Human Rights as a Weapons System

The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a milestone document in the advancement of the dignity of the human race. When it comes to U.S. respect for and promotion of universal human rights, the U.S. is in a radically different position than its strategic competitors, i.e., China and Russia. This may be an area where the U.S. may be able to isolate both nations based on their deplorable human rights records. This could be an area where there is little downside, as these competitors could be labeled pariah states by the international community based on their behavior that goes against global norms, or they alter their behavior to integrate into the global community. If the latter, they would become less threatening to vital U.S. interests. How could the DoD utilize human rights as a weapon system against strategic competitors?

• Abate

  • explains that the contemporary rivalry between the U.S. and China is fundamentally an ideological conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. By actively promoting, demonstrating, and modeling universal human rights and democratic values, the U.S. can strengthen its partnerships with small and middle powers. These smaller states can collectively reinforce the liberal international order and serve as a "moral balance of power" that restrains the coercive whims of larger competitors. Highlighting the moral and material benefits of the liberal model over the single-party authoritarian model increases the likelihood of states aligning with U.S. strategic interests

• Ahern

  • notes that strategic competitors actively manipulate international institutions to shield themselves from human rights scrutiny, making the reform of these organizations a key battleground for the U.S.. China has systematically positioned its representatives at the top of United Nations agencies to stifle global criticism of its domestic authoritarian excesses. To weaponize human rights effectively, the U.S. must aggressively reassert itself in UN agencies and lead a structural reform of international human rights bodies to ensure autocratic, human-rights-suppressing regimes cannot lead them. Revitalizing these institutions to champion liberal values like individual liberty and human dignity directly facilitates U.S. efforts to counter Chinese disinformation and expose their geopolitical maneuvers

• Amico

  • outlines how moral and normative persuasion is a powerful instrument of grand strategy, as a nation's "might" is deeply dependent on its ability to align its actions with recognized principles of right and justice. Citing Stacie Goddard's theory of legitimacy, the paper notes that when a state successfully frames its actions as "right" and aligned with international norms, it can reduce the likelihood of resistance from other states. Conversely, strategically utilizing normative arguments against an opponent makes it exceptionally difficult for them to contest the status quo without appearing as open violators of those very norms. By integrating a counterintelligence framework into public rhetoric, strategic communicators can systematically identify and exploit the gap between an adversary's rhetoric and their covert activities to advance U.S. security interests

• Baker, YU-20

  • outlines how the U.S. can wield international law and public exposure as a combined weapon to penalize and contain Chinese military and economic expansion. Showcasing the PRC's illicit activities—including intellectual theft, illegal claims in international waters, and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang—on the world stage is vital to holding the regime accountable. Utilizing international courts to secure legal justifications for human rights violations enables the U.S. to build a legitimate foundation for economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure. This strategy not only penalizes the competitor directly but also pressures other neutral nations that regularly conduct business with the PRC, effectively isolating the competitor within the global commerce and legal systems

• Bearden

  • highlights that the DoD can weaponize human rights by targeting and exposing the abusive labor and environmental practices of state-backed Chinese enterprises operating in developing regions like Africa. While the PRC publicly promotes its overseas ventures as mutually beneficial, many of these projects feature highly unequal and unsafe labor practices that directly violate human rights. By actively exposing these exploitative behaviors and engaging with ethnic Chinese diasporas, the U.S. can undermine the PRC’s soft-power image, document Beijing's predatory intent, and generate counter-propaganda. Highlighting these local labor violations helps erode Beijing's foreign policy credibility, builds trust in the U.S. among host-nation populations, and counters China's regional economic encirclement

• Bellamy, Col. Chad A. (Chaplain), "Religious Practice Under Control:  China's Human Rights Violations and Repression of Religious Freedom," AWC PSP, 2022, 30 pgs.

  • Argues that the U.S. should leverage information operations to highlight the repression of religious liberty and the elimination of minority cultures as a means of distinguishing free societies from authoritarian regimes. Using the systematic elimination of Uyghur Muslim culture in Xinjiang as a primary example, this paper demonstrates that exposing these "concentration camps" and human rights atrocities on the global stage helps mobilize the international community to isolate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and counter its claims of political legitimacy. Exposing how a nation treats its citizens directly correlates to how it acts in the international community, providing the DoD with a narrative tool that undermines the competitor's soft power and highlights the moral divide between autocracies and democracies.

