If you don’t do what the US wants, they start to undermine the legitimacy of your regime with human rights talk. This is what happened here. India didn’t play ball on sanctions against Russia, and suddenly Blinken is talking about human rights abuses. Now India is just retorting.
I'm sure you're right, but IMHO allegations of human rights abuses should always be given due weight regardless of the intentions of the accuser. What matters is whether the allegations are true, and that's all that matters, otherwise the debate simply degenerates into whataboutism.
Yes but the US also should take a consistent stance on human rights rather than only bringing them up when there is an ulterior motive, which will make other countries view them simply as a cudgel for enforcing us interests.
I don't think that's reasonable. I don't think it's ok that North Korea systematically tortures huge numbers of people to death, or that huge numbers of Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda, or that for many decades South Africa systematically subjugated the majority of their population.
Internal affairs can very quickly become international issues. Civil wars have a habit of spilling over borders, and refugee crises such as due to the situation in Syria affect nations on other continents. There are always knock-on effects.
We should never have tolerated Russia's mercilessly brutal subjugation of Chechnya. We deplored their activities in Syria, but eh, Syria is far away. What they're doing in Ukraine is basically the same, but now it's in Europe so that's different. That's pure hypocrisy. There is a direct line to be drawn from what Russia did in Chechnya, joining the dots through Georgia, Syria and the Donbas directly to the attack on Kyiv. None of that should ever have been tolerable, but we did tolerate it.
We should be kicking up a huge fuss over the treatment of the Uighurs, the minimal sanctions we're imposing now is the diplomatic equivalent of ineffectual hand wringing. It's tacit acceptance that this sort of behaviour is acceptable. After all, we are accepting it.
US foreign policies are sometimes driven by lobbying and vote banks.
"Human rights abuse" is a policy arm of the US clearly used as a weapon against hostile rivals.
It is a clear message to Indians that the US does not consider them an ally.
And that the US will continue to back and use its arms in India - Church, Media, Academia, Leftist groups to destabilise, and support secessionist movements with an intent to eventually weaken or break up the country.
Sometimes it appears as if the US does things just because it can, this is definitely a big blunder in foreign relations.
