Human Rights in American Foreign Policy

From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse

Joe Renouard

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812292152
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International human rights issues perpetually highlight the tension between political interest and idealism. Over the last fifty years, the United States has labored to find an appropriate response to each new human rights crisis, balancing national and global interests as well as political and humanitarian impulses. Human Rights in American Foreign Policy explores America's international human rights policies from the Vietnam War era to the end of the Cold War. Global in scope and ambitious in scale, this book examines American responses to a broad array of human rights violations: torture and political imprisonment in South America; apartheid in South Africa; state violence in China; civil wars in Central America; persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union; movements for democracy and civil liberties in East Asia and Eastern Europe; and revolutionary political transitions in Iran, Nicaragua, and the collapsing USSR.Joe Renouard challenges the characterization of American human rights policymaking as one of inaction, hypocrisy, and double standards. Arguing that a consistent standard is impractical, he explores how policymakers and citizens have weighed the narrow pursuit of traditional national interests with the desire to promote human rights. Human Rights in American Foreign Policy renders coherent a series of disparate foreign policy decisions during a tumultuous time in world history. Ultimately the United States emerges as neither exceptionally compassionate nor unusually wicked. Rather, it is a nation that manages by turns to be cautiously pragmatic, boldly benevolent, and coldly self-interested.

Chapter 1

The Crisis of Confidence

This chapter explores the domestic and international milieus in which human rights violations became a concern of the American people and their government. Early in the Cold War, policymakers’ fear of communism overshadowed their global humanitarian concerns, but by the late sixties many more Americans were questioning their nation’s ties to undemocratic, anticommunist regimes. This chapter takes a close look at Greece and Brazil, which fell under dictatorial rule in the sixties and became two of the earliest human rights causes in Washington. It also places Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s realist foreign policy alongside activists’ and legislators’ increasing attention to human rights violations. The Nixon administration’s critics raised questions about the lack of democracy and individual liberty in Eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere, but Nixon and Kissinger remained steadfast in their defense of realpolitik. China also stands out in this story for the almost complete absence of Western attention to its violations during the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s.

Prologue: Human Rights After 1945

The broad-based international human rights movement that began to coalesce in the middle of the twentieth century drew on diverse origins. Paul Gordon Lauren has aptly described this movement as the convergence point of multiple premodern and modern “visions.”¹ With a nod to some notable antecedents, its roots lay in the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. In the ensuing two centuries, growing wealth and interdependence in the Western world spurred the aspirations of the middle class, workers, women, and ethnic and religious minorities. In the twentieth century, the horrors of two world wars fueled calls for more substantial civilian protections in international law, while advances in communication and transportation increased interconnectedness and the proliferation of liberal ideas.

The carnage of the Second World War—especially the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations—threw into sharp relief the need to address the failures of the Versailles peace and to establish and enforce international rights standards. Accordingly, between 1945 and 1950 the world community created a set of regional frameworks and multilateral covenants.² This period saw a significant change in attitudes toward basic rights and the proper composition of international law, as evidenced by such milestones as the U.N. Charter (1945), the Nuremberg case law (1945–1949), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). The Universal Declaration became the blueprint for national and regional policies, and it remains the most commonly cited document in the human rights pantheon. In effect, a new global vision posited that citizens and states could rightly concern themselves with the well-being of other states’ citizens. The international community was giving unprecedented attention to what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others.”³

American policymakers’ active involvement in these efforts reflected a major shift in domestic attitudes toward internationalism. The failings of prewar unilateralism (or “isolationism”) made the World War II generation far more willing to accept the burdens of Great Power status. Americans were thus at the forefront of the creation and maintenance of the United Nations, the Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The Cold War then convinced most of the remaining conservatives and unilateralists that faraway events could have dire consequences for American security, and this new, activist attitude became manifest in the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and President Harry S. Truman’s containment doctrine.

Yet despite America’s democratic traditions and its leading role in postwar standard-setting, American humanitarian activism waned after 1950. A combination of Cold War concerns, political realism, lingering isolationism, and domestic racial conflicts kept human rights at the margins of American diplomacy. A general consensus emerged that Washington would back undemocratic but anticommunist leaders in the developing world while also working to undermine or depose left-leaning regimes. Political disagreements remained, but they concerned means, not ends. A 1950 memo from diplomat George Kennan to Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarding Latin America demonstrates policymakers’ tendency to deemphasize democracy and individual rights in favor of the struggle against communism. “We cannot be too dogmatic,” argued Kennan, “about the methods by which local communists can be dealt with” in Latin America. “Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak” to fend off aggression, “then we must concede that harsh governmental methods of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternative, to further communist successes.”⁴