• Bishop

  • demonstrates how the U.S. can establish technological and moral hegemony by championing global standards of ethics, data privacy, and human rights in emerging military technologies like artificial intelligence. By contrasting the U.S. commitment to minimizing unintended harm with China’s flexible ethical framework and use of AI for state-led surveillance of ethnic minorities, the U.S. can legitimize its leadership while casting its competitors as unethical actors. This values-based framework shapes how other nations adopt and integrate technology, embedding democratic values into global systems. This strategic alignment forces smaller nations to choose between competing digital ecosystems, effectively isolating competitors and cementing democratic alliances

• Bowman

  • outlines how the Department of Defense (DoD) can utilize human rights as a strategic interest and tool to discredit authoritarian competitors and forge deep international partnerships. Promoting human rights based on democratic values lends critical credibility to American institutions, serves as a beacon to attract global partners, and legitimizes the nation's capacity to discredit competitors with opposing values. In the context of great power competition, the U.S. and its partners must actively contest the spread of authoritarian human rights models and counter attempts by competitors to rewrite international norms within multilateral institutions. To turn this into an active weapon system, the U.S. should proactively utilize targeted sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and active leadership within international human rights institutions to directly confront violators and isolate competitors

• Curl

  • provides a critical caution, emphasizing that human rights can only function as an effective weapon if the U.S. maintains its own moral authority and avoids double standards. Historically, when the U.S. has bypassed international human rights conventions and due process standards (such as using torture or indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay), it has severely strained relationships with key political allies and damaged its moral standing. Such actions create self-laid minefields of hypocrisy, emboldening authoritarian regimes like Russia and China to justify their own human rights abuses by citing U.S. precedents. To successfully weaponize human rights against adversaries, the DoD must systematically realign its own counterterrorism and military operations with foundational international laws and human rights standards

• Davenport

  • Davenport’s study of China’s irregular warfare strategy recommends that the U.S. shift its posture in the cognitive domain from a reactive defense to an active campaign that champions Western values and the rule of law. The DoD can utilize its extensive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to expose adversary lies and launch proactive public narratives that frame their expansionist actions as directly contrary to global human rights and international norms. Engaging early in this cognitive battle allows the U.S. to shape global perceptions, exert persistent pressure on competitor leadership decision-making, and mobilize international coalitions to defend the rules-based order

• Foster, Colleen, "The National Security Implication of Human Trafficking and Slavery," AWC Strategic Studies Paper, 2020, 20 pgs.

  • Cautions that while human rights advocacy is an essential tool to advance American influence, the U.S. must resolve its own domestic vulnerabilities to prevent its moral authority from being compromised. Historically, improvements in human rights have been used successfully as leverage to reshape relationships with competitors—such as prompting Gorbachev to reform Soviet human rights practices in exchange for deeper relations with the West. However, any "say-do gap" created by ongoing violations within the U.S., such as labor trafficking inside military subcontracting and supply chains, severely damages U.S. credibility. To successfully employ human rights as an offensive system, the U.S. must maintain absolute transparency and eliminate domestic compliance issues, ensuring its diplomats are not viewed as hypocrites when negotiating and signaling that competitors' practices are under scrutiny.

• Gaytan, Marissa, "Countering Internal Chinese Propaganda and Censorship: Cultural Exchanges Key to Establishment of a Free Press," SOS AUAR 2022, 8 pgs. 

  • ​​​​​​​Proposes that the United States can indirectly "weaponize" the promotion of human rights and civil liberties by using educational and cultural exchanges to dismantle the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) internal censorship from the inside out. While the CCP utilizes its "Great Firewall" and robust propaganda machine to suppress domestic dissent and hide human rights abuses, the U.S. can leverage its academic institutions to expose Chinese citizens to democratic ideals, individual freedoms, and checks on government power. By systematically increasing student visas for Chinese scholars, embedding Mandarin programs in U.S. schools, and encouraging Americans to study and work in China, these citizen-to-citizen interactions foster a shared understanding of open societies. This educational exposure serves as an asymmetric soft-power tool that raises the political awareness of the Chinese populace, motivating them to demand a free press capable of highlighting corruption and preventing human rights abuses against minority populations. Ultimately, by cultivating this grassroots push for basic civil liberties, the U.S. can capitalize on the CCP's vulnerability to domestic unrest, forcing the regime to gradually adopt free-press principles and transition toward a more predictable, less threatening neighbor.

