The predictable chorus of dismay echoed through the marble corridors of the Palais des Nations this week when the United States once again failed to show up for its Universal Periodic Review. For the second consecutive year, American diplomats declined to present themselves before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Almost instantly, non-governmental organizations and professional human rights functionaries issued their standard press releases, warning that the absence of the world’s foremost superpower threatens to shatter the fragile architecture of international accountability.
One must admire the sheer, unblinking gall required to refer to Geneva’s proceedings as an instrument of accountability. The Human Rights Council has long ceased to be a serious moral arbiter, if it ever was one. It is, in practice, an expensive clearinghouse for despots to launder their reputations while passing pious judgment on constitutional republics. When an international tribunal seats the representatives of systematic torturers, imperial aggressors, and petro-dictatorships, subjecting oneself to its procedural cross-examination is not an exercise in democratic humility. It is an act of diplomatic masochism.
For decades, European diplomats have treated these multilateral rites like liturgical duties, operating under the polite fiction that authoritarian states can be shamed into compliance over coffee in neutral Switzerland. The results speak for themselves. While diplomats in Geneva draft endless, tepid resolutions, filtration camps continue to operate in occupied Ukraine, Uyghurs remain locked in Xinjiang labor compounds, and political prisoners rot in Belarusian penal colonies. In the real world, the dictators do not blush. They organize voting blocs, trade favors with non-aligned client states, and turn human rights reviews into weapons against open societies.
Washington’s choice to keep its seat empty is an overdue refusal to play the rube in a rigged game. There is no strategic or moral logic in dispatching senior American officials to be lectured on civil liberties by regimes whose own legal systems are extensions of the state security apparatus. Submitting domestic jurisprudence to the scrutiny of states that outlaw opposition parties does not advance freedom. It merely grants legitimacy to the jailers by pretending they belong on the bench.
Yet an earned contempt for the United Nations is not, by itself, a foreign policy. While Washington is entirely correct to treat Geneva’s posturing with disdain, an empty chair always carries a cost if it is not paired with an aggressive counter-offensive. Nature abhors a vacuum, and multilateral institutions abhor one even more. When the United States walks away without a disciplined plan to confront autocratic influence abroad, Beijing and its junior partners in Moscow gladly step into the breach. They do not join these bodies to play by the rules; they join to rewrite the vocabulary of international law, substituting collective state control for individual liberty and calling it sovereignty.
The mistake of the internationalist commentariat is confusing conference rooms with power. True human rights protections have never been secured by multilateral peer reviews or non-binding rapporteur reports. They are secured by hard power, clear alliances, and the economic leverage to make repression costly. The rights of millions in Eastern Europe are guaranteed today not by the Universal Periodic Review, but by NATO’s forward posture in Poland and the Baltics, backed by American ammunition depots and nuclear deterrence.
If Western democracies wish to defend universal liberties, they must stop looking for salvation in Swiss seminar rooms and start looking at their own defense budgets, sanctions regimes, and critical supply chains. Accountability does not arrive on parchment stamped by an international bureaucrat. It arrives when aggressors run out of foreign reserves, when authoritarian supply chains are choked by export controls, and when free nations possess the military capability to ensure that borders cannot be moved by force.
The human rights lobby will continue to lament the empty American chair in Geneva, mistaking procedural attendance for moral seriousness. Let them. Washington has far more urgent business to attend to than answering questions from autocrats pretending to care about the rule of law. The defense of human dignity is being fought in the factories producing artillery shells and the intelligence networks tracking illicit capital, not over lukewarm mineral water at the Palais des Nations.