notable exceptions, policymakers avoided criticizing those governments they considered “friendly.” If legislators or presidential administrations wanted to weaken a government, they used human rights and democracy policies; if they wanted to strengthen a government, they did not. This was especially true with respect to the Soviet Union. When the United States pressed the Kremlin to free political prisoners and liberalize emigration, it was a direct challenge to Soviet laws. Thus Moscow’s leaders were generally correct in their belief that American activism was aimed, at least in part, at challenging the Soviet state. As for Washington’s dealings with nominal allies, policymakers’ chiding was generally intended to strengthen these governments, unless the leaders in question had lost popular support, in which case some in Washington would support a regime change. Policymakers then often blurred the line between encouraging reforms and interfering in events. When the United States supported democratic transitions in Haiti, the Philippines, and Chile in the 1980s, it was effectively choosing sides by working against the incumbents and quickly backing their successors.
When we consider American foreign relations in toto, international human rights concerns were secondary to more traditional interests like security, trade, international stability, strong bilateral relationships, regional hegemony, and anticommunism. Put another way, although Washington’s human rights efforts were noteworthy, they were not quite revolutionary. American national security always trumped human rights, and policymakers were reluctant to hinder commerce. Important trading partners were rarely sanctioned for long. Likewise, those nations that fell outside of America’s primary economic sphere were seldom a part of human rights debates in Washington. There were some exceptions to these rules: human rights sanctions against Chile and Argentina hurt some American businesses, and antiapartheid policies in the 1980s conflicted with other economic and security interests in the Southern Africa region. But these were aberrations, and the sanctions in question only transpired after months or years of difficult political wrangling.
Another natural consequence of these priorities was that policymakers opted for bilateral policies over multilateral ones. Many Americans had long harbored deep suspicions of multilateral agreements and organizations like the League of Nations (pre-1939) and the United Nations (post-1945). Consequently, although the United States established groundbreaking bilateral human rights policies in the 1970s, Americans were far less willing to embrace multilateral policies. The U.N. human rights treaties languished in the Senate for years, while many U.N. bureaus became sounding boards for nonaligned and communist governments’ criticisms of the Western democracies. As the United Nations lost credibility in the human rights field, national legislatures like the U.S. Congress took on a more significant role. Global human rights concerns were addressed more effectively through the traditional mechanisms of bilateral relations than through multilateral forums.
My final major claim is that inconsistency was central to human rights policymaking and enforcement. The U.S. government’s inability to create a strong, consistent set of policies that applied equally to all nations was a natural outcome of the fractiousness of politics and the sheer variety of interests competing for attention in Washington. This inability further stemmed from a series of problems that beset the human rights movement from the very start. The entire post-1945 regime of universal rights and international law was defined by a conflict—some considered it a contradiction—between the rights of states and the rights of individuals. Because national sovereignty is one of the oldest and most fundamental principles of international law, the new emphasis on individual integrity clearly implied a radical reinterpretation of sovereignty. Furthermore, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed the inviolability of the individual, the U.N. Charter’s second article reinforced the primacy of national sovereignty and sovereign equality. Authoritarian regimes thus relied on the maxim that a nation’s “internal affairs” were its own business, while activists touted the individual as the basic building block of international relations.
Another source of seemingly “inconsistent” behavior grew out of disagreement over the precise definition of a human right. Beyond the most basic matters of individual inviolability—freedom from torture, freedom from extrajudicial execution, and the like—there was no consensus. Activists also found that several cultural, ideological, and religious traditions challenged Western definitions. The impoverished citizens of developing nations were arguably more interested in economic growth than in freedom of expression or religious pluralism. And while the Western democracies exalted individual liberty and corporal integrity, Marxists assailed this as “bourgeois ideology” and instead touted social equality, also known as “economic, social, and cultural rights.” Likewise, cultural relativists and pluralists argued that every culture had a unique conception of rights and obligations, while the postcolonial perspective asserted that human rights were a “neo-imperialistic” imposition upon non-Western societies. In the words of the scholars Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab, the liberal human rights doctrine was “a Western construct with limited applicability” to the belief systems, values, and needs of much of the world’s people.31 Islam offered yet another challenge to the notion of universality through its strict moral code and the tenets of Sharia law. These divides—East/West, collective/individual, capitalist/Marxist, religious/secular—were never simple binaries.32 Many in the West, for example, defended the legitimacy of economic and social rights. Nevertheless, these conflicts consistently hampered activists’ efforts.
For Washington policymakers, these disputes were overshadowed by the far more important debate over the national interest. While activists argued that human rights promotion was in America’s interest, conservative cold warriors and advocates of traditional diplomacy asserted that the United States should support any stable, anticommunist government. In their eyes, cutting military aid and arms sales destabilized allies, hurt American businesses, and decreased Washington’s leverage but did not prevent regimes from obtaining aid and weapons elsewhere. Was it not preferable, conservatives asked, to maintain cordial relations with undemocratic governments and, if necessary, use private diplomacy to persuade them to reform gradually? The diplomatic corps, too, found much to dislike about human rights rules. Foreign service officers (FSOs) were trained to cooperate with foreign governments, but new laws and practices forced them to broach uncomfortable subjects with their hosts.
In response to these criticisms of morality in foreign policy, activists offered an alternative vision of the national interest—one that included the well-being of other states’ citizens. Some argued that liberal democracies made better, more stable allies. Others claimed that ties to oppressive governments hurt America’s reputation and even spurred foreign policy setbacks, as when revolutionaries overthrew U.S.-backed regimes in Iran and Nicaragua. Most activists, though, justified their vision by pointing to humanism and the American liberal tradition. The United States, they argued, should pursue human rights because this was the right thing to do and because these were consistent with the nation’s founding principles. Realists countercharged that none of these justifications gave much guidance on when and where to apply such ideals, and even activists had to admit that there was a profound difference between desiring a freer, more democratic world, and taking up a national mission to spread liberty and democracy. Some activists argued that America was duty-bound to act because it was a powerful nation that could use its vast economic resources, diplomatic leverage, and even the threat of military force to change other governments’ behavior. But as activists and policymakers would discover time and again between 1967 and 1991, there were limits to American power, and policymakers were rarely able to convince other governments—or other U.S. government agencies, for that matter—to do exactly what they wanted.
One final observation: human rights NGOs were only of marginal importance to Washington policymaking in comparison with their importance to the global movement. This is not to say that human rights NGOs were ineffective; it is, rather, to say that other non-state actors played a more substantial role in America. The number and variety of NGOs concerned with international human rights were remarkable. Hundreds of ethnic associations, churches, synagogues, private foundations, and labor unions occasionally worked on behalf of human rights causes, from the Polish-American Congress and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry to the National Council of Churches and the AFL-CIO. As
