Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard
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and Tiananmen are conveniently alliterative signposts for the sweeping changes of the Vietnam War era and the Cold War’s end. Within this time frame, American interest in global human rights was especially evident in three major turning points—the late 1960s, 1973, and the late 1980s. In the early Cold War era, support for authoritarian anticommunist regimes occasioned little comment. Even as late as 1965, few Americans questioned the assumptions behind President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to send troops into South Vietnam and, for a brief time, the Dominican Republic. But as the war in Vietnam became increasingly costly in blood and treasure, domestic support diminished and policymakers were confronted with uncomfortable questions about the war’s wholesale violence and its effect on civilians. The bombing campaigns and atrocities like the My Lai massacre spurred a public conversation on the justice of the fight, and the image of the United States as a beacon of freedom was challenged, and occasionally supplanted, by the image of America as an agent of suffering. As more and more observers suggested that the United States was fighting an unjust, unwinnable war, a parallel concern emerged that Washington was exacerbating repression through its support of illiberal, undemocratic regimes worldwide. When congressional liberals began to defect from the Cold War consensus by demanding a drawdown of the Vietnam commitment, they also shed light on America’s many other troublesome relationships. They focused first on the autocratic regimes in Greece and Brazil. Other “friendly” states (Iran, South Korea, and Indonesia, among others) also attracted activists’ attention in the late sixties and early seventies, as did humanitarian crises in Biafra and Bangladesh. Likewise, legislators challenged the budding U.S.-Soviet détente by publicizing the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of dissidents and Jews. As a result, the Soviet Jewry movement emerged as the most significant, broad-based human rights movement of the 1970s.
Beginning in 1973, policymakers’ and activists’ attention shifted to South America. General Augusto Pinochet’s military coup d’état against President Salvador Allende of Chile was a watershed moment, in part because of the Pinochet regime’s brutality and in part because of the widespread (though flawed) perception that the United States had orchestrated Allende’s overthrow. Alongside the Soviet Jewry issue, the Pinochet coup and its aftermath arguably did more than any other overseas event to propel the human rights push in Washington. This same year, Congressman Donald Fraser (D-MN) held the first generalized human rights hearings in congressional history, and a group of legislators sponsored the first of dozens of bills that would eventually curtail aid to anticommunist dictatorships. For the remainder of the decade—especially during the presidency of Jimmy Carter—activists and policymakers would spotlight abuses in South America’s Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay) and Eastern Europe, with a few other regions occasionally coming into focus.
The second half of the 1980s saw the most wide-ranging efforts of all. The first administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981–1985) generally tolerated allied governments’ excesses in the name of Cold War pragmatism, but Reagan’s second term signaled a substantial departure. In conjunction with the global democracy trend and the waning East/West ideological conflict, the executive and legislative branches and both political parties backed human rights and democratization efforts across a wider swath of the globe than at any time before or since. In this relatively short period, policymakers and activists took up causes in East Asia, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South and Central America, and South Africa. Political divisions remained, but it is hard to deny that American policymakers did a great deal in the late eighties to promote liberal reforms and democratic transitions. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War then constituted a final breaking point. After 1991, absent a competing superpower or even an alternative ideological vision, the political salience of human rights waned noticeably in Washington, while the violations of nonstate actors increased in prominence.
Into the Human Rights Era: The 1970s as a Turning Point
The story of the international human rights movement is long, complex, and largely beyond the purview of this book.13 Much more germane to this study is the question of why and how human rights concerns became a part of American foreign policy. Within the post-1945 time frame, there is general scholarly agreement that the 1970s was a defining decade, from the standpoints of both American politics and international activism. Simply put, before this time international human rights mattered very little in most world capitals, but perceptions and policies changed so much in the seventies that scholars now refer to this as the decade of the human rights “breakthrough,” and even “revolution.”14 In a provocative turn of phrase, Samuel Moyn has suggested that the global human rights movement was “the last utopia”—a largely post-1970 phenomenon that was viable as a program and lexicon only in the context of the failure of earlier social orders and utopian ideologies.15
Several factors combined to create a more congenial environment for human rights concerns in the late 1960s and 1970s. This period’s aberrant rise in civil conflicts, military coups, and outright atrocities drew international attention, and may have convinced some Americans that the United States should play a stronger role in protecting civilians. Civil wars and genocides plagued Bangladesh, Burundi, and Cambodia, while undeclared civil struggles (“dirty wars”) afflicted Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.16 There were military dictatorships in Brazil, Greece, and Indonesia, and violent racial and political conflicts in South Africa, Uganda, and Rhodesia. Civil wars increased in intensity, with the late sixties and early seventies seeing a nearly threefold increase in worldwide battle-related deaths over the previous decade. (The numbers remained high until 1991, after which they dropped precipitously.)17 A tidal swell of NGO activity and news coverage helped bring these issues to the attention of Western governments and publics.
Concurrent with the rise in civil violence was the retreat of liberal democracy. Between 1950 and 1975, the proportion of nations with functioning parliamentary systems declined. At the dawn of the seventies, communist governments in Eastern Europe and Asia seemed as resolute as ever, while right-wing autocracies were ubiquitous in much of the rest of the world. Across the global South, notes Roland Burke, there was a marked expansion of authoritarianism, including twenty-six coups in Africa in the 1960s, mostly in the decade’s final few years. As Kathryn Sikkink has pointed out, in Latin America alone upward of a dozen nations underwent a wave of repression from the 1960s to the 1980s that was unprecedented in the twentieth century. “In virtually all cases,” she writes, “the repression was carried out under military regimes that had come to power through the wave of coups that swept the region in the 1960s and 1970s…. We have to go back to the colonial and independence periods to find comparable violence.”18
The Cold War thaw and President Richard Nixon’s détente policy also helped fuel human rights interest in Washington. Nixon and his closest foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, pursued détente with the Soviet Union as a means of preventing nuclear war, limiting the arms race, and containing Soviet ambitions. The Soviets, meanwhile, sought recognition, Western technology, arms control agreements, and respect for existing borders. A mutually beneficial relationship developed. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later recalled that Soviet-American relations “reached a level of amity in 1973 never before achieved in the postwar era.”19 Neither set of leaders cared to make human rights a part of this process, but the close relationship facilitated American influence in the internal affairs of the Eastern Bloc. The most prominent legislative attempt to wield this influence was the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, which tied U.S.-Soviet trade to Soviet Jews’ right to emigrate. The Cold War thaw also increased the potential for action against nominal American allies. In earlier years, dictators’ probusiness and anticommunist credentials were enough to earn a passing grade from American policymakers, a sentiment summarized in a senior official’s alleged comment about a morally dubious ally: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s OUR son of a bitch.” The quote’s origins are apocryphal, but no matter; it captures an element of truth in America’s ties to unsavory autocrats like Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.20 But in the 1970s Americans grew much less tolerant of undemocratic practices in noncommunist states. Détente shaped American diplomacy and the human rights movement until the very end of the 1970s, only to reappear in a different form in the late 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.