Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard

he acted as a constant antagonist to human rights advocates. An academic schooled in the diplomacy of Metternich and Talleyrand, Kissinger was a strong believer in traditional interstate relations and the balance of global power. And like Nixon, he preferred to deal with only the most powerful nations; the developing world mattered little to him, excepting those places where the United States and the Soviets battled by proxy. Kissinger tended to believe that the United States should maintain relations with key states, no matter how illiberal or undemocratic their governments were. In a 1966 essay that would become remarkably self-referential, he argued that a true statesman’s view of human nature “is wary; he is conscious of many great hopes which have failed.” To the statesman, “gradualism is the essence of stability” and “maintenance of the existing order is more important than any dispute within it.”⁸⁰ Kissinger carried these attitudes into the Nixon administration. As he told a group of business leaders in 1971, the administration sought to “reduce dogmatic hostilities around the world. Our policies are not idealistic, moralistic. We do not plead altruism—a tendency far too common in the history of American foreign affairs.”⁸¹

      Kissinger’s Machiavellian streak went hand in hand with his pessimistic view of human nature. Growing up Jewish in prewar Germany, he witnessed firsthand the weakness of the Weimar Republic and European democracies in the face of the Nazis’ rise. This lesson in the fragility of democracy may explain, in part, his later willingness to deal with undemocratic governments like those in Beijing and Moscow. And on a personal level, he was more than a little arrogant. “I’ve always acted alone,” he told a journalist in an unguarded moment. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse…. This amazing, romantic character suits me.”⁸² And although Kissinger was a tremendous asset to the Nixon administration, he was difficult to maintain, and his carefully cultivated public image of cool rationality masked his mercurial emotions.⁸³ A Nixon speechwriter suggested that “the care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of [Nixon’s] presidency, but he was worth it.”⁸⁴ Nixon himself was blunter, once telling an aide, “There are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think that he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”⁸⁵

      Kissinger’s diplomatic style matched his pragmatism. Because he believed in maintaining personal relationships with important leaders, he was unlikely, to say the least, to assail someone for human rights violations. He argued that American attacks on the Soviets’ record would make superpower conflicts only more likely and that similar criticism of anticommunist states would alienate allies. The real job of diplomacy, he asserted, was to hammer out bilateral agreements based on mutual interest, not to make grand pronouncements of principle that would have no long-term effect. Even when President Nixon supported humanitarian assistance in war-torn regions, Kissinger was largely indifferent. As we will see, scholars, journalists, and activists have not merely criticized Kissinger’s indifference to humanitarianism; several have even accused him of complicity in human rights violations through his support of authoritarian regimes in Chile, Indonesia, and elsewhere.⁸⁶

      From our twenty-first-century perspective, Nixon and Kissinger come across as singularly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward human rights matters. But it is worth considering their position in a broader historical context. These men practiced a form of diplomacy that had served European and American statesmen for centuries. Only in rare cases had other states’ internal practices concerned executive policymakers in Washington. We must also acknowledge that many domestic and foreign observers applauded Nixon’s foreign policy and his rejection of the American imperium. His détente with Moscow was generally popular in 1972–1973, and he was commended for the opening to China and the accords that finalized America’s Vietnam withdrawal. A relatively small number of Americans wanted Nixon to pursue a more moral course that included human rights judgments. It is perhaps most accurate, then, to say that Nixon and Kissinger were transitional figures whose training and worldview did not prepare them for the human rights activism of the 1970s. The movement was so new and unusual that they tended to believe it was politically driven and largely irrelevant to the real work of diplomacy.

      The post-1968 Cold War thaw—of which the U.S.-Soviet détente was an integral part—was the international political foundation on which American human rights policies were built. Moderates in the American and Soviet camps had been trying to engineer a détente since the 1950s, but a viable working relationship had always eluded them. By the late sixties, divisions in both alliances made for a more congenial superpower climate. Sino-Soviet tensions peaked in 1969, when the two nations became engaged in a series of bloody border clashes. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, and Czechoslovakia expressed varying degrees of independence from Moscow. Coincident with this lack of unity in the communist world, France pursued a more unilateral course and withdrew from the NATO integrated military command. And in a process known as Ostpolitik, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt cultivated relations with East Germany and the Soviet Union. Owing to these splits, East/West tensions reached a postwar nadir at the end of the sixties.

      Richard Nixon entered the White House amid these shifting alliances. Despite, or perhaps because of, his anticommunist credentials, he was willing to negotiate with the communist states that were, as he put it, “too powerful to ignore.”⁸⁷ In his 1969 inaugural address he signaled to the world, “After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open.”⁸⁸ Because Moscow and Beijing needed Western technology, trade, and recognition, détente would be a logical means to several ends. It would strengthen NATO and prevent America’s European allies from becoming too independent. An engagement with the Soviet Union and China would also allow Nixon to play the two countries against one another. He further hoped to increase his political capital through bold international maneuvers. If he could secure arms limitation agreements, an opening to China, and support in ending the Vietnam War, it would all but ensure his reelection. The more agreeable international environment would then allow Americans to cut defense spending and usher in what Nixon called “a generation of peace.” Thus détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China became Nixon’s top priorities after his first two years in office. Through a combination of ideological flexibility and pragmatism amid changing circumstances, Nixon and his Soviet counterparts overcame the limitations faced by their predecessors and produced numerous results, from trade and arms control agreements to cultural exchanges and joint scientific ventures.

      The administration’s emphasis on interstate peace and order would often conflict with the goals of human rights activists. Indeed, although East/West propaganda continued in the détente era, the U.S. and Soviet governments reduced the ideological sniping that had defined the Cold War for over two decades. In the parlance of the day, détente implied noninterference in a nation’s internal affairs. Or as Michael Ignatieff has asserted, it “traded rights for order.”⁸⁹ Nixon and Kissinger came to accept the Soviet Union as a world power whose leaders were more interested in preserving international stability than in fomenting Marxist revolutions. The Soviets, too, argued that détente had nothing to do with individual rights or Westernization of the Soviet Union. A typical Pravda editorial of the period asserted that détente should be defined by a “comparison of ideas and facts … and must not be turned into a conscious incitement of mistrust and hostility, the falsification of reality or, least of all, subversive activity.”⁹⁰

      Yet although Nixon, Kissinger, and the Soviets preferred not to make human rights issues a part of détente, they could not control all of the forces unleashed by the Cold War thaw. Détente opened the Eastern Bloc to scrutiny from NGOs, Congress, and ordinary American citizens, and in the long run activists in both East and West became significant actors in international relations. Many observers also held out hope that trade liberalization, educational exchanges, and scientific cooperation would improve the flow of ideas and perhaps decrease repression in the East. Such a decrease would ultimately require activism within Eastern Bloc nations, but détente’s proponents argued that liberalization was more likely if East/West relations improved. State Department experts counseled that détente could even imperil the Soviet system in the long run. An adviser reminded Kissinger in 1970 that “any loosening of