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Toolbox

From our earliest conversations, Obama and I had talked about the recurrence and seeming inevitability of mass atrocities. We discussed not what it would look like to eliminate evil, a utopian fantasy, but rather, how to optimize what the United States did in response. Now that Obama was the president and I was his human rights adviser responsible for atrocity prevention, we had a chance to actually implement the kinds of changes we had batted around.

Researching “A Problem from Hell,” I had observed that deliberations about how to prevent mass atrocities rarely took place in a timely way among senior decision-makers in the US government. And lower-level US officials who pushed for action lacked the power to authorize it, finding themselves mired in bureaucratic gridlock while violence spread. Partly as a result, the US government often failed to employ low-cost tools—such as sending diplomats to apply pressure or mediate, cutting off the flow of weapons to a country, or working at the UN to deploy international peacekeepers.

In my writing and activism, I had argued that US officials should respond with a sense of urgency to early-warning signs, and that they should be empowered to alert senior decision-makers to threats of violence. High-level officials should then open their toolbox, scrutinizing whether or not the benefits of employing a particular tool outweighed the costs.

People who knew me before I met Obama expected the hardest part of my adjustment to working at the White House would be taming my outspokenness.

But when people asked, “Do you miss having your own voice?” I could barely fathom the question.

“The reason I was exercising my voice before was to influence people in jobs like the one I now have,” I would say. “A voice is not an end in itself.”

Now that I was a US official, I hoped to prod the system to speedily consider US and international options to mitigate violence.

PRESIDENT OBAMA LIKED TO QUOTE from a scene in The Departed where Mark Wahlberg and a fellow cop are on a stakeout. When the other policeman loses the man they are tracking, an enraged Wahlberg begins yelling at the officer, who indignantly shouts back, “Well, who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the guy who does his job,” Wahlberg responds. “You must be the other guy.”

With a similar dynamic in mind, I lobbied for the creation of the first-ever White House position to coordinate the US government’s response to atrocities.⁷ I was responsible for all multilateral affairs and human rights issues; I needed a single individual by my side who would think full-time about how to prevent mass atrocities. Together, we could push senior decision-makers to authorize action before violence spiraled out of hand, incurring fewer risks and conceivably saving more lives.

After consulting with President Obama, Denis McDonough (who had replaced Lippert as NSC Chief of Staff) agreed to create the position of NSC Director for War Crimes and Atrocities, which would report to me. I had a very specific person in mind for the role: a thirty-two-year-old civil rights lawyer named David Pressman, who had served as an aide to Madeleine Albright when she was Secretary of State.

I had gotten to know David back in 2005, when he worked with George Clooney to intensify public pressure on the Bush administration to do more to prevent atrocities in Darfur. He was full of contradictions. He projected ambition, and over the years had cultivated an impressive Rolodex of contacts in both political parties. He said he became a lawyer because he viewed law as a “language of power.” Yet David’s Machiavellian sensibility had a beautiful twist—he ruthlessly pursued the goal of protecting vulnerable people.

True to this aim, during law school he secured a clerkship on the Supreme Court . . . of Rwanda. And while David could be argumentative to a fault, he also had an endearing ability to laugh at himself. I had heard the acronym GSD—Get Shit Done—used to praise people who were effective in government, and I was confident that David’s GSD score would be high. He was destined to break large amounts of bureaucratic crockery, but I could not imagine achieving the kind of change I sought without him.

Once David assumed the newly created position, I could count on finding him in the office when I arrived early in the morning, and he usually stayed well after I left late at night. I don’t think I ever came in to the EEOB on the weekend without finding our office door unlocked and David pounding away on his keyboard. Because I had been unable to secure additional office space, my administrative assistant’s tiny cubicle had been partitioned into two. Both she and David worked without complaint in a jury-rigged space not much larger than a mid-sized refrigerator. “You’ve come a long way since hanging out with movie stars,” I teased him.

David and I met with people inside and outside the US government to devise a list of meaningful reforms. And we drafted a directive that President Obama soon issued to his cabinet, declaring that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States” and creating an Atrocities Prevention Board, the first White House–led structure tasked to react to early warnings of atrocities.

From there, Obama directed the intelligence community to prepare an unprecedented National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) identifying the places facing the greatest risk of mass atrocities. He licensed the creation of “alert channels” so that information about unfolding crises could more easily reach decision-makers, including him. He directed the Pentagon to incorporate the prevention of atrocities into its training and contingency planning. He banned violators of human rights from entering the United States.⁸ And he called on the private sector to create new technologies that could expose or authenticate violations of human rights.

