The Dynamics of Human Rights in United States Foreign Policy

Natalie Kaufman Hevener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351304788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book sets out the critical controversies which are necessary for an understanding of the nature of international human rights and their relation to U.S. foreign policy. It considers the human rights policies pursued by the United States in international organizations.

Part I
Introductory Perspectives

Chapter 1
Moral Dilemmas in the Development of United States Human Rights Policies

Paul M. Katlenburg

Recent emphasis on human rights in U.S. foreign policy has sharply heightened awareness and prompted discussion of the role of morality in our foreign policy. This is hardly surprising. The overwhelming feeling among the public at large and among political leaders that recent American policy, during and after the Vietnam War and particularly during the Nixon-Kissinger period, had been at least amoral if not downright immoral inspired much of the emphasis on human rights in the successor Carter administration. President Jimmy Carter's repeated stress on human rights in turn focused commentary on still broader questions of the role of morality.

Even though more than three decades have elapsed since the Nuremberg judgments established the principle that state leaders are themselves accountable for state actions desecrating presumed norms of acceptable civilized human behavior, most of the American foreign policy elite has continued until quite recently to be basically comfortable with some of the fundamental assumptions of realpolitik. These include the belief that a state's morality in international affairs cannot be judged by the same standards applied to ordinary individuals in orderly society, and that special rules apply. Yet this outlook—most always assumed, rarely examined—has seemed faulty in a host of recent cases. In respect to Vietnam, ITT, Lockheed, and, above all, the abuses of the FBI and the CIA, the pretext of “national security” interest covering the actions of leaders has been mercilessly stripped off by popular scrutiny with ensuing public accounting on the part of individual leaders. Except in the case of Watergate, this has not yet led to public prosecutions, but the threat of these in future cases hangs unmistakably in the atmosphere. It is, after all, undeniable that the former attorney general of the United States is presently imprisoned for authorizing actions which, in his own mind, were designed at least as much to protect “the national security” as to advance the political interests of his cohorts.

It seems plausible that it was at least in part because the claim of immunity from morality by statesmen presumably acting in the interest of national security seemed wrong to many people that “a new morality” became the campaign slogan of the victorious candidate in the 1976 elections. Are the claims of leaders that they act under cover of the national interest, and accordingly need not account for their actions like ordinary mortals, ever again to be taken seriously by their peers in government or by the people? Would such claims be sustained were the veil of secrecy to be permanently lifted to expose the means employed in successful actions? Even the long buried and seemingly advantageous bribery by the CIA of the Italian Christian Democrats after World War II does not now seem immune from post-facto judgments of immorality, much less so the unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro or to keep Salvador Allende from taking power.

We do not have a great deal in the literature of international relations to help guide us on the path of answers to the vexing questions raised by the problem of morality in foreign policy. The general subject was explored with great wisdom by Arnold Wolfers nearly 30 years ago¹ while Hans Morgenthau both thundered on the inevitable evils of power² and masterfully arraigned the powerful on moral grounds in essays published at the height of the Vietnam War.³ Richard Falk, Charles Frankel, Maurice Cranston, Ernest Lefever, Inis Claude, Paul Ramsey, and John Courtney Murray, S.J. are among those who have provided advice on morality to statesmen, which the latter have largely ignored. But we seem yet far from definitive answers to the fundamental problems the subject raises, some of which the present essay attempts to further explore.

The Pervasiveness of Reification

Reification is the treatement of abstract concepts as if they had concrete material existence. The use by leaders and peoples of such svmbols as “national security,” “national interest,” even “state,” “nation,” “government,” or “law,” tends to blind us all to the real people and real situations which are implicit within these symbols. If we do not return to human beings, the problem of morality in foreign policy—which is a problem of values and principles held by human beings, and the conduct of such human beings in interactions with others who also hold values—remains obscure and meaningful answers cannot be found.

Concepts like “the state,” “national security and interest,” even “law” and “government” are after all only abstractions which when reified shield the real people who, whatever their titles or elite roles, actually guide human affairs. In the last analysis we are always dealing with leaders who speak for people so long as the latter consent, or in case of tyrannies or autocracies, so long as the leaders can maintain their control. Only leaders, in the name of “law,” apply commonly agreed-to standards that remain valid only so long as the values underlying them are shared and accepted—for example, was the leaking of secret government communications the illegal activity or were the means used to prevent such leaking that which was illegal? Only leaders tell other people on their behalf or as their targets what the “national interest” is supposed to be. Leaders are, in the end, only human beings with all their capacities and Haws, as we are so painfully reminded when we contemplate a Nixon or a Carter—or a Charles de Gaulle, a Henry Kissinger, or an Idi Amin.

