Did Carter fail on human rights?

DID CARTER FAIL ON HUMAN RIGHTS?

President Reagan knew he had tapped something important this spring when he vowed in the name of human rights to "oppose tyranny in whatever form, whether of the right or the left.' Some people were skeptical, of course. They had heard this sort of promise before, and the president's brief remarks about human rights--a few sentences buried in a long statement sent to Congress--seemed designed largely to justify his support for "indigenous resistance' forces in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the statement clearly struck a chord. Human rights concerns were suddenly respectable again, without reservation, and the American public seemed to breathe a sign of relief as the president declared that he was returning to a foreign policy unequivocally in keeping with the country's traditional idealism.

What the president was recognizing, to his credit, was that he had been unable to bury the human rights policy he had inherited from Jimmy Carter. This was not a revelation. President Reagan had learned early on that, like it or not, he could not dispense with the language of morality and humanitarian concern that Carter had used to discuss foreign policy. Under pressure from Congress, the public, and human rights organizations, the Reagan administration had found it necessary to factor human rights into its policy toward Chile, Haiti, and the Philippines --the cases where it boasted of its human rights efforts--and also toward El Salvador, South Africa, Turkey, South Korea, Nicaragua, Poland, and the Soviet Union, among other countries. It had discovered that the American people simply were uncomfortable with unadorned realpolitik--with a foreign policy that did not seem to serve a moral purpose beyond national security.

The president himself clearly required such a purpose, although his was anticommunism rather than human rights. In fact, whatever was said about the Carter policy, neither the right nor the left seemed to have much doubt that we as Americans were--at some level--responsible for the political well-being of other people around the world and that it was the task of our foreign policy to promote that well-being in one way or another. The difference, in early 1986, was that when President Reagan embraced human rights he seemed willing to back up his words with deeds, even in places, like Haiti and the Philippines, ruled by right-wing dictators.

It was a heady moment, an opportunity for Americans to congratulate themselves on both their moral vision and on a measure of political consensus. In the midst of the enthusiasm, no one stopped to ask--or seemed to remember--what went wrong with the Carter human rights policy. No one seemed to recall how politically divisive it had been or how foolishly righteous it had often sounded. President Reagan himself seemed to have forgotten that he had once campaigned against it and that his advisers--particularly Jeane Kirkpatrick--had charged that the Carter policy was detrimental to American interests in places like Nicaragua and Iran. More than that, no one seemed to remember how far Carter had had to back off the idea in the course of his four years in office. No one seemed to recall how little real progress he had achieved or how generally ineffective this failure had made him seem.

Two recent books--one by Gaddis Smith, professor of history at Yale, the other by Joshua Muravchik, a writer and former aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson*--may serve to remind us. The two authors differ considerably in their judgments of the Carter approach, but both agree that it failed, and both endeavor to lay the foundations for a more successful human rights policy.

* Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years. Gaddis Smith. Hill and Wang, $17.95. The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy. Joshua Muravchik. Hamilton Press, $18.95.

The outlines of the Carter policy are not in dispute. The promotion of human rights was part of a larger emphasis on what were seen as moral and humanitarian goals--arms control, nuclear non-proliferation, open diplomacy, reconciliation with past adversaries, avoiding the use of force, and moving beyond the ideological battle with Moscow. It was also a reaction to the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and, in a somewhat more complicated way, to the American experience in Vietnam. This meant, from the outset, that the president and his advisers defined their human rights policy as a kind of antidote to power politics--as if the two were mutually exclusive and concern about human rights inevitably ran counter to American power in the world. It was an unnecessary and oversimplified opposition that eventually spelled disaster for the Carter human rights campaign.

That initiative began with some flourish, in a string of pronouncements, during the campaign and the first months of the presidency, affirming Carter's "absolute' commitment to human rights. The new president moved quickly to make good on that commitment, with both symbolic gestures and more substantive steps. The human rights bureau of the State Department was considerably strengthened, and its chief, Patricia Derian, given the rank of assistant secretary. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher, United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, and Assistant Secretary Derian were dispatched around the country and the world to promote human rights in speeches and diplomatic conversations. Vance and Derian met with leaders of human rights organizations in several countries, and a number of former political prisoners were received in Washington.

Within months, the president had signed three international human rights accords--the hemispheric American Convention on Human Rights and two United Nations covenants, one on civil and political rights, the other on economic and cultural rights--that had been languishing for years without U.S. approval. The administration also began to scrutinize, and block, economic and military aid to friendly governments with bad human rights records. U.S. representatives to international financial institutions were instructed to vote against loans to offending countries. An Inter-Agency Group on Human Rights and Foreign Assistance was set up to coordinate human rights concerns and American economic policies; a similar group reviewed military and security assistance, and there was a sharp decline, in the first two years of the administration, in military exports.

There were, however, signs of trouble from the start. Carter came into office with a deep sense of moral purpose but without much idea of how foreign policy worked, and human rights were the first victim of his inexperience. It became clear very early that he had not given much thought to how a human rights policy would square with the country's other interests, whether strategic or humanitarian. There was particular confusion about how it would be reconciled with his broader intention of improving relations with the Soviet Union. Moscow made clear almost immediately that it did not like being scolded by the American president and that it felt his contacts with Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov cast a pall over arms control talks. Carter seemed startled and quickly backed off, allowing his desire to get along with Moscow to triumph over human rights.

Just the opposite happened in East Asia, where the White House soon saw the need to contain the Soviet Union and as a result turned something of a blind eye to human rights abuses in South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, and China. The attitude toward the Philippines was fairly typical. President Ferdinand Marcos kept the country under martial law--there were no free elections, little freedom of speech or press, and a large number of political prisoners --but his friendship was considered indispensable if America was to maintain control of its military bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay. As a result, Washington's occasional comments about Marcos's neglect of human rights were invariably followed by talk of his country's strategic importance, and there were no cuts in American assistance. Indeed, in 1979, the White House signed an agreement promising Marcos $500 million, much of it in the form of modern weapons, for five more years of access to the bases.

It was for much the same reason that Carter went out of his way to praise the human rights performance of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland--three countries where he thought he could encourage some measure of independence from Moscow. Thus, in both Asia and Eastern Europe, human rights fell victim to the administration's perception that it had to decide between humanitarian and geopolitical concerns.

In yet other parts of the world, the administration saw human rights concerns conflicting with other humanitarian purposes--and human rights invariably were sacrificed. The White House downplayed significant abuses in both Vietnam and Cuba, former adversaries with whom Carter hoped to build better relations. Thus, instead of protesting about political prisoners or press censorship, the administration held negotiations with both countries about the possibility of resuming diplomatic ties. The White House also urged Congress to go easy on a number of nations in black Africa--including Uganda, which had one of the worst human rights records in the world-- where Carter hoped to make new friends and demonstrate American sympathy for the principle of majority rule.

In the end, Latin America was just about the only place where it seemed possible to pursue human rights without significant cost. It was there that Carter made his greatest effort, loudly chiding dictators and cutting military aid--and there, too, that he probably had the greatest success. United States leverage was more significant in Latin America than anywhere else in the world; the president did not hesitate to make his feelings known to the generally poor and powerless nations of the region. Military governments throughout the hemisphere were offended by his remarks and the descriptions of their countries in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, but their only recourse--to decline U. S. military aid--hurt them far more than it hurt us. Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Brazil all rejected aid at one time or another, and in several cases the administration added to the burden by blocking badly needed international loans.

The results were hard to measure, for in most cases they had less to do with concrete changes than with a new regard for the idea of human rights. But the long-term effect of the Carter policy has been significant, encouraging the people of Latin America to demand their political rights, while reminding the ruling generals that the world was watching them. Some former political prisoners, including Argentine writer and editor Jacobo Timmerman, attribute their release to Carter. Still other Latin Americans attribute the recent spread of democracy in the hemisphere --since 1976, ten Latin American countries have held their first free elections in years--to seeds planted during the Carter administration. Whatever else he did, however much he hesitated and backed down, Carter had established the principle that governments throughout the hemisphere, and the world, were internationally accountable for the way they treated their own citizens.

But even in Latin America, the president eventually backed off when strategic threats--there and elsewhere in the world--began to sap his energy and idealism. The effect was often rather unseemly--awkward vacillation or unabashed retreat --and in several cases the consequences were disastrous. The last year of the Carter administration brought renewed aid for the Salvadoran military and much diminished criticism of the Argentine junta, followed by a desperate effort to befriend the military dictator of Pakistan--all three justified on grounds of anticommunism and the need to contain Soviet adventurism. The spectacle was particularly embarrassing in Pakistan, where President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq had the gall to turn down Carter's offer of $400 million in military aid. Unlike the small countries of Latin America, Pakistan seemed by then--in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan--strategically crucial to the United States, and Washington virtually begged Islamabad to take our money and our weapons, to no avail.

In both Iran and Nicaragua, the president wavered indecisively. In Iran, there was some quiet criticism of the Shah's human rights record but then extravagant praise and loud public support for his continued leadership. Nor, until the very end, did Carter refuse to sell the Shah whatever he asked for in the way of military aid--the exception was tear gas and riot control equipment. In the Nicaraguan case, the president was much more critical of the dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and in 1978, when Somoza refused to hold elections, Washington took a number of punitive steps, terminating military assistance, cutting back on economic aid and reducing the number of officials in the U.S. embassy in Managua. Nevertheless, as the revolution neared, the White House drew back in fear, refusing to cut aid to Somoza's national guard and even lobbying for renewed multilateral assistance. Clearly, by the time they were overthrown, Carter was ambivalent about both dictators, and it is probably impossible to judge the extent of U.S. responsibility for either revolution. In the end, his administration was blamed for "losing' both countries.

Why did the Carter human rights policy go so wrong? Together Smith and Muravchik put forward most of the criticisms leveled by the right and the left since Carter first began to talk about human rights. In essence, there were three: that Carter's human rights policy was not ideological enough, that it was poorly executed, and that it was unrealistically ambitious.

Muravchik's charges come largely from the right. Like Smith, he is troubled by the president's ineptness, but his major criticism is that Carter failed to see or use human rights as a weapon against communism. He gives several reasons why. First, by focusing primarily on the fundamental rights associated with what Muravchik calls the "integrity of the person'--the right not to be killed, tortured, or imprisoned at will-- Carter is said to have neglected the political rights that are most important to Americans and essential for a democratic way of life.

Second, Muravchik contends Carter relied too heavily on punitive measures. As a result, Carter titled toward attacking right-wing "authoritarian' allies rather than "totalitarian' adversaries-- countries against which the U.S. cannot or dares not apply too much punitive muscle. Finally, by focusing on such allies, he is said to have undermined American interests in the world and sown confusion about the very meaning of human rights--about who most abuses them and why they matter in the first place.

These are serious charges that have to be answered before we can make any effort to formulate a more effective human rights policy. There should be no question that democratic values are a central part of what America means by human rights, and that the U.S. must not hesitate to criticize either communist abuses of human rights or the hypocritical concern for humanitarian values that dominates official rhetoric in both the third world and the Eastern bloc. Those who faulted Carter on these counts have some grounds for complaint.

Nevertheless, an American human rights policy devoted largely to ideological crusading cannot hope for much success. Carter had some experience with crusading--albeit not an ideological crusade--and the failure of his shrill, righteous approach should be an ample lesson. Besides, no human rights initiative that seems merely to serve a narrow American agenda can hope to have the moral authority to produce changes anywhere except in countries ruled by our most obedient clients. To be credible, a human rights policy must be as consistent as possible and truly evenhanded--difficult as that may be, given that U.S. leverage on foreign countries varies widely. Any other sort of policy will surely seem cynical--as if America is merely using human rights to gain tactical advantage in a struggle that is really about power.

In this sense, there may be something to the argument that an exclusively punitive human rights policy may do more harm than good. An American human rights policy will not be effective unless it has some teeth--probably a range of options, including quiet diplomacy, public pressure, withholding of aid, and other economic sanctions. But punitive measures, even more than scolding, are likely to make other governments only more resistant to change. And a successful policy will have as much to do with holding up a universal standard as imposing punishment-- punishment that is inevitably brought down on some offending countries and not others.

This is where Muravchik and other conservatives make a crucial mistake. Instead of advocating a universal standard, they argue that human rights should be an essentially American yardstick applied to the rest of the world. To his credit, Jimmy Carter seemed to understand the pitfalls of this approach--his goal was, after all, the "promoting of basic global standards'--and he rarely tried to use human rights as a tool of power politics. Our human rights policy should be an effort to advance an absolute good, not to bring other countries into our camp. If it happens to have that effect--and no doubt it will-- that's fine. But that ought not to be the purpose or the method of our policy.

Does this mean that an assertive human rights policy is necessarily incompatible with America's other interests in the world? Smith thinks so. He sees the Carter debacle as yet another chapter in the old story of American messianism--a familiar and predictable consequence of our preference for a high-minded foreign policy that is too good for this world.

It is a discouraging interpretation, and one that offers little hope for a more successful human rights policy. But was Carter merely a misguided idealist? And is American support for human rights in fact nothing but a fanciful dream--an honorable moral crusade that can help Americans feel good about themselves but do little in the end to change other people's lives? Not necessarily, for one need not assume, as Carter did, that there can be no relation between humanitarianism and strategic purposes.

Carter was determined from the outset to move beyond traditional power politics; he hoped that moral principle, world order, and international collaboration could replace confrontation and military force as the staples of foreign policy. It was almost as if he thought he could dispense with national interest in the name of larger moral and humanitarian ends. Needless to say, the world turned out to be a much rougher place than he expected, and in case after case--the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan, and Poland, among others--he abandoned the pursuit of human rights as soon as the going got tough. He seems to have felt that he had to choose between toughness and idealism--and when he chose, it was all or nothing. The irony is that he chose too late and ended up looking at once naive and weak.

Many of Carter's critics, particularly on the right, seemed to agree with his stark analysis. Jeane Kirkpatrick led the charge, arguing that his human rights policy had undermined American interests in Nicaragua by bringing down the Somoza dictatorship. Americans were urged to close their eyes to the depredations of "friendly dictators'--or risk much greater abuses of freedom at the hands of Moscow and its clients. It was a grim choice indeed--as if, in the short term and the Third World, at least, Americans had to choose between their interests and their values.

It took Ronald Reagan, of all people, to put this view to rest. In Haiti, Chile, and the Philippines, he seems to have discovered that it serves American interests to support democracy and human rights even when this pits us against a "friendly' dictator under attack from the left. In all three cases, to be sure, the president acted with great hesitation, and only after considerable pressure from Congress and the human rights community. Nor, in any of the three countries, did the administration move until it perceived that the dictator we had been supporting was not likely to last very long. The president's reasoning may have been more practical than idealistic; it doesn't really matter. In all three cases, the White House eventually concluded that it no longer served our interests to back the faltering tyrant.

In these three cases at least, President Reagan and his advisers seemed to have grasped the argument, first put forward under the Carter administration, that America ought to be "on the side of change'--that by backing moderate political forces trying to oust a Third-World dictator, we could preempt the Soviet Union from playing a significant role in either the revolution or the future of the country at hand. The Carter administration did not have much success with this doctrine: it was used on occasion to justify the administration's actions in Nicaragua and Iran, but, in fact, in both cases the White House wavered uncertainly between the dictator and the side of change, and both revolutions eventually got out of hand. The Reagan administration may have been luckier--or more deft. But whatever the reason, in Haiti, Chile, and the Philippines, it has not yet had to choose between America's interests and its political values.

Both Muravchik and Smith conclude that the Carter human rights policy was a failure--and, to a degree, they are right. Carter found that he had to back off the policy in country after country, and the concrete results of his efforts were slim indeed. Saddest of all, by the time he was voted out of office, the idea of human rights seemed to have gotten a bad name. His approach was perceived by all as righteous and ineffectual --to the point that many liberals as well as conservatives had begun to have doubts about just how aggressively America ought to try to promote humanitarian values in the Third World.

Under pressure from Congress and others, Ronald Reagan has begun to erase those doubts, strengthening and perhaps even redeeming the policy he inherited from Carter. Reagan deserves some credit for skillful execution, and Carter surely deserves some blame for his ineptness, but in the end it is Jimmy Carter who must be credited with the idea. Carter did not invent human rights--indeed, his policy would have had little teeth without the body of human rights legislation passed by Congress in the mid-1970s-- or American messianism. But whatever mistakes he made in office, Carter's idea was just about right--a minimal and universal standard, consistently applied, that would put America on the side of decency and humanitarian values around the world. He sensed that it could make America strong to stand for something in the world. What he couldn't seem to grasp was how to make this work for him.

Why did Carter's commitment to human rights make him look so weak? And why did he have to abandon it in favor of strategic interests? In part, at least, because he aimed too high--and failed to grasp that it was possible to be just a little bit moralistic. If this is true, his failure should teach us something--should protect his successors and the American public from our own extravagant hopes about transforming the world in our own image. According to one estimate, only one-third of mankind lives under governments committed to individual rights, and only one-quarter lives in countries capable of providing the economic minimums often considered to be a human right. It is hardly an encouraging prospect--but there could be almost nothing worse, for either American credibility or the people we hope to help, than claiming to have more power than we do to improve upon it. Carter himself had some trouble finding a middle ground between extravagant idealism and peevish despair. It would be a shame to repeat the mistake.