But while these moves were trailblazing, the real test of the US government’s seriousness about preventing mass atrocities would come, of course, in the real world.

IN 2010, ON THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY of the Srebrenica massacre, I returned to Bosnia as a US official, touching down in a Sarajevo that had been transformed from the war zone I’d lived in as a young reporter. The Bosnian government had designated July 11^th, the anniversary of Srebrenica’s fall, as a day of mourning and remembrance in which families would gather to bury the remains of their loved ones. Remarkably, forensic experts were still discovering bone fragments and personal effects of the victims. Five years before, I had visited with my friend David Rohde for one such ceremony in which 610 men and boys had been interred. This year, 775 Bosnians would be laid to rest.

Before the official ceremony began in the tiny hamlet in eastern Bosnia, I ducked away from the heads of state and foreign ministers milling around and approached a woman who looked distraught. She told me in Serbo-Croatian that the previous year she had buried her husband and three of her five sons, each of whom had been murdered by Bosnian Serb soldiers. This year she was burying her fourth son.

I knew how hollow my words would sound. But I told her I had come on behalf of President Obama, who wanted to express his condolences and solidarity. “Ja sam nova majka,” I added, but as soon as I said those words (“I am a new mother”) and thought of Declan, I struggled to continue.

“Ne mogu zamisliti Vašu bol,” I said. “I can’t imagine your pain.”

The woman began speaking. “In my dreams they are there,” she said. “But then I wake up and they are gone. They have vanished.” What she said next shook me: “My son I am burying today was only seventeen. He was just a young boy. I didn’t have time to love him enough. I didn’t give him enough hugs. He wouldn’t have known what he meant to me.”

We never know how much time we will have with those we love. I could do nothing other than embrace the woman.

“We can’t bring your sons or husband back,” I said as we parted. “But we will never give up on bringing to justice those who did this to your family.”

Ratko Mladić, the mastermind of the Srebrenica genocide who had been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal, had evaded capture for fifteen years. There had to be a way to find him.

The two previous administrations had tried. President Clinton’s State Department created a War Crimes Rewards Program, plastering around Bosnia and Serbia thousands of WANTED posters featuring photos of Mladić and the other leading indictee, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić. The posters promised $5 million for information that led to their arrests. But in Mladić’s early years on the run, he had benefitted from a wide circle of protectors that included elements within the Serbian military and Russia’s powerful Federal Security Service.

At the beginning of his presidency, George W. Bush had intensified the manhunt, sending more Special Forces to Bosnia than the United States had deployed anywhere else in the world since the end of the Cold War. But after September 11^th, 2001, tracking down Balkan war criminals naturally receded as a priority, and the intelligence and military resources dedicated to finding Mladić were reassigned to counterterrorism efforts. Without pressure from the United States, the pursuit lost momentum.⁹

After President Obama took office, he sent Vice President Joe Biden to Belgrade to meet Serbian president Boris Tadić, a reformer who wanted to forge a closer relationship with the West. Biden encouraged Tadić to find and arrest Mladić. Our government and that of the UK offered assistance to Serbian authorities in tracking the fugitive’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, concrete leads remained elusive.

Using the tools at our disposal, we got to work. Stephen Rapp, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, traveled to Serbia five times to underscore President Obama’s deep interest in the case. Capitalizing on the imprimatur of the White House, David also launched a new process in which he gathered government agency representatives to look for ways the United States could capture those, like Mladić, who had been indicted by international tribunals for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

David always took great pleasure in inventing new government acronyms. “Off to PIFWC!” he would exclaim as he made his way to the Situation Room, carrying a large notebook containing the latest intelligence on our government’s efforts to track alleged war criminals. While I couldn’t always remember precisely what PIFWC stood for (Persons Indicted For War Crimes), I regularly popped my head into David’s cubicle for status updates on Mladić’s whereabouts.

“Nothing yet,” he would usually say. “But he’s top of the list!” If David was pessimistic, he never showed it.

Bringing mass murderers to justice meant more than just providing a degree of closure for the families of victims—it advanced US interests. Finding someone like Mladić would remove a major impediment to reconciliation in a place where the US government had deployed tens of thousands of troops and invested billions of dollars in pursuit of greater stability. This logic extended well beyond the Balkans. Impunity for people who had committed unspeakable atrocities undermined fragile governments, often the same governments the State Department and the Pentagon were going to considerable lengths to strengthen. The rule of law was an essential foundation for peace and economic development, and even though the apprehension of war criminals would not itself usher in lawfulness, it could possibly deter other would-be mass murderers.

In emphasizing the importance of arresting war criminals, David and I of course understood that we would not be able to secure significant additional intelligence or financial resources. To compensate, we pursued an approach inside the government that had a lot in common with activist strategies outside: look for pressure points, identify potential allies, and work the system. And thanks to the relatively simple bureaucratic innovation of the NSC-initiated PIFWC meetings, I saw almost immediately how attention from the White House activated interest throughout the government and concentrated minds in Serbia.

In an overture that proved pivotal in demonstrating to the Serbian government that President Obama was deeply committed to seeing Mladić brought to justice, we invited the Serbian president’s chief of staff, Miki Rakić, to the White House. David, who had been a theater director in college and always had an eye for the mise-en-scène, reserved the ornate Indian Treaty Room in the EEOB for our meeting. He thought the intricate gold and marble detailing and the kaleidoscopically tiled floor would serve as a fitting backdrop to my reciting the benefits that would accrue to Serbia if Mladić were rounded up. Rakić made clear he would take the message back to his president. This renewed dedication to the pursuit of Bosnia’s most wanted took place almost entirely behind the scenes, but it successfully signaled to Serbian officials that they should dedicate more assets to the search.

My phone rang at six a.m. on May 26^th, 2011. It was David.

“We got Mladić,” he said, sounding euphoric.

I could hardly process the news. “You’re kidding?” was all I could initially manage. But to my amazement, it was no joke. After fifteen years on the run, one of the world’s most notorious war criminals was behind bars.

In a joint effort involving Serbian, British, and American intelligence agencies, officers from the Serbian Interior Ministry had found and arrested Mladić in his cousin’s farmhouse.¹⁰

Hailing the arrest in a statement, President Obama applauded President Tadić and noted the long record the United States had, “from Nuremberg to the present,” in pursuing justice “as both a moral imperative and an essential element of stability and peace.”

Obama concluded, “May the families of Mladić’s victims find some solace in today’s arrest.”^*

I had suggested this line, thinking not just of the mother I had spoken with during my visit to Srebrenica, but of all the families in Bosnia who had endured unthinkable loss.

ONE OF THE FIRST MAJOR TESTS of whether we could smother a possible crisis early on, before it devolved into mass killings, came in South Sudan.

According to a peace agreement brokered by the Bush administration in 2005, South Sudanese voters were supposed to hold a referendum in January of 2011 on whether to secede from Sudan. Two decades of Sudanese government bombing raids and ground attacks were thought to have left nearly two million people dead, and the people in southern Sudan unequivocally wanted independence. But as we met at the NSC to map out possible scenarios in advance of the vote, it seemed inconceivable that Khartoum’s genocidal government would allow the oil-rich south to become its own country. The most likely outcome was either that Sudan would prevent the referendum, or that it would simply refuse to recognize the inevitably unfavorable results. Both scenarios would provoke violent conflict. Warning lights from NGOs and our own intelligence community were flashing red.

The administration was filled with people who cared deeply about South Sudan, including Susan at the UN, my Wednesday Group friend Gayle, and our colleagues in the State Department and NSC who managed Africa policy. Denis sent stern messages to all government agencies that a peaceful referendum in South Sudan was one of President Obama’s personal priorities. At the UN, Susan negotiated a landmark communiqué in which China and African nations joined the United States and Europe in calling on the Sudanese government to respect the referendum results. Both the United States and the UN also carried out contingency planning in case violence erupted.

In large part because of this sustained pressure and unusual international unity, the Sudanese government allowed the vote to go forward. Some 98 percent of the four million registered South Sudanese participated, with 99 percent favoring independence. The government in Khartoum begrudgingly accepted the outcome.

Knowing that the South Sudanese had experienced such endless heartbreak, I was immensely relieved as I read in the New York Times about their celebration—“hollering, singing, hugging, kissing, smacking high-fives and dancing as if they never wanted the day to end, despite the sun beating down and voting lines that snaked for blocks.”

In Ivory Coast, the tools we employed were different, but also had important effects. There, the crisis emerged when the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, lost his bid for reelection and tried to remain in power while holed up in the presidential compound. Forces loyal to Gbagbo used a large arsenal of weapons to attack civilians and shell homes in neighborhoods thought to be aligned with the winner, Alassane Ouattara. By February of 2011, the potential for mass atrocities was high, and as in South Sudan, grave warnings were pouring in.

Instead of waiting for lower-level diplomatic maneuvers to be tried, we recommended President Obama telephone Gbagbo to press him to accept the election results. When he ducked the call, we sent him a written message from Obama, conveying that he would face consequences if he refused to step down. We also imposed visa restrictions and targeted sanctions on Gbagbo and members of his inner circle, while working with other countries that had influence in Ivory Coast to see if they could convince Gbagbo to go into exile.

During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, most UN peacekeepers evacuated the country when the violence escalated. In Srebrenica in 1995, UN forces stood by while a massacre was committed. This time was different. France and the United States led a relatively collaborative UN Security Council in authorizing the 11,000 UN peacekeepers in the country “to use all necessary means” to protect civilians from attacks.

Working in tandem with 1,600 French troops who were stationed in Ivory Coast, the UN peacekeepers showed unusual firmness, striking military sites that were being used to launch attacks against civilians, and eventually targeting Gbagbo’s presidential compound, from which he commanded his loyalists. Gbagbo was finally arrested in April of 2011, averting a larger bloodbath and allowing Ouattara to take office, fulfilling the will of the voters.

To combat the killers in the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), President Obama deployed US resources in support of central African governments whose previous efforts had foundered. Formed in northern Uganda in the late 1980s by a young rebel soldier named Joseph Kony, the LRA had killed some 100,000 people, displaced another 2.5 million, and kidnapped at least 60,000 children. Kony and his commanders forced boys as young as six to become soldiers and made young women and girls act as sex slaves.

With broad bipartisan backing and energized by religious and student groups in the US, President Obama ordered the deployment of one hundred military personnel to provide advice, training, and information to what were largely Ugandan military efforts to hunt down and dismantle the LRA leadership.¹¹ Although a US military presence can often provoke a backlash abroad, when thirty of these advisers set up shop in Obo, an impoverished town in the neighboring Central African Republic, the residents were so relieved to have protection after years of LRA attacks that they reportedly staged nightly celebrations to honor the Americans.

In addition to working with the regional militaries, officials with the State Department and USAID helped build early-warning networks, using radios and cell phone towers, which communicated LRA troop movements to isolated communities. And in collaboration with the governments of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan, the US military advisers helped airdrop one million leaflets that contained photos of former LRA fighters who had safely returned home, information about the demobilization process, and maps showing the closest sites where militia members could defect.

Through the same War Crimes Rewards Program that helped secure Mladić’s capture, the State Department offered $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Kony and his two lieutenants. While Kony has eluded capture to this day, one of his top aides, Okot Odhiambo, was found dead in 2015, while another, Dominic Ongwen, surrendered to US forces and was sent the same year to the ICC. He is currently standing trial on numerous counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The US-backed regional effort made a major difference. Battlefield deaths and defections reduced the LRA’s fighting force by more than half, significantly eroding its ability to terrorize civilians. In 2010, before President Obama stepped up US involvement, the LRA killed 776 civilians. In 2013, it killed 76. In 2014, it killed 13.

TWO YEARS INTO THE ADMINISTRATION, I had a greater appreciation for the limits of our resources—most particularly our attention, our intelligence assets, and our senior diplomatic personnel. Nonetheless, I saw that with the President’s backing, utilizing the toolbox could pay dividends on other vital issues as well.

Attacks abroad against the LGBT community called out for attention. Hundreds of LGBT people were being killed annually, and tens of thousands faced both arrest and the threat of physical and sexual violence. Seventy-six countries criminalized being gay, and five states (Mauritania, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen) still imposed the death penalty as punishment.^* Although attacks on LGBT people were not being carried out on the scale of mass atrocities, David and I set out to identify a set of tools that the US government could use to promote the safety and dignity of people being persecuted and attacked for their sexual orientation.

Supporting at-risk LGBT people in other countries was breaking new ground. Indeed, just before President Bush left office, his administration refused to support a UN General Assembly declaration that called for an end to the criminalization of homosexuality around the world, even though sixty-six other countries, including all twenty-seven members of the European Union, had signed on. A couple of weeks into Obama’s presidency, our administration had reversed course and joined the declaration.¹²

Gruesome events drove home just how vulnerable LGBT people remained in many parts of the world. In 2011, a forty-six-year-old Ugandan activist named David Kato was murdered. Kato, one of the bravest LGBT leaders in the world, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home. His murder followed the publication of his photo, name, and address in a Ugandan tabloid, among a list of one hundred alleged “Homos.” Kato’s picture appeared next to the words “Hang them.”

Devastated by the news of Kato’s death, David drafted a short statement for President Obama to issue, which I pushed up the NSC’s chain of command. While the Ugandan government was an ally in taking on the LRA, its stance on LGBT rights was abhorrent. Kato’s murder terrified LGBT Ugandans, who understandably had no confidence that the police would protect them from violence. President Obama hailed Kato, whose name was not widely known globally, as “a powerful advocate for fairness and freedom” who had “tremendous courage in speaking out against hate.” A friend of Kato’s read Obama’s statement at his funeral.

For a head of state—and not just any head of state, but the President of the United States—to denounce the killing of a gay activist abroad was unheard of. Yet by raising his voice, President Obama was making clear that he cared about attacks on LGBT people wherever they happened.

At the last minute, we decided to include a reference in the President’s statement to five LGBT murder victims in Honduras. Even this brief mention made headlines there. And when the US embassy followed up, offering American assistance, the Honduran government agreed to establish a Special Victims Task Force of federal police and prosecutors to investigate crimes against LGBT people and other vulnerable groups. I relayed this development at our biweekly NSC meeting of Senior Directors, using these examples to make the case that US officials should not underestimate the power of their words. Not long after, we helped secure a resolution in the UN Human Rights Council, which for the first time in history recognized discrimination against LGBT people as a human rights violation.

We had to walk a very fine line in promoting LGBT rights internationally. The more vocal Obama and other Western leaders became, for example, the more we saw African leaders trying to claim that “imperialists” were foisting their values on traditional cultures. We were sensitive to the risk that the US government’s vocal support for LGBT people abroad could end up being counterproductive.

At the same time, US reticence over the years had not prevented various African leaders and parliaments from propagating bigoted laws (sometimes encouraged by American evangelicals who felt they were losing ground in the United States). Nor had our silence deterred vigilantes from brutalizing gay people in their communities.

We took our cues on whether to speak out publicly or engage governments behind the scenes from LGBT activists, many of whom were bravely protesting and filing court cases themselves. Of course, among activists too one could hear a range of opinions. But by and large, they said President Obama was uniquely situated to advocate for gay rights, as he could draw on America’s long struggle for civil rights—and our own country’s slow progress toward LGBT rights—as he explained the importance of equality.

David started convening US officials from agencies across the government to brainstorm what the United States could do to integrate LGBT rights into our foreign policy. Knowing that who attended government meetings—how invested they were in an issue, or how much clout they had back in their home agency—was often a better predictor of eventual impact than precisely what was on the agenda, David handpicked the participants.

Whenever I sat in on these meetings, I would express my wonder at the enthusiasm of those at the table. “I’ve never seen such a beaming bunch of government officials in my life,” I would tell David. Many US officials who joined our efforts identified as LGBT themselves, and they relished being part of a historic process that could help people living in the shadows elsewhere. The mere fact that each meeting began with an intelligence briefing on threats to LGBT people abroad was a rousing mark of a new era.

Every September, the President traveled to New York to deliver a kind of State of the Union on foreign policy to the world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). As Obama’s UN adviser, I worked with Susan and her team in New York to help plan the President’s meetings with other heads of state during his three-day visit. I also offered Ben Rhodes ideas for his annual speech.

When Ben circulated a draft of the 2011 UNGA remarks to a small circle of NSC officials, I tried to add a line in which Obama would urge world leaders to respect LGBT rights. Yet every time Ben sent around a revised version of the speech, my line had been cut. As was often the case with the harried speechwriting process, he did not have time to write back to explain why he kept rejecting my suggestion.

I tried calling and emailing, even unsuccessfully resorting to parking myself in front of his door at the hotel where we were all staying. Finally, the evening before Obama was slated to speak, I spotted Ben across the lobby and began a light jog in his direction. When he saw me coming, he looked pained and hurried toward the nearest elevator bank.

“I can’t,” Ben said when I caught up with him. “We just don’t have room. Obama’s all over me to cut more.”

“I understand,” I said, while also positioning myself so the elevator door couldn’t close. “I’ll send you a much shorter version of the point!”

I hurried to my room, emailed Ben a menu of options to choose from and, having not heard back by three a.m., drifted off to sleep. I had secured a decent number of changes to the speech on other human rights issues, and I was resigned to the fact that this would not be the year President Obama took on LGBT rights at the UN.

When I woke up a couple of hours later, though, Ben had forwarded me the final version of the speech with the words “Happy Birthday” at the top of the email. My birthday (and Cass’s) always fell during UNGA week. In the craze, I had forgotten it. This birthday present—like Holbrooke’s wedding gift of a meeting with Hillary Clinton—was unusual, but much appreciated.

That day, sitting in the US seats in the General Assembly hall behind Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Rice, I held my breath while Obama spoke, wondering whether he would be greeted with jeers or cheers as he declared:

No country should deny people their rights because of who they love, which is why we must stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians everywhere.

He was the first head of state ever to advocate for gay rights in the UN General Assembly.

Owing to alphabetical happenstance, the US box was adjacent to that of the Zimbabwean delegation, where the eighty-seven-year-old president Robert Mugabe sat. Mugabe had once remarked that gay people were “worse than dogs and pigs and should be hounded out by society.” And he had overseen changes to the country’s criminal code to make it illegal for men to even hug one another in public. As soon as Obama invoked gay rights, I heard Mugabe groan, “My God!”^*

Human rights advocates around the world expressed gratitude to Obama for elevating the issue in such a forum. As the Kenyan activist David Kuria told a journalist, “When a President such as Obama with African roots talks in favor of gay rights, at the very least it shows that not everyone is homophobic and that, in fact, African leaders are in a . . . thinning minority.” The following year, Kuria would become the first openly gay person to run for office in Kenya.

After I left the General Assembly hall, I forwarded a copy of Obama’s remarks to Sally Brooks, my close friend from high school, whom I had watched struggle for acceptance as she came out when we were teenagers.

David Pressman’s meetings with government agency representatives had generated a range of practical ideas on how to expand our tools to help LGBT people in peril. We enshrined the best of these in a presidential guidance document, which Obama signed. The very existence of what became an official Presidential Memorandum on International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons sent a ripple throughout the US government, signaling to officials at every level that the President cared about fighting anti-gay prejudice.

Obama instructed government agencies to step up the diplomatic fight against the criminalization of LGBT people abroad. He directed the State Department to improve protection for LGBT refugees and those seeking asylum. And he encouraged diplomats to fund rapid legal defense to combat the imprisonment or persecution of sexual minorities.

During the eight years Obama was President, US embassies would open their doors to persecuted LGBT persons, with many ambassadors marching in LGBT Pride parades and pressing foreign governments to reject bigotry and protect the rights of all their citizens.

Obama’s personal engagement with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff secured the creation of both a special unit at the Organization of American States for monitoring LGBT rights in Latin America and a new position for a high-level expert (or “special rapporteur”) who would advocate on their behalf throughout the Americas.

Clinton would give a landmark speech at the UN in Geneva in which she proclaimed “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” echoing her famous 1995 speech on women’s rights in Beijing. Her successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, would create the position of US Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons. Overall, as an administration, we would dispense more than $30 million to support frontline advocates for LGBT rights in some eighty countries.

And, in powerful acts of statesmanship and symbolism, when he traveled to Africa, President Obama would raise LGBT rights standing next to the very African leaders who ridiculed them.

Promoting these rights abroad wasn’t just something that affected vulnerable foreigners. When planning to live or travel overseas, LGBT Americans had to consider whether they would be harassed, denied service, or even lynched for their sexual orientation. We were using US foreign policy to work toward a day when the rights that were finally gaining acceptance at home would not be denied abroad.^*

LEADERS RARELY GET POLITICAL CREDIT for preventing harms or for attempting to improve the lives of vulnerable people. Practically speaking, the complexities of almost every international crisis mean that even a generally positive outcome is messy and involves tradeoffs that do not resolve the issues at the root of conflict or exclusion. When the US government takes a leadership role in preventing mass atrocities, the blame is sometimes laid at our feet for not being able to prevent future human rights abuses. And unfortunately, violence frequently recurs.

In South Sudan in late 2013, for example, some of the very same politicians and generals who brought the country into existence would lead their people into a savage civil war.

In Syria, we would soon see that bureaucratic reforms and high-level discussions would not spare President Obama the wrenching dilemma of whether to risk using military force to try to prevent slaughter.

Discrimination and attacks against LGBT people still happen all around the world.

But just because we couldn’t right every wrong did not mean we couldn’t—or shouldn’t—try to improve lives and mitigate violence where we could do so at reasonable risk.

Obama once told me, “Better is good, and better is actually a lot harder than worse”—a message he has expressed often since leaving office.

Convincing the American national security apparatus to incorporate concern for human consequences into our dealings with other countries would never be easy. And people were right to charge that, even at our best, the United States was inconsistent. But on the occasions when we did push other governments to treat their citizens with dignity—something few other governments took it upon themselves to do—US influence could be profound.