by Marianne Scott
The views of the Biden and Trump administrations on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) could not be in greater contrast. President Biden issued three Executive Orders (EOs) on the subject, mandating that the federal government support and extend equity to a broad variety of individuals and communities facing poverty and discrimination. His secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, directed the State Department to engage with foreign governments and foreign peoples on equity and justice, calling the EOs “based on hard-nosed self-interest.”
On his first day in office, President Trump revoked President Biden’s EOs on equity. His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, introduced three criteria for the State Department: If it doesn’t make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous, don’t do it. Although the current administration is scrubbing all talk of equity, I think using Secretary Rubio’s yardstick to measure whether addressing equity globally will make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous shows that equity considerations do belong in our nation’s foreign policy.
Here’s how I came to that conclusion.
Why Advancing Equity Globally Contributes to a Safer, Stronger, and More Prosperous USA
I’ll start with what I mean by equity in foreign policy. I use the definition from President Biden’s executive order Advancing Racial Equity, signed on his inauguration day. “The term ‘equity’ means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals…”
What constitutes a more prosperous America? Well-established measures exist for increased prosperity, including higher GDP per capita, lower poverty rates, and higher social mobility. One prominent prosperity index goes beyond these economic fundamentals to include entrepreneurship and innovation, infrastructure, and personal freedoms.
I think a safer America has fewer enemies and more friends; fewer interruptions to our global supply chains due to other countries’ instability; more nations aligned with us to tackle global threats such as the spread of infectious diseases, technological disruption, transnational organized crime, environmental disasters, and others; effective defenses against our adversaries, and control over our national borders.
A large military has long been the hallmark of a strong America, but America’s strength also depends on having an innovative, growing economy and a resilient democratic system that together deliver results and opportunities for all our people; influence on the global stage; allies who will support our positions; and foreign publics who respect (hopefully also admire) our leadership and our nation and understand our interests.
Inequities and discrimination in other countries undermine and set back every single one of these measures of American prosperity, safety, and security. They make countries less stable by constraining economic growth, creating resentment, enemies, emigration, and desperation, as well as exacerbating global poverty. President George W. Bush explained it like this:
It’s in the country’s economic interest that we fight global poverty, because as developing nations grow in prosperity, they create better lives for their citizens and markets for US products. It’s in our security interests that we fight global poverty, because weakened, impoverished states are attractive safe havens for terrorists and tyrants and international criminals.”
Quite simply, access to opportunity for every community increases overall economic strength. There is no better inoculation against authoritarianism than a democracy that delivers equitably for all. Global threats such as disease and crime disproportionately affect those who are overlooked and oppressed. Denying people access to quality education, economic opportunity, rights, healthcare, and other necessities because of the community they come from, what they look like, who they love, or what they believe, makes their societies less safe, weaker, and less prosperous, which in turn endangers America.
The Historical Context
The Biden administration wasn’t the first to introduce equity as a foreign policy issue, only the most forceful. President Carter laid out his new foreign policy direction in 1977 saying, “We can no longer separate the traditional issues of war and peace from the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed U.S. foreign policy goals as “a safer, more prosperous, more democratic, more equitable world.” Under at least three secretaries of state – Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Antony Blinken – the State Department formalized racial equity and social inclusion issues in bilateral diplomatic engagements. The U.S. also has signed international agreements that promote equity and inclusion, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Adopted unanimously in 2015 by all 193 member states, the UN resolution seeks, “A just, equitable, tolerant, open and socially inclusive world in which the needs of the most vulnerable are met.”
The Biden administration’s emphasis on equity was a recognition of a unique moment in history, a global moment of urgency and opportunity. George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in May, 2020 not only ignited calls for racial justice and protests in the United States, but also generated new conversations about race and discrimination, and sparked protests against police brutality around the world. During the same year, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated public skepticism in many countries that democratic governments could deliver when it mattered most. Governments’ responses to the pandemic shattered the social contract that democracy would provide a better future for us and our children. For millions of people around the world, it hasn’t. Nowhere was this more evident than in this hemisphere.