Is there such a thing, really, as “national survival”? Who, what survives? If one hundred million or more Americans were killed in a nuclear holocaust, would the United States have survived even if there were no further damage? It certainly would not be the United States we know now.⁴

If, as Charles Frankel has suggested⁵ a dictatorial regime came to power in the United States which established a ruthless and ubiquitous secret police and incarcerated, say, “only” three million people as “enemies of the regime,” would the United States have survived? It certainly would not be the United States we know now. On the other hand, if the United States kept its present democratic system of government unchanged but agreed like India to belong to the British Commonwealth as a republic, would the United States have survived?

Reification is what makes possible the phenomenon of “bureaucratic detachment,” so elegantly described in the following quotation from James Thomson about Vietnam:

In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as “systematic pressure,” “armed reconnaissance,” “targets of opportunity,” and even “body count” seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment. Most memorable to me was a moment in late 1964 target planning when the question under discussion was how heavy our bombing should be, and how extensive our strafing, at some midpoint in the projected pattern of systematic pressure. An Assisant Secretary of State resolved the point in the following words: “It seems to me that our orchestration should be mainly violins, but with periodic touches of brass.”⁶

“Games-theory detachment” enables decision makers to engage in what Irving Horowitz once dubbed “the Howard Johnson sanitized vision of conflict.”⁷ Abstract concepts and distant human relationships are linked into imaginary “problem situations” wholly distinct in the minds of many statesmen and decision makers of lesser breed from their own “real” world. Thus, the savage fighting in Vietnamese villages turns into “pacification”; the terrors of North Vietnamese civilians into “graduated pressure”; the bribing of Chilean publishers into “preservation of press freedom”; the smearing of Martin Luther King into “cointellpro”; the tapping of subordinates’ phones into “leak plumbing.” In each instance, the effects on individuals are submerged into the necessities of “programs” which run on momentum, impervious to review, dictated by the alleged requirements of the higher abstractions. Owing to the reified presumption of national security interest, the question of morality, of the personal suffering of some and the possible personal responsibility of others, simply need not arise. Real people, whether the victims of such actions or the consciences of those who perpetrate them, simply cease to count—all in the name of a “higher morality,” that of the interests of the state.

This is what is changing. If we wish to come to grips with the problem of morality today, we must return to human beings and realize that in fact it was Nixon and Kissinger (with Geneen of ITT, Helms of CIA, and various lesser fry) who sabotaged Allende, and were and are accountable for the actions of “the United States in Chile”; that it was Castro who may have done in Kennedy because the latter may have tried to do in Castro, making them both accountable for the actions of “Cuba” and “the United States.” Nuremberg may have been early though not necessarily premature in convicting men whose defense it was that they acted in the name of the state. But by the end of the twentieth century, it had become apparent that such defenses would no longer be accepted by publics, at least in the Western world. From this point on, men are to be judged with all the complexities such judgments imply, not the reified abstractions under which they have been acting in the past.

The Cloaking of Power in False Virtue

Why are the moral foundations of realpolitik crumbling in the test of time? There is certainly no denying the empirical finding in the world today of an overwhelming and almost universal tendency on the part of leaders to “seize what they can get,” as Machiavelli advised, “and hold what they have acquired.”⁸ The “drive to power” seems to remain as firm a motivating force in international politics today as at any time in history, whether for state leaders or for opponents of existing regimes—whether these are national or social revolutionaries, or a mix of both, or transnational actors such as multinational corporations (MNCs), individuals operating across boundaries, or international public or private organizations. The “haves” continue satisfied with, and trying to expand the reach of, their grasp on the sinews of world power; the “have nots” endeavor to see the goods redistributed, frequently saying they are overthrowing injustice, but fundamentally animated in most instances by the same self-interest. In an extreme view, the world seems to remain Hobbesian enough to justify both the sin and redemption schools of theology and the famed statement in reference to diplomacy that “the act of acting (by the state) is itself evil.”⁹

