American and Russian Conflict

The central moral problem of government has always been to strike a just and effective balance between freedom and authority. When freedom degenerates into anarchy, the human personality becomes subject to arbitrary, brutal, and capricious forces -- witness aberrations of terrorism in even the most humane societies. (Bauman, 1982)Yet when the demand for order overrides all other considerations, man becomes a means and not an end, a tool of impersonal machinery. Human rights are the very essence of a meaningful life, and human dignity is the ultimate purpose of civil governments. Respect for the rights of man is written into the founding documents of almost every nation of the world. It has long been part of the common speech and daily lives of our citizens. The obscene and atrocious acts systematically employed to devalue, debase, and destroy man during World War II vividly and ineradicably impressed on the world the enormity of the challenge to human rights. It was to end such abuses and to provide moral authority in international affairs that new institutions and legal standards were forged after that war -- globally in the United Nations and in this hemisphere in a strengthened inter-American system. (Chomsky & Herman, 1979) The fact remains that continuing practices of intimidation, terror, and brutality, fostered sometimes from outside national territories and sometimes from inside, mark the distance yet to be traveled before the community of nations can claim that it is truly civilized. This is why the distinguished junior senator from New York, Senator Moynihan, is surely right in stressing that human rights should be not simply a humanitarian program but a political component of American foreign policy.

For the difference between freedom and totalitarianism is not transient or incidental; it is a moral conflict, of fundamental historical proportions, which gives the modem age its special meaning and peril. Our defense of human rights reminds us of the fundamental reason that our competition with totalitarian systems is vital to the cause of