• Glowacki

  • emphasizes that pariah states face significant structural hurdles in attempting to leverage and shape international institutions in their favor. When U.S. strategic competitors act in blatant violation of established international norms, they are increasingly labeled as pariahs, which creates severe liabilities for their partner states and systematically inhibits broader international cooperation. This dynamic provides the U.S. and its allies with a powerful asymmetric advantage to diplomatically isolate and containment-fence revisionist regimes. However, the paper also warns that to maintain this leverage, the U.S. must avoid "self-laid minefields of hypocrisy" where its own inconsistent application of international law and self-defense standards undermines its grand strategic goals and credibility

• Harper

  • Harper’s analysis of Sino-Russian relations outlines how the promotion of Western democratic values and universal human rights serves as an asymmetric threat to the domestic political legitimacy of both Beijing and Moscow. Authoritarian competitors view Western critiques of their internal affairs and the treatment of their own citizens as existential threats that invite dangerous domestic discord and undermine party control. By persistently exposing and criticizing domestic human rights abuses (such as state-sponsored digital surveillance and internment of minority populations), the DoD can target a major psychological vulnerability of these closed regimes. This strategic pressure forces adversaries to expend significant domestic and political capital defending their internal governance, thereby limiting their ability to project power and influence abroad

• Hebert 

  • Hebert’s research on space norms outlines how the DoD can leverage international norms to enable soft power campaigns that "name and shame" adversaries. Codifying expected standards of behavior provides a clear baseline to assess intent, improve attribution, and narrow the "gray zone" of hybrid conflict. In the informational and diplomatic realms, highlighting a competitor’s deviation from established norms serves to delegitimize their actions, isolate them internationally, and build robust public support for U.S. defensive operations

• Holland

  • Holland’s analysis of strategic messaging advocates for a return to Cold War-era soft power diplomacy and influence operations that use factual information about human rights abuses to undermine the legitimacy of authoritarian competitors. By systematically collecting data on the illegal and predatory activities of state-run entities and disseminating it through global information campaigns, the U.S. can educate domestic and foreign publics on the negative impacts of autocratic expansion. This strategic communication directly challenges the competitor’s narratives, highlights their lack of respect for human rights and the rule of law, and encourages local populations to resist political alignment or trade dependency with corrupt, repressive states

• Hou

  • highlights how the liberal international order is fundamentally anchored in democracy, universal human dignity, and human rights. Crucially, the paper notes that global norms of state sovereignty have evolved to include the explicit "responsibility to protect" human rights, meaning that a state's failure to govern responsibly can provide the legal and moral justification for external intervention. In the context of great power competition, the U.S. can exploit China's documented abuses (such as those in Xinjiang) to unify democratic alliances, erode the legitimacy of the authoritarian model, and counter its revisionist efforts to alter the rules-based system. Because some features of the liberal order are fundamentally at odds with authoritarian ambitions, elevating human rights violations acts as a powerful strategic constraint against revisionist power

• Myers, Maj. Jared D., "Video Games as Soft Power:  A New Frontier for Strategic Competition?" SAASS thesis, 2022, 90 pgs. 

  • Explains that the Department of Defense (DoD) can exploit the global gaming and Esports landscape as a highly effective, low-cost informational capability to project values and counter strategic competitors like China. By capitalizing on the time-sensitive window created by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) severe domestic crackdowns on youth gaming, the U.S. can leverage its dominance in the international gaming industry to transmit liberal democratic values, culture, and political ideals directly to global audiences—including the over seventy percent of citizens in authoritarian states who are now connected to the internet. While the CCP aggressively attempts to protect its international image by censoring sensitive topics like human rights and Taiwan's status in Chinese-backed consumer tech, Chinese gamers routinely utilize virtual private networks (VPNs) and internet "accelerators" to bypass these digital firewalls. Consequently, the U.S. government can proactively strengthen relationships with domestic game developers to cultivate interactive spaces that foster cross-border cultural exchanges, showcase the open and attractive brand of Western democracy, and allow foreign players to build genuine social connections with average Americans. Ultimately, this asymmetric strategy highlights the stark dissonance between the benign image autocratic regimes attempt to project and their actual records of domestic political repression and human rights abuses, thereby undermining their global prestige while reinforcing the legitimacy of the rules-based international order

