elsewhere, but Nixon and Kissinger remained steadfast in their defense of realpolitik. China also stands out in this story for the almost complete absence of Western attention to its violations during the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s.
Prologue: Human Rights After 1945
The broad-based international human rights movement that began to coalesce in the middle of the twentieth century drew on diverse origins. Paul Gordon Lauren has aptly described this movement as the convergence point of multiple premodern and modern “visions.”1 With a nod to some notable antecedents, its roots lay in the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. In the ensuing two centuries, growing wealth and interdependence in the Western world spurred the aspirations of the middle class, workers, women, and ethnic and religious minorities. In the twentieth century, the horrors of two world wars fueled calls for more substantial civilian protections in international law, while advances in communication and transportation increased interconnectedness and the proliferation of liberal ideas.
The carnage of the Second World War—especially the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations—threw into sharp relief the need to address the failures of the Versailles peace and to establish and enforce international rights standards. Accordingly, between 1945 and 1950 the world community created a set of regional frameworks and multilateral covenants.2 This period saw a significant change in attitudes toward basic rights and the proper composition of international law, as evidenced by such milestones as the U.N. Charter (1945), the Nuremberg case law (1945–1949), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). The Universal Declaration became the blueprint for national and regional policies, and it remains the most commonly cited document in the human rights pantheon. In effect, a new global vision posited that citizens and states could rightly concern themselves with the well-being of other states’ citizens. The international community was giving unprecedented attention to what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others.”3
American policymakers’ active involvement in these efforts reflected a major shift in domestic attitudes toward internationalism. The failings of prewar unilateralism (or “isolationism”) made the World War II generation far more willing to accept the burdens of Great Power status. Americans were thus at the forefront of the creation and maintenance of the United Nations, the Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The Cold War then convinced most of the remaining conservatives and unilateralists that faraway events could have dire consequences for American security, and this new, activist attitude became manifest in the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and President Harry S. Truman’s containment doctrine.
Yet despite America’s democratic traditions and its leading role in postwar standard-setting, American humanitarian activism waned after 1950. A combination of Cold War concerns, political realism, lingering isolationism, and domestic racial conflicts kept human rights at the margins of American diplomacy. A general consensus emerged that Washington would back undemocratic but anticommunist leaders in the developing world while also working to undermine or depose left-leaning regimes. Political disagreements remained, but they concerned means, not ends. A 1950 memo from diplomat George Kennan to Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarding Latin America demonstrates policymakers’ tendency to deemphasize democracy and individual rights in favor of the struggle against communism. “We cannot be too dogmatic,” argued Kennan, “about the methods by which local communists can be dealt with” in Latin America. “Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak” to fend off aggression, “then we must concede that harsh governmental methods of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternative, to further communist successes.”4
True to Kennan’s directive, American leaders of the fifties and sixties typically chose pragmatism and realism over vague standards of universal rights and a costly push for liberal democracy. As the presidential adviser William P. Bundy has written, the moral problem of backing dictators “hardly troubled an America engrossed in what she saw as a major job of preserving the national independence of new nations and protecting them from … totalitarian methods of government.”5 Many saw multilateral human rights instruments as threats to U.S. sovereignty, or worried that embracing such instruments would lead other nations to criticize racial segregation in America. Still others simply asserted that moral concerns did not belong in diplomacy, or pointed out that even the best of intentions could generate unforeseen consequences. “How often,” wrote the realist scholar and political adviser Hans J. Morgenthau in 1960, “have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?”6
The Cold War thus had a dual effect on international human rights promotion. On the one hand, “rights” assumed a new respectability as Washington and Moscow promoted competing visions of state obligations. On the other hand, national security ideologies were defined in part by repressive domestic policies.7 Cold War anticommunism differed from human rights activism, though at times the two overlapped. Anticommunism stimulated the work of ethnic activists who sought to curb authoritarianism in their ancestral homelands, but these desires went unrequited in the fifties and sixties because East/West relations were so poor. America’s support of autocratic, anticommunist regimes also hindered global liberal and democratic developments. This is not to say that Americans were uninterested in civil and political liberties; it is simply to say that their interest was not global in scope. The unique civil rights struggle of African Americans was only incidentally “transnational” for much of the fifties and sixties, though civil rights–era violence did serve as fodder for communist propaganda outlets—unwanted attention that may have speeded the passage of federal civil rights legislation.8
As America’s postwar human rights momentum was nipped in the bud, such concerns were largely ignored in the making of foreign policy. True, Americans remained genuinely concerned about communist governments’ transgressions, and criticism of totalitarianism was, in a broad sense, a commentary on individual liberty. American political rhetoric and public opinion posited a “free world” struggle to contain communism, and in the 1960s Congress did hold a few hearings on religious intolerance in the Eastern Bloc. But Americans aimed their reformist energies at solving the nation’s considerable racial problems, not international human rights violations. According to the policymaking logic of the day, human rights were the business of bodies like the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNHRC), not Congress or the president. As the activist Aryeh Neier has argued, multilateral human rights instruments “barely registered on the consciousness of even those most preoccupied with struggles over rights in the U.S.”9
The few global human rights issues that confronted the Lyndon Johnson administration (1963–1969) were generally relegated to the U.N. mission. Johnson allowed his representatives to issue mild criticisms of some communist governments, but he did little else, even on behalf of popular causes. Soviet anti-Semitism, for example, spurred the formation of NGOs, rallies in several American cities, and regular pickets at the Soviet embassy, but Washington’s official sympathy was not matched by political will or diplomatic initiatives.10 Such issues were still embedded in a Cold War ideological framework: just as Soviet propagandists attacked American racism, Americans attacked Soviet anti-Semitism. The Johnson administration encouraged direct appeals from private organizations, but in the absence of a closer East/West working relationship Americans could do little to help Soviet citizens. Besides, few in the mid-1960s believed that letters to the Kremlin would change Soviet internal policies. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, activists’ attention shifted from anti-Semitism to Soviet-Jewish emigration, and this interest would prove to have effects far beyond anyone’s expectations. (Richard Nixon would continue President Johnson’s hands-off approach, but he would find it much harder to sustain his priorities in the face of the Soviet Jewry movement.)
The Johnson administration also avoided a leading role in South