True to Kennan’s directive, American leaders of the fifties and sixties typically chose pragmatism and realism over vague standards of universal rights and a costly push for liberal democracy. As the presidential adviser William P. Bundy has written, the moral problem of backing dictators “hardly troubled an America engrossed in what she saw as a major job of preserving the national independence of new nations and protecting them from … totalitarian methods of government.”⁵ Many saw multilateral human rights instruments as threats to U.S. sovereignty, or worried that embracing such instruments would lead other nations to criticize racial segregation in America. Still others simply asserted that moral concerns did not belong in diplomacy, or pointed out that even the best of intentions could generate unforeseen consequences. “How often,” wrote the realist scholar and political adviser Hans J. Morgenthau in 1960, “have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?”⁶

The Cold War thus had a dual effect on international human rights promotion. On the one hand, “rights” assumed a new respectability as Washington and Moscow promoted competing visions of state obligations. On the other hand, national security ideologies were defined in part by repressive domestic policies.⁷ Cold War anticommunism differed from human rights activism, though at times the two overlapped. Anticommunism stimulated the work of ethnic activists who sought to curb authoritarianism in their ancestral homelands, but these desires went unrequited in the fifties and sixties because East/West relations were so poor. America’s support of autocratic, anticommunist regimes also hindered global liberal and democratic developments. This is not to say that Americans were uninterested in civil and political liberties; it is simply to say that their interest was not global in scope. The unique civil rights struggle of African Americans was only incidentally “transnational” for much of the fifties and sixties, though civil rights–era violence did serve as fodder for communist propaganda outlets—unwanted attention that may have speeded the passage of federal civil rights legislation.⁸

As America’s postwar human rights momentum was nipped in the bud, such concerns were largely ignored in the making of foreign policy. True, Americans remained genuinely concerned about communist governments’ transgressions, and criticism of totalitarianism was, in a broad sense, a commentary on individual liberty. American political rhetoric and public opinion posited a “free world” struggle to contain communism, and in the 1960s Congress did hold a few hearings on religious intolerance in the Eastern Bloc. But Americans aimed their reformist energies at solving the nation’s considerable racial problems, not international human rights violations. According to the policymaking logic of the day, human rights were the business of bodies like the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNHRC), not Congress or the president. As the activist Aryeh Neier has argued, multilateral human rights instruments “barely registered on the consciousness of even those most preoccupied with struggles over rights in the U.S.”⁹

The few global human rights issues that confronted the Lyndon Johnson administration (1963–1969) were generally relegated to the U.N. mission. Johnson allowed his representatives to issue mild criticisms of some communist governments, but he did little else, even on behalf of popular causes. Soviet anti-Semitism, for example, spurred the formation of NGOs, rallies in several American cities, and regular pickets at the Soviet embassy, but Washington’s official sympathy was not matched by political will or diplomatic initiatives.¹⁰ Such issues were still embedded in a Cold War ideological framework: just as Soviet propagandists attacked American racism, Americans attacked Soviet anti-Semitism. The Johnson administration encouraged direct appeals from private organizations, but in the absence of a closer East/West working relationship Americans could do little to help Soviet citizens. Besides, few in the mid-1960s believed that letters to the Kremlin would change Soviet internal policies. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, activists’ attention shifted from anti-Semitism to Soviet-Jewish emigration, and this interest would prove to have effects far beyond anyone’s expectations. (Richard Nixon would continue President Johnson’s hands-off approach, but he would find it much harder to sustain his priorities in the face of the Soviet Jewry movement.)

The Johnson administration also avoided a leading role in South Africa and Rhodesia. The global interest in these two states demonstrated that national self-determination and racial equality were two of the most prominent rights claims of the fifties and sixties.¹¹ Many nations, NGOs, and multilateral forums attempted to undermine the South African system of apartheid—white-minority political rule and de jure white social and economic domination—through resolutions, economic sanctions, and boycotts. President Kennedy halted U.S. arms sales to South Africa in 1962, and the following year the U.N. Security Council passed a voluntary arms embargo. The Johnson administration continued Kennedy’s policy, but was unwilling to go beyond concurrence with the international status quo. Near the end of his presidency, Johnson even sought better relations with Pretoria in response to the rise of a radical bloc in the United Nations.¹²

