Human Rights and Foreign Policy: A Proposal

A great deal has been written about human rights and foreign policy in the recent past. With much of what I propose to discuss below, before arriving at a policy proposal, I expect there will not be substantial disagreement, with some of it inevitably there will be. We are all agreed that the movement for human rights, politically expressed, is quite new; that U.S. involvement in that movement has been uneven; that the advent of the United Nations Covenant on Human Rights slightly altered the juridical international picture; that the Soviet Union came recently to a policy of manipulating the West's campaign for human rights; that the Vietnam War brought on a general disillusionment with American idealism; that the Realpolitik of Nixon-Kissinger generated first congressional resistance and then, through candidate and later President Jimmy Carter, executive resistance to adjourning official U.S. concern for human rights. And, of course, everyone knows that Mr. Carter's human rights policy is now in a shambles. This is the case, in my judgment, not because of executive ineptitude, but because of morphological problems that can't be met without an organic division of responsibility.