Systemic Hypocrisy in United States Foreign Policy

Abstract

Why is contemporary United States foreign policy systemically hypocritical? This essay offers a legal realist perspective, which considers human rights and democracy-oriented narratives as morally appealing meta-discourses that are subject to reframing, weaponisation, and instrumentalisation by a wide variety of contending political actors in pursuit of concrete material or policy objectives. The perspective of legal realism is used in the case of post-Cold War United States foreign policy to understand how normative discourses are used across various geographies of geopolitical contestations in which state-initiated violence and death are prevalent. This commentary suggests that in pursuit of its geostrategic and economic objectives, the United States government’s human rights rhetoric abroad did not match the actual consequences of its domestic and foreign policies, thereby showing systemic hypocrisy.