Podcast: Peter Berkowitz on Connecting Unalienable Rights to Foreign Policy

This Week’s Guest: Peter Berkowitz

Just over a year ago, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo created the new Commission on Unalienable Rights, tasked with “provid[ing] the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters” as well as “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” The formation of this commission signaled that he views America’s pursuit of human rights at home and abroad as properly rooted the deepest sources of American political philosophy and history.

The Commission on Unalienable Rights has been controversial from the beginning, with critics accusing it of too myopic a focus on religious liberty and too little a focus on questions of sex and gender. In this podcast, we sit down with Peter Berkowitz, director of policy planning at the State Department and the executive secretary of the commission, to hear first-hand the thinking behind the commission’s new draft report and the conclusions it presents.