Nor did the United States take the lead when the white-dominated government of Southern Rhodesia declared unilateral independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 as a means of forestalling a transition to independence and all-but-inevitable black rule. The United States endorsed a British-authored sanctions resolution, and Johnson issued an executive order prohibiting Rhodesian chrome imports and American oil and arms exports. He cited the principles of majority rule and national self-determination, though it seems that his chief concerns were domestic African American and liberal opinion, Anglo-American relations, and relations with other African states. Johnson’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, suggested that the United States was obliged to support U.N. sanctions, because to do otherwise would inhibit Johnson’s domestic racial policies and hurt American businesses in Africa. But with Johnson’s attention on Vietnam and Europe, his administration followed the British lead and used American influence only behind the scenes. “There are times when the best policy is to sit things out on the sidelines,” advised one insider. “Any efforts on our part to straighten things out … will be at best useless, at worst counter-productive. So let’s be nice, generous, friendly—and aloof.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk similarly advised Johnson that Rhodesia was “first a U.K. problem, then a U.N. problem, and only then is it a U.S. problem.”¹³

Some Americans opposed the chrome embargo. Not only did it force American manufacturers to buy from the Soviet Union, but Rhodesia and South Africa were anticommunist and arguably better potential allies than the other African states. (Johnson even had to politely refuse Rhodesian volunteers for service in Vietnam.) “I know the Negro has been putting pressure on to break relations with Rhodesia,” one Texan wrote to Johnson in 1967, “but why should we quit buying from a democratic country and buy from our known enemy?” Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) argued that the U.N. Charter did not authorize “interference” in a member state’s affairs. “Rhodesia is just as much a part of the British Empire as the state of Texas is a part of the United States,” he asserted.¹⁴ Few of these critics spoke of the troubling moral issue of white-minority rule, though in light of the many violations taking place in Africa, they were perhaps justified in asking why the United States was sanctioning Rhodesia and embargoing arms to South Africa while otherwise ignoring most of the continent. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations clearly feared losing the friendship of new African states, while Johnson especially worried that a weak policy would alienate African Americans.

It was not until the end of the sixties that American policymakers began to seriously consider the role international human rights should play in American foreign policy. It is perhaps fitting that 1967–1968 proved to be a turning point in the human rights story, for this stands as the modern watershed sine pari of social upheaval, antiwar protests, political assassinations, radical youth movements, and “long, hot summers” of racial antagonism. Tensions extended far beyond American shores, with violent demonstrations and government crackdowns taking place in locales as disparate as Paris, Berlin, Prague, Chicago, and Mexico City. It was also a turning point for American race relations and the civil rights movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 precipitated the last of the 1960s riots and ushered in a new set of domestic civil rights goals and conflicts.

In the realm of foreign relations, 1967–1968 witnessed the collapse of the Vietnam consensus and the weakening of the containment paradigm. Every presidential candidate—as well as President Johnson, who withdrew from the race—agreed that America had to rethink its global approach. As the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol noted in May 1968, “Everyone is to some extent aware that American foreign policy, after this [Vietnam] trauma, will never again be the same.”¹⁵ The Cold War became an altogether different struggle, one in which policymakers sought creative ways of decreasing overseas commitments. Other contemporary events also had broad ramifications. The April 1967 military coup in Greece brought a shocking end to democracy in a NATO member nation, while the Soviet arms buildup and the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia convinced American leaders to strengthen transatlantic ties. Not coincidentally, 1967–1968 arguably witnessed the initial stirrings of détente, first between East and West Germany and later between the United States and the Soviet Union.¹⁶ Inspired in part by these developments, some legislators and activists began to challenge the security-centered goals of the containment doctrine.

Vietnam and the End of Consensus

The new diplomatic possibilities of the late sixties emerged from the failure of older ideas. The containment principle, which originated as President Truman’s short-term solution to the problem of communist insurgency in Greece and Turkey in 1947, was the blueprint for American security policy for twenty years. It was not until the Vietnam War became a stalemate that critics began to mount a serious challenge to the containment paradigm. Congressional liberals were ahead of the curve with their moral criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy and their fear that the war would undermine the Democrats’ domestic agenda. Early in 1966, before it had become fashionable to criticize the war effort, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) expressed uncertainty and some bewilderment about the bombing of North Vietnam, noting the “serious problem” that Americans were “called upon to make a kind of moral commitment to an objective or to a set of purposes which we do not clearly understand.”¹⁷ Within two years,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Riot in Washington
• Chapter 1. The Crisis of Confidence
• Chapter 2. The Congressional Challenge and the Ethnic Revival
• Chapter 3. The Carter Human Rights Policy
• Chapter 4. Ronald Reagan and the New Conservative Internationalism
• Chapter 5. Global Human Rights, Democracy, and the Cold War’s End
• Epilogue: Human Rights in the Post–Cold War World
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments