Human Rights and Foreign Policy: A Proposal

William F. Buckley, Jr.

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980

Article preview: first 500 of 9,173 words total.

Summary:  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.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is Editor of National Review. His most recent book is a novel, Who's On First.

The Soviets in Geneva [to negotiate SALT II] never even hinted at the Kremlin's resentment of the Carter human rights policy, and the Americans were equally careful not to echo their Government's criticism of Soviet human rights abuses. Unaware of this rule, a newcomer to the U.S. team brought up the dissidents in an informal tête-à-tête with his Russian opposite number. When he reported the exchange later in a 'memcon,' his superiors told him never again to mix business with displeasure.

-Time Magazine, May 21, 1979, a Special Report on the history of the negotiation of the SALT II treaty.

A great deal has been written about human rights and foreign policy in the recent past.1 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.

II

Although the very idea of human "rights" is firmly rooted in biblical injunction, which asserts a metaphysical equality ("Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself") and enjoins altruism ("Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"), biblical insights made little political progress over the centuries in which church and state joined in accepting, and even underwriting, civil class distinctions at the extreme of which were self-assured kings and self-abnegating slaves, never mind that the political phenomenon never challenged, let alone diluted, the theological conviction that both kings and slaves would eventually answer to the same divine tribunal.

Human rights, including a measure of political rights, were asserted and to a degree explicated, in the documents that led to, and flowered from, the American and French Revolutions. The Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, enumerated individual rights which the state might not impinge upon, save by due process. The respect paid to these rights by sponsoring governments varied with the vicissitudes of the historical season, an ambivalence by no means outdated. Negro slaves in America coexisted with the Bill of Rights; the Reign of Terror in France with the Declaration of the Rights ...

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