• Oliver

  • ​​​​​​​Demonstrates that the U.S. and its partners can utilize "international shaming" as a powerful non-weaponized tool of external pressure to enforce norm compliance and erode an adversary's international standing. By deploying strategic communications, information politics, and symbolic politics to expose systemic abuses, the U.S. can target an adversary's domestic legitimacy and global reputation. This persistent exposure forces targeted autocratic regimes to defend their behavior against universal standards, altering their decision calculus. Under conditions of great power competition, a targeted adversary is highly sensitive to international public opinion and may be compelled to either modify its behavior to avoid negative domestic and international friction or face diplomatic and strategic isolation as a pariah state​​​​​​​

• ​​​​​​​Onstad
  • ​​​​​​​highlights how strategic competitors are highly vulnerable to coordinated human rights signaling and international condemnation in multilateral forums. For instance, when the U.S. and its allies raise China's human rights abuses, such as the suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang or Tibet, it directly disrupts the adversary's global campaign to dominate the international narrative regarding its power and values. To avoid international backlash and preserve its reputation of being open for global business, China is forced to expend massive diplomatic, economic, and political resources to self-censor, deter debate, and manage foreign perceptions. Targeting these specific pressure points allows the U.S. to restrict the adversary's freedom of action and impose significant friction on its regional influence operations
• Peacock
  • Peacock’s research on China’s "Three Warfares" demonstrates how the Department of Defense (DoD) can utilize public opinion and media warfare as an informational "battle for prestige" to target the reputation of strategic competitors. By systematically publicizing and highlighting the deplorable human rights records and domestic repression of competitors—such as China’s treatment of the Uighur population in Xinjiang—the DoD and its international allies can orchestrate a coordinated "name and shame" campaign. Because autocratic regimes place a high strategic value on maintaining global prestige to secure trade and security partnerships, a systematic international outcry over human rights abuses can severely degrade their international standing, restrict their strategic options, and isolate them as pariah states in the global community. Additionally, this public pressure can deter further aggressive behaviors by imposing high reputational costs on competitors who seek to be seen as responsible global actors
• Sheehey
  • Sheehey’s investigation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine argues that the international community has a collective moral obligation to intervene and halt mass atrocities, and that the United Nations can act as a "representative sovereign" to authorize the use of force when a state fails to protect its own people. By leveraging the unanimous global consensus surrounding R2P's core pillars, the U.S. and its allies can legally and morally delegitimize tyrannical regimes that commit crimes against humanity. This collective, multilateral enforcement of universal human rights norms strips authoritarian adversaries of their claims to sovereign immunity when they trammel on human dignity, providing a powerful legal and moral framework to justify international intervention or punitive measures
• Stuard
  • Stuard’s study on security cooperation and human security suggests that the DoD can turn human rights into a proactive weapon of attraction by elevating human security as a central pillar of military engagements in critical regions like the Indo-Pacific. By prioritizing programs that protect individual liberties, personal security, and economic welfare, the U.S. military can establish itself as a reliable, empathetic partner of choice, reinforcing the universal appeal of democratic values. This values-based approach directly counterbalances China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which operates under an apathetic model that ignores human rights records and fosters corruption in fragile states. Furthermore, adhering to legal frameworks like the Leahy Laws ensures that U.S. military aid is conditioned on human rights standards, preserving the moral legitimacy of U.S. leadership and driving a wedge between autocratic states and potential regional partners
• Werner
  • suggests that the U.S. and the DoD can exploit strategic competitors' domestic population-control policies and resulting demographic crises to gain a geopolitical advantage in other contested regions. For instance, China's history of aggressive reproductive interference, including the One Child Policy, has created severe, long-term demographic challenges that weaken the state from within. By leading the international community to form a unified majority that formally condemns these human rights violations, the U.S. can coordinate a coalition to impose severe economic retribution. This concerted moral and economic pressure can ultimately force the competitor to make critical concessions in other vital areas of U.S. interest, such as territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas