Eliot Engel: ‘We are the leaders, and we should act like it’
“If we want to effectuate change in the world, if there are things we want to see in the world, if we are going to be the world leader, there are responsibilities that come with that,” Engel told me in an interview. “We are the leaders, and we should act like it.”
Engel entered Congress in 1989, in the last days of the Cold War. His interest in foreign policy came from his father, a union iron worker and fervent anti-communist. When asked to rank his top three preferred committee assignments as a freshman, Engel wrote “foreign affairs” on all three lines. “I figured they would get the hint,” he said.
Engel’s role since that time has been to champion a center-left, neo-liberal interventionist foreign policy, one that has fallen out of fashion on both the American right and left — but he still believes in it. The example of its success he points to is the one he helped to shape: the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 against Serbia, which stopped the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and birthed a new state, where he is still venerated.
“With Kosovo, this was working against a genocide in the heart of Europe,” Engel said. “And as someone who is very knowledgeable about the Holocaust, I thought we couldn’t just leave it where people in Kosovo would just be slaughtered.”
He admits and laments the mistakes made in other U.S. interventions, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. But Engel believes that the United States must use its power and influence to ameliorate suffering where possible.
His long activism to protect Syrian civilians was driven by the accounts of Syrian atrocity victims, and the evidence smuggled out of Syria by the military defector known as Caesar, who testified before Engel’s committee in 2014. “You look at those pictures,” Engel said. “They were like the Holocaust.”
The last four years of Engel’s congressional tenure were the most disruptive. His committee was heavily involved in the impeachment of President Trump for extorting Ukraine for political favors. “I didn’t relish the impeachment,” he told me. “I was very sorry it had come to that, but I didn’t see what else we could do.”
Engel struggled to manage oversight of Trump’s two secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo. Tillerson didn’t appear to want the job from the moment he got it, Engel said. “He seemed like he was lost.” Pompeo refused to comply with basic congressional oversight, he said, which was disturbing because as a congressman, Pompeo was adamant about enforcing oversight of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It’s a little hypocritical,” Engel said.
In a final snub, the Trump White House earlier this month dropped its support for the 2021 State Department Authorization Act, which bore Engel’s name, in retaliation for Congress not including Ivanka Trump’s legacy women’s program in the National Defense Authorization Act. Engel says the White House’s move was “stupid and petty.”
Though the Democratic Party seems to be drifting away from its post-Cold War muscular liberalism, Engel argues that Democratic leaders must still insist the United States lead the charge for freedom and human rights abroad.
“You can be progressive and still understand that the United States is a force for good,” he said. “We don’t always get it right, but we try to. And when we have the ability to save lives, we ought to use that ability.”
A true American success story, Engel grew up poor in the Bronx housing projects, attended New York City public schools and graduated from Hunter College. A former schoolteacher and guidance counselor before earning a law degree and turning to politics, Engel says he is not finished working and is planning his next steps.
He used his parting speech on the House floor to call for a return to the practice of leaving U.S. partisan political battles “at the water’s edge” and putting country over party when dealing with national security. He called on Congress to reassert its role in foreign policy and to use that power to advance our values and stand up for the afflicted worldwide.
“We don’t want to be policemen of the world,” he said, but “there are times when we need to draw a line and get involved because if we don’t, history will judge us.”
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