Spread Freedom, Not Woke Values: An American Agenda for Democracy and Human Rights
House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Civilian Security and Trade
2025-05-08
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Source: Congress.gov
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for the record, and we are pleased to have a distinguished panel of witnesses before us today on this important topic, starting with the Honorable Robert Destro, the former Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the Department of State. Welcome, sir. Wonderful to hear your statements. Patrick Kirk, Vice President of Strategy, Innovation and Impact of the International Republican Institute. And finally, the Honorable Tom Malinowski, former member of Congress. I remember serving with you the first term. and former Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the Department of State. Now, this committee recognizes the importance of the issue before us, and it's grateful to have you here to speak with us today. Your full statements will be made part of the record, and I'll ask you to keep it to five minutes in order to allow time for other member questions. And I recognize Mr Destro for his opening statement.
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Robert A. Destro
Welcome once again, sir. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and Ranking Member Castro, thank you for your comments. And I'm going to try and keep it brief, but one of the things I think we should see here, and I'm really happy that you have Tom Malinowski and Patrick Quirk here, because this is what you're looking at, I think, is a great working group. That what we need to do, it's not a question of whether we're committed to human rights. We wouldn't be here unless we were. What we're concerned about here is we have now, we have, I think, a once in a several generation opportunity to look at the organization of state, Secretary Rubio has given you the proposed reorganization. Lots of questions about that in my mind, too. And I particularly have the same concerns as you do, Mr. Castro, about giving it all to the regionals. I'm not so sure about that. But what we need to be looking at is we have an opportunity here for Congress and the president to be working together to optimize it. because the country is not made of money. We can't afford to, we should be spending on human rights. I completely agree with that. But whatever the disagreements we might have, we need to be focusing on the outcomes of our programs. And that's something we just don't do. So what I would begin with basically is inviting my colleagues here and offering our services to the staff, if I can, to say, let's sit down around a table and start talking about some of the hard questions. And so one of the hardest questions is that I think we often need to put our areas of disagreement out on the table. The first one is even in the title of the hearing.
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Robert A. Destro
It's not freedom versus woke. My friends who would proudly describe themselves as woke see themselves as just as committed to freedom as I do. In fact, my son coached at a university that had its woke rating right on its website. So I see the issues we have as one of process. If our goal is to spread freedom and foster inclusiveness, sovereignty and interdependence, because that's really what we're talking about, is the interdependence of our people and the people of these who live under repressive regimes or who live in pretty good places. we must look at how the State Department actually operates. Now, spreading freedom is a laudable goal, you know, but the hard question is how successful has the State Department actually been? What are the outcomes? You might want to start with asking the people of Libya, where our regime change operations and democracy building has left them with slave markets. You could ask the people of Guatemala or Venezuela or Cuba, how many years have we been working on Cuba and we don't seem to be making much progress? There's a lot of money been spent on that. What's our return on investment? I would argue not very much. So whatever we're doing, it's not working. So I've seen with my own eyes that you know, how other organizations, it's not just state, it's not just USAID, it's all of it, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation. You know, I just got a text this morning from a friend in Belize, and I've been working with the Belizeans now for several years in a really, they're really innovative, wonderful People's Constitutional Commission reform process. Our embassy has not been around.
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