Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard

      

       Human Rights in American Foreign Policy

      PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

      Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       Human Rights in American Foreign Policy

      From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse

      Joe Renouard

       PENN

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America

      on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Renouard, Joe, author.

      Human rights in American foreign policy : from the 1960s to the Soviet collapse / Joe Renouard.

      pages cm. — (Pennsylvania studies in human rights)

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4773-2 (alk. paper)

      1. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1989–1993. 3. Diplomacy—Moral and ethical aspects—20th century. 4. Human rights—Government policy—United States—20th century. 5. Cold War. I. Title. II. Series: Pennsylvania studies in human rights.

      JZ1480.R465 2016

      327.1′1—dc23

      2015022968

       For my family

      What has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

      —Boris Pasternak

       Contents

       Introduction: A Riot in Washington

       Chapter 1. The Crisis of Confidence

       Chapter 2. The Congressional Challenge and the Ethnic Revival

       Chapter 3. The Carter Human Rights Policy

       Chapter 4. Ronald Reagan and the New Conservative Internationalism

       Chapter 5. Global Human Rights, Democracy, and the Cold War’s End

       Epilogue: Human Rights in the Post–Cold War World

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction: A Riot in Washington

      November 15, 1977, began like most any other fall day in Washington. The morning temperature hovered in the upper forties, and the forecast called for an afternoon high of around sixty. It had been unusually cool in the District of late, and residents welcomed the return of warmer weather. On Capitol Hill, the 95th Congress was working through its customary autumn slate of committee hearings and legislative proposals, with staffers poring over reams of bills on foreign affairs, the economy, and the more mundane matters of congressional governance. At the White House, President Jimmy Carter’s morning was taken up with the usual round of cabinet meetings and advisers’ briefings, as well as an interview with New York Times foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger.

      The central item on Carter’s agenda that day was an official visit by the head of state of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi. The United States had maintained a special relationship with the Shah for a quarter of a century, and the new American president was eagerly anticipating his first meeting with this longtime ally. In accordance with the Shah’s importance to the United States, the White House planned to pull out all the stops with a state dinner, policy meetings, and multiple photo ops with the Shah and his elegant wife, Empress Farah. The United States had many reasons to value the Shah’s friendship. Not only did he provide a steady source of oil, but he had solidified relations with Israel and the large Arab states of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and he stood as a reliable bulwark against Soviet ambitions along the two nations’ fifteen-hundred-mile border. In return for the Shah’s secular anticommunism, oil, and Western orientation, the United States had provided him with modern weapons, diplomatic support, and favorable trade deals.

      There was just one problem: the Western-leaning, Western-educated Shah was no Western liberal. He had ascended the throne in 1941, and he had seen his power greatly augmented in 1953 following a U.S.-backed coup. In the ensuing years he had ruled more like an eighteenth-century absolutist than a twentieth-century democrat. Iran’s political institutions were ill-equipped to accommodate dissent or a political transition, and its security agency, SAVAK, was widely accused of imprisoning, torturing, and even killing dissidents. The Shah deemed these authoritarian measures necessary for a feudal society making the transition to modernity, but in the 1970s more and more Western critics were speaking out against such methods. True, the Shah was hardly the worst human rights abuser in the world. His ambitious modernization program had benefited many Iranians, and he had recently implemented a set of limited legal and social reforms.¹ But his one-party government was neither liberal nor democratic.

      The Shah’s human rights record had been of little interest to American policymakers, but Jimmy Carter was a new kind of executive. He had campaigned on a promise to bring moral values to governance, and since his inauguration he had pursued an ambitious human rights policy. This activism put him into a difficult position. If he publicly confronted the Shah, he would damage the vital U.S.-Iran relationship. But if he ignored the Shah’s transgressions, he would risk losing credibility for all of his policies, including human rights. With U.S.-Iran ties and his own policies in flux, Carter hoped to steer a middle course by publicly supporting the Shah, continuing the special relationship, and addressing Iranian human rights in private.

      In keeping with the tradition of state visits to the White House, the schedule called for a welcoming reception on the South Lawn. Such ceremonies were common, but this time thousands of pro- and anti-Shah demonstrators were expected, and the presence of two opposing groups created the potential for violence. By ten o’clock that morning, around eight thousand had arrived. The anti-Shah crowd was an unusual mix of students, Marxists, Muslims, and liberals who were united only in their loathing of the Shah. Well-known figures from the 1960s antiwar movement proclaimed Iran to be America’s worst police-state ally, while an Iranian student group declared that “the U.S. government, multinational corporate interests, and the Shah” were “engaged in an orchestrated effort to mask the reality of oppression in Iran.” The pro-Shah group, meanwhile,