Yet what is crumbling in the midst of all this activity is the acceptability of proffered justification by those speaking for the state. Selfish actions taken in the “national interest” continue to be cloaked in noble language, virtuous principles, and high moral sentiments. Thus, Kennedy was not extending the American empire to the Southeast Asian mainland, but making it possible for the less developed world to build independent nations and achieve development. In this rhetoric, he was reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt and Lloyd George who did not avow to imperialism but to the “emancipation of peoples,” or of Benito Mussolini who was not aggrandizing Italy but saving Ethiopia from tribal barbarism. De Gaulle was not avowedly creating spheres of influence, but preserving European civilization from the “twin hegemonies of the Giants,” reminding one that Woodrow Wilson was supposedly occupying parts of the Caribbean, Mexico, and the new Soviet Union to strengthen democracy and hopes of self-determination. Nixon, in 1969 and after, was not preserving in Vietnam his best options for reelection, but giving the South Vietnamese a final chance to achieve “peace with honor”; just as Clemenceau, intent on the paralysis of Germany or Bismark, concerned with Prussia's hegemonic aspirations, claimed they were “assuring the peace of Europe.” To this day, Brezhnev is not consolidating Soviet control in East Europe behind detente but “building world peace through coexistence.” Fewer and fewer people in the world today accept and believe these multiple deceptions.

Since the early 19th century, leaders have become ever more sharply aware that this is an age in which the masses of their peoples perceive themselves increasingly more deeply affected by the interactions and interrelationships of a multiplicity of nation states—after all, they will suffer the consequences of international economic crises or shed the blood in international wars. Accordingly, the masses of people have to believe or be made to believe in causes, principles, norms, virtues, and justice—as seen in their own codes. Leaders themselves have to do so. They are therefore not necessarily or always consciously lying or deceiving themselves or others. They are in fact practicing Staatsräson, reasons of state, under the growing constraints of popular scrutiny and their increasing needs for popular support. The result is the massive dependence of leaders on noble and moralistic rhetoric, whether such rhetoric is founded on the alleged necessities of the preservation of the state, or on those preserving peace in the community of nations.

Cloaking conduct governed by statesmen's relatively temporary judgments of Staatsräson, or by their relatively narrowly conceived judgments of justice in the international community, in the unmitigated expression of its moral validity is an extreme temptation of leaders, which they follow to their peril. Conversely, as we shall note below, cynicism among their publics leading to disbelief that morality really does or even can play any role in the behavior of leaders of states is an equally dangerous tendency. Under these conditions, publics will gnaw at the state and its leaders until they destroy each other by ceasing to share common values altogether. The United States came perilously close to such circumstances in the years 1973-75.

The Perils of Rule and the Fickleness of Public Values

Why are moral principles and the presumed universal norms underlying them so often overplayed by many leaders, as already suggested, thus leading to cynicism when illusions are shattered? Why are overarching principles invoked, rather than more modest ones that stand at least a minimal chance of credibility when policies are judged? One may have to search for answers in the perilous nature of rule in the world today. Governing has become risky everywhere because of the enormous growth in the twentieth century of individual and group will assertions. This in turn derives from the latent effects of universal mass education—a phenomenon less than a century old.

Since the legitimacy of political leaders tends to be increasingly questioned in so many places by more and more of their subjects, whose growing level of education enables them to question their governers’ competence and whose increasingly participatory role in society elevates their ambition, authority at all levels and in all societies tends to be constantly undermined and under fire. This is another long-term result of the historic change wrought by the French Revolution—in the Western world at least—from monarchic, hereditary, and aristocratic-elite rule to representative republics, universal suffrage, and popular democracies or dictatorships. We must now live with the fact that individuals and groups at all echelons of society will make increasing assertions of “rights” and will make these assertions felt.

At the same time, and paradoxically because of the same phenomena of multiplying group and individual will assertions, almost always intensively reported by the mass media, it is more than ever difficult for leaders or lesser decision makers to “stick by principle” and yet retain command. The increasingly complicated nature of politics in the late 20th century obliges leaders in practice to construct compromises straddling the widest possible range of ideolgoically or even morally principled positions simply to safeguard their rule. We may safely propose that this is true in socialist, autocratic, or other types of political systems, as well as in pluralistic ones.

Thus, Nixon led the rapprochement with China which in turn, permanently we may hope, ended the “good versus evil” cast of international politics which Nixon himself had done so much to propagate in the post-World War II cold war, and led to the present relative deideoliza-tion of international affairs. President Gerald Ford accepted substantial portions of detente diplomacy and turned from an apostle o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Introductory Perspectives
• Part II United States Participation in the Identification and Definition of International Human Rights
• Part III Human Rights Policies of the United States in International Organizations
• Part IV Formulation and Implementation of United States Human Rights Policies
• Appendix
• Contributors
• Index