Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard

a new human rights bureau and compile “country reports” that would assess the domestic situation within every country receiving assistance.

      Legislators were motivated by their constituents’ concerns, by personal political ambitions, and, presumably, by a degree of genuine concern for suffering peoples. But while we cannot prove what was in their hearts, it is easier to demonstrate that their respective positions lined up with their ideological beliefs and their political interests. Liberal Democrats Donald Fraser, Edward Kennedy, and Frank Church took the first major steps by chairing hearings and sponsoring resolutions to limit military assistance to authoritarian regimes of the right.⁵ Conservatives then latched onto the trend to attack détente, left-wing regimes, and economic aid to developing nations. Coalitions occasionally formed across party lines, but rarely across ideological lines. Conservative Democrats were more likely to align with conservative Republicans than liberals of their own party on anti-Soviet proposals. Likewise, some moderate and liberal Republicans were troubled by American support of dictatorships, and thus were often willing to join with liberal Democrats (though liberal Republicans were a rarity by the end of the 1970s). Members of Congress also prioritized specific regions. Conservatives generally fixated on the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, while liberals focused on the right-wing regimes of Latin America. Beyond Latin America and Europe, Congress largely ignored violations in the Middle East and East Asia, though they occasionally spotlighted American allies Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Africa was also generally ignored, with the exception of Uganda in 1978–1979 and South Africa during the 1980s antiapartheid movement.

       The Foreign Aid Battleground

      A major factor in the growing congressional interest in human rights was the long-standing debate over America’s program of international economic and military assistance. Foreign aid—the voluntary transfer of public resources from one nation to another—was central to the human rights story because cutting aid was among the most effective methods by which members of Congress could create and enforce a human rights policy. If private diplomacy or public criticism failed to alter an abusive government’s behavior, legislators could withhold funds in order to encourage reforms. The aid-cutting trend and the human rights movement developed for many of the same reasons. The Cold War thaw allowed policymakers to step outside of the assumptions that had long governed aid allocation. At the same time that policymakers were growing wary of overextending the nation’s commitments, the economic troubles of the seventies seemed a poor context for the U.S. government to dispense dollars around the world. Foreign aid was always controversial, and policymakers debated it for two decades before they began debating human rights. Consequently, by the time Congress began passing human rights laws in the mid-seventies, legislators had already grown comfortable with the notion of aid cuts.

      The unraveling of the foreign aid consensus predated, and in some ways contributed to, the dissolution of the containment doctrine. In most years up to the mid-1960s, foreign aid exceeded 1 percent of GNP; during the Marshall Plan it even exceeded 2 percent. But when the Vietnam War effort began to look prohibitively costly, more Americans questioned the principles undergirding aid programs. Senator Fulbright, who called foreign aid “one of the most vexing problems of American foreign policy,” joined with congressional liberals to savage the manner in which the paternalistic aid commitment to South Vietnam had evolved into a military commitment.⁶ In the sixties, liberals further argued that foreign assistance was too closely linked to American economic interests and anticommunism. Although aid to South Vietnam financed infrastructure and schools, it also funded the poorly conceived strategic hamlet program and the authoritarian police apparatus. Legislators asked why South Vietnamese leaders seemed unable to improve their popularity or increase their democratic attributes despite being granted such large sums. One early attempt to address these problems, Title IX of the Foreign Assistance Act (1966), proposed making “political development” (loosely defined as more democratic procedures and institutions) a part of USAID decisions. But the effort was not sustained, and USAID’s mandate remained economic development, not the promotion of democracy.⁷

      Human rights concerns had little influence on aid debates in the 1960s, but policymakers did question aid to regimes that exhibited poor political development or expressed anti-Americanism. Many liberals and moderates disagreed that a government’s anticommunist credentials were a proper litmus test for receiving aid. These critics argued that aid should only go to the poorest countries or to democracies, a position they justified on both strategic and moral grounds. Meanwhile, conservatives’ criticism of foreign aid was an integral part of their opposition to post-1945 liberalism. Republicans had been somewhat amenable to aid early in the Cold War, but in the sixties they lambasted the exorbitance of aid levels and marveled at how few strings were attached. The United States, they argued, was giving too much money to too many countries, an attitude exemplified in a 1966 Republican campaign slogan: “Why are we losing our money AND our friends?” These misgivings did not stem from recipient nations’ human rights records, but rather nations’ relative alignment with American interests and anticommunism.⁸ Many American voters, too, supported cuts in the interest of anticommunism, isolationism, countering anti-Americanism, or trimming the budget. A constituent wrote to Senator Henry Jackson in 1970, “In every country that we have given aid to that says ‘Go Home Yankee,’ take them off the list of being permitted to receive foreign aid.” Another wrote, “Let’s build a healthy prosperous America if we have a lot of money to spend and the hell with the damned foreigners, let them fend for themselves…. Besides, the more we donate to them, the more they despise Americans.”⁹ That same year, one congressman succinctly described how this new isolationism had affected Congress: “The congressional climate in support of American economic overseas commitments has never been more inhospitable.”¹⁰ Due in part to these reservations, foreign aid declined throughout the seventies and eighties, dropping as low as 0.25 percent of GNP, and this downward trend continued into the twenty-first century.¹¹

      Richard Nixon’s approach to the aid dilemma was consistent with his wider foreign policy goals. Publicly, he assured Americans that there were sound moral reasons for foreign aid, but his real interest was using aid to prevent developing nations from turning toward socialism or nonaligned anti-Americanism. He also sought to shift more of the aid burden to America’s allies, multilateral institutions, the private sector, and the developing nations themselves. Reducing direct aid would be a way for the United States to loosen itself from troublesome entanglements and avoid being “blackmailed,” he asserted, though he did not see democracy as a necessary yardstick for aid allocation. “If you go down that road,” he said to Kissinger, “you will have to cut off aid to two-thirds of the ninety countries in the world that get it.”¹² In 1971, the Senate rejected the foreign assistance bill for the first time ever. Emergency legislation allotted some funds, but for the next several years budgets were lower than usual. “Neo-isolationism” was clearly a factor in these trends. Whereas the prior generation of liberals had supported the use of dollars to build up the developing world, those in the 1970s were far more likely to focus on America’s domestic ills. The American public, too, was rejecting broad plans for global melioration. In a 1976 Gallup poll, 23 percent of respondents called themselves “predominantly” or “completely” isolationist, compared with just 8 percent in 1964. Only 7 percent of respondents identified themselves as “completely internationalist” in 1976, while 30 percent had done so in 1964.¹³

      Nevertheless, cutting aid and arms exports was controversial on many levels. Military aid constituted the bulk of American foreign assistance, and foreign military sales were among the nation’s largest exports. Such aid and sales strengthened alliances, allowed friendly regimes to defend themselves, prevented the United States from having to commit troops, and helped keep American defense contractors in the black. Not only were American leaders reluctant to abandon long-standing friendships, but after Vietnam they also sought to reduce direct military commitments. Indeed, military aid allocations were a relatively reliable measure of America’s foreign policy priorities. As policymakers shifted their attention away from Asia and toward the Middle East at the dawn of the 1970s, aid to South Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan fell considerably, while Israel and Egypt leaped to the top of the list.¹⁴

      Arms sales and security assistance