The Hemispheric Example
At the end of the 20th century, the people of the Americas (South and Central America and the Caribbean,) rejected autocracy and military governance that had promised prosperity and stability but instead delivered oppression and volatility. In a region with traditionally extreme inequalities of income and wealth that parallel skin color and ethnic lines, for the first decade of this century, democratic governance was accompanied by hemispheric economic expansion and significant progress in poverty reduction, thanks to the rapid rise of global trade and rising prices for commodity exports. Between 2002 and 2011, over 50 million people moved out of poverty into the lower middle class, and stalled there (inequality in the region declined from a Gini coefficient of 0.55 in 2000 to .50 in 2010), while the existing elite (particularly the top one percent) grew wealthier.
The commodity boom ended over a decade ago, exposing a lagging quality of basic social services (particularly healthcare, education, transport, and justice); political polarization; corruption; discrimination; environmental devastation, and rising gang and other violence. This sparked frustrations that generated social unrest, mistrust of institutions, and migration, while elected leaders in several countries on both the right and the left tried to manipulate democratic systems to keep themselves in power. As the 2020 InterAmerican Development Bank publication The Inequality Crisis: Latin America and the Caribbean at the Crossroads notes, the 2019 protests in major Latin American cities demanded “equal treatment, better opportunities for all, and a more level playing field.”
The COVID-19 pandemic then delivered disproportionate tragedy to the people of the Americas. At its height, about 28% of COVID deaths worldwide occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean despite the region being home to around nine percent of the global population. The pandemic further contracted economic growth in the region, further eroding public confidence in leaders’ ability to deliver, and accelerating the demand for more equal, inclusive societies.
What matters to the people of the Americas is precisely what will make the United States safer, stronger, and more prosperous: good governance that produces merit-based inclusive societies that incentivize people to stay in their home countries and contribute there. This includes safe cities and towns with opportunities to excel and innovate in the formal economy no matter your race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, and quality public services for all. Functioning democratic governance that helps build more equitable societies offers a better alternative to the autocratic models of our adversaries.
The Diplomatic Context
In Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s landmark speech in Quito, Ecuador in 2021, “Making Democracy Deliver for the Americas,” he called it a “moment of democratic reckoning,” understanding that the “racial reckoning” of 2020 had stripped the blinders off of those who assumed that race, class, and ethnicity did not affect democracy or economic growth. His speech was just the latest admission that the centuries-old inequities and discrimination in the Americas endanger democratic governance in the region and the United States’ national security.
U.S. foreign assistance and public diplomacy programs have focused on underserved communities for many years. Multilateral fora, particularly in the Americas, have emphasized equity and inclusion for decades. Back in 2004, via the Nuevo Leon Declaration, the U.S. signed onto the hemispheric pledge “to advance implementation of measures to…achieve economic growth with equity.” Successive Summits of the Americas explicitly resolved to combat inequity and inequality such as the Sixth, Seventh, and most recently Ninth Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. in June 2022 in Los Angeles, under the theme “Building a Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Future.” Peru continued the push under the theme “Together Against Inequality and Discrimination,” for the 52nd Organization of American States General Assembly in Lima in October 2022. The Department’s 2023 Equity Action Plan went further, in addition to incorporating equity into external engagement it included actions to institutionalize equity strategies in the Department’s internal infrastructure.
Reducing discrimination and inequity is a national security challenge that cannot be addressed effectively without taking into account the unique circumstances, needs, and perspectives of the most vulnerable. This is where diplomacy and diplomats matter most. To mitigate threats from abroad, our diplomats must understand the entire country where they are stationed, including and perhaps particularly the perspectives of the most marginalized. Our diplomats must engage with foreign governments about discrimination and inequities that fuel forces that threaten America’s security and prosperity.
There still exists a national security imperative to attack the bias and discrimination that corrode our societies. Improving equity and reducing racial and other identity-based discrimination at home and abroad will make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.
Marianne Scott retired from the Senior Foreign Service in 2022 as a Minister Counselor after spending nearly three decades as a diplomat. She served most of her career in Latin America with tours in Africa and working on European Affairs. She also has extensive experience leading nonprofits working to build international understanding and using the humanities to build community. She is now writing her first novel.