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Does the law itself need to be changed?

I think the law is sufficiently flexible to incorporate everything I've been talking about. The problem is, it doesn't require what I've been talking about.

Most of what it requires has been done. That is the sort of negative annual list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs). Every year the State Department puts out the list of the bad guys and goes through this silly procedure of deciding whether it will take economic sanctions against a country.

I say it's silly because in 10 years, economic sanctions have only been taken against one country. That was Eritrea, three years ago. And things got worse.

China has been on the list every year since the first one. After Tiananmen Square, we put sanctions on crime control equipment — cattle prods and barbed wire. The IRFA says if you have existing sanctions on human rights violations, you can use those for IRFA purposes. So every year we rubberstamp an existing, empty, rhetorical sanction for China. The Chinese, who in the early years were intensely irritated by this public condemnation, are beginning to yawn about it.

That doesn't mean we're not doing anything else in China. There are some pretty good programs, but it's all ad hoc. The good things that are going on are happening because a person on the ground — an ambassador, or a Foreign Service Officer, or an NGO that's being funded from the United States, or a military unit — is just trying to solve the problem.

Those people are, in effect, advancing religious freedom, but we're failing across the board because we have no policy to do so. Ad-hoc [religious liberty diplomacy] just won't cut it both for justice reasons and because of the national security of the United States.

Does the current system have the manpower to take a more proactive approach?

I don't believe we have enough diplomats. I think every Secretary of State who ever lived would agree with that. We need more Foreign Service Officers. We need a larger diplomatic establishment.

I believe that this should not be the responsibility of one office in the State Department with one senior official. It needs to be integrated into everything that our foreign policy does.

If you ask people around the world what U.S. religious freedom stands for, it's cultural imperialism, or it's Zionism, or it's making the world safe for American missionaries — all negative. We have utterly failed to communicate anything sympathetically about our own religion-state victories which came out of great struggles.

We persecuted our own. Congregationalists tortured and hung Quakers on Boston commons in the 17th century. Then, a century later, we have this magnificent thing called the First Amendment. We still have discrimination after that. And yet, despite that struggle, we now have the most religiously pluralistic and vibrant culture in the world. All the people around the world hear the success story, but they don't hear us talking about the struggle.

There are obviously some tensions between the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the State Department. Most recently, the State Department updated its list of CPCs for the first time in two years — but didn't tell USCIRF for months.

There was healthy tension when I was [in the State Department]. There has to be some disagreement between those agencies. But I think that's good when it's a good cop/bad cop thing. When the commission is harshly criticizing the State Department about its failure to take to task one country or another, the State Department, if it is wise, can use that to its advantage with country X.

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April (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53