George Orwell’s Ministry of Peace? State’s newly-released blueprint reverses decades of hard-won gains to prevent conflict, mass atrocities, and human trafficking and to protect human rights. Congress has been asked to approve the Trump Administration’s intent to dramatically restructure US foreign affairs in ways that reflect not only operations but our values. The latest proposal, attached to this post, eliminates functions and offices that were established in response to decades of advocacy; these offices responded to what US citizens and taxpayers told Congress they valued. With their overhaul, we see an end to seventy years of US support for human rights.

The Trump Administration is reversing decades of work preventing conflict, mass atrocities, and human trafficking.

In the wake of World War II, an international consensus was given structure in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, championed by America’s First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and widely supported by people in the US and around the world who were exhausted by war and appalled by mass atrocities. New State Department leadership is abandoning that vision. The American public needs to understand the cost of walking away from this consensus.

While many of the countries who endorsed the Declaration honored that document more in the breach than the practice, it set a vision of a peaceful, more just and more humane world. It established a North Star to which responsible and accountable governments could aspire. And it provided a basis for decades of careful, patient documentation and advocacy to create new structures, policies and programming that, for a time, led governments to take important steps. Some examples include effective campaigns ban landmines; to adopt and enforce laws to end child trafficking and child labor; to recognize sexual violence as a war crime. Piece by piece, advocates built actual protections against gross human rights violations and accountability for atrocities.

The blueprint lays out an international order by, for and of a new cadre of colonial overlords who believe women are lesser than men, heathens should be converted, and subjects under their colonial rule should be subservient.

Importantly, international standards, policies and programs reflected what we believed was a spreading global consensus: that all persons deserve to be treated with dignity. That governments should abide by international laws. That perpetrators of genocides should be held accountable.

Yet the State Department blueprint sets forth a chilling new vision of an international order by, for and of a new cadre of colonial overlords, who, like those of earlier times, believe women are lesser than men, heathens should be converted, and subjects under their colonial rule should be subservient. The Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and Office of Global Women’s Affairs, which led efforts to promote women’s equality globally and end gender-based violence will be eliminated despite decades of bipartisan support. The Office of Religious Freedom will be elevated, as will the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Given the profile and background of Trump appointees, it can be expected that both offices will weaponize anti-Semitism to advance a Christian ethnonationalist worldview; in other words, a foreign policy that advances its own group as superior and therefore more deserving of rights and protections than others, and believes that colonial domination of others is therefore justified.

The new State Department will show neither mercy nor sympathy to those displaced by war, disaster or famine. No office for UN peacekeeping operations. Waves of activism galvanized by horrific genocides in Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda and Bosnia and Sudan in the 1990s, finally resulted in US commitments to atrocity prevention. Those commitments are being swept away. There will be no offices on Countering Violent Extremism, nor Conflict and Stabilization Operations, and we will lose important capacity to intervene and stop armed insurgencies. There will be no office to assist the relocation of Afghan refugees. As former State Department Undersecretary Uzra Zeya stated, “It endangers the lives of Afghans who put their lives on the line to work with the United States and countless other people who have fled war and persecution and abandoned the countries. This is counter to our historic commitment to refugees and also undermines our national security.”

The Bureau for Democracy, Rights and Labor will become a vehicle for the weaponization and subversion of longstanding human rights frameworks. To speed up the wreckage of these frameworks, the Bureau is being redefined as the standard-bearer for “the Administration’s affirmative vision of American and Western values.” Instead of human rights, the Bureau will house a new “Office of Natural Rights” dedicated to advancing a new Christian ethnonationalist hegemony couched as “traditional western conceptions of core freedoms and . . . an affirmative vision of civil liberties.” Lest this be misunderstood, the Congressional Notification provides a helpful example of such weaponization: “The office will build the foundation for criticisms of free speech backsliding in Europe and other developed nations.” In other words, online harassment of those opposing America’s rulers will now be official foreign policy.

In the 1990s I was personally part of a wave of activism that shone a spotlight on the exploitation of children around the world, and abuses of young women in sweatshops. Years of advocacy over multiple Administrations and with Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle allowed us to slowly build policy and programming commitments to match widespread public sentiment in favor of ending sweatshops, child labor, forced labor and human trafficking. Many in the business community have worked alongside advocates to support programming that ensures global supply chains are free from human rights abuse. This too is ending, as the State proposal subverts work to advance labor rights into an “Office of Free Markets and Free Labor.” The Office to Combat and Monitor Trafficking in Persons will still exist, but the invaluable decades of programming it supported to assist survivors of trafficking around the world and bring them justice will end, and instead its functions will be restricted to the production of an annual report.

Most chillingly, a longstanding Office on Population, Migration and Refugees will no longer provide shelter and protection for refugees or those displaced by conflict or crisis. Instead, “Reflecting core Administration priorities, these offices will be substantially reorganized to shift focus towards supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.” A new Office of Remigration will facilitate the arrest, detention and rendition of people who may be legally and peacefully in the United States. Thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people may suffer the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, denied due process to make their case and sent into exile.

The State Department will now be an obstacle to preventing human rights violations.

The dismantling of US foreign policy and foreign assistance dramatically changes the enabling environment for all other stakeholders and actors working globally to advance human rights, peace and security. Going forward, the State Department is likely to be a significant obstacle to those working on human rights violations, as it promotes its narrow and elitist vision of those in need of protection and diplomatic support, and weaponizes the use of existing authorities to target governments it perceives as allowing criticism of its positions. The Administration’s 2026 budget proposal includes substantial increases for US military and Homeland Security spending, laying groundwork for a heavily militarized approach to containing dissent at home or abroad. The explicit creation of an office and resourcing for ‘remigration’ speaks for itself.

Like the Ministry of Peace in Orwell’s 1984, the new State Department is structured to promote internecine conflict and endless and meaningless wars.

What can we do? We must be continued advocates for respecting and protecting human rights. Even with all our international laws, policies and programs in place we had hardly achieved universal respect for human rights. The US over several decades supported international instruments, undertook human rights reporting, and directed resources at atrocity prevention, ending human trafficking and addressing other rights violations only because of prolonged media attention and public campaigns. As the Trump Administration pushes its own vision of what and whose rights matter, advocates need to understand that what we thought was moral consensus is disintegrating. We must not assume post World War II frameworks around human rights are sufficient scaffolding for our values. If we want to maintain or rebuild that scaffolding, we have to start with the assertion of our values, making over and over again the case for gender equality, for ending child exploitation, for preventing genocides. Norms only exist for as long as people accept them; this is a moment when if we don’t use our voices we may lose them.

And let’s not give up on Congress. Members of Congress still have the power to restore US commitments to atrocity and conflict prevention, advancing peace and security, ending human trafficking, and respecting and protecting human rights. While for the moment Congressional Republicans have apparently ceded their authority, their consensus is paper-thin. We must continue to engage and to remind legislators of their commitments and ask them, over and over, to restate their values. Keeping our relationships with legislators will be critical to any effort to rebuild systems and humane, values-driven policy in future.

Let’s think about what comes next. Our modern human rights standards and norms emerged in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust. There were those bold enough to imagine a world where wars no longer happened, and human dignity was valued everywhere. Those who believed in the vision galvanized movements that ended colonial domination and brought down the Iron Curtain. What do we find unacceptable today? What actions do we find so abhorrent we are willing to work to ensure they cannot happen, anywhere? Let’s imagine and then rebuild a 21st century human rights architecture, using the foundations that have galvanized important progress for several decades. For myself, that starts with issues I worked on early in my career: ending child labor and human trafficking. We rewrote US law and international norms. We won the resources necessary to end labor exploitation and trafficking. We succeeded- for a time - and we can succeed again. With lessons from our achievements under our belts, let’s recommit to the next chapter of the advocacy we always needed, and will always need.

Bama Athreya is a human rights advocate who most recently served as Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID, leading portfolios on gender equality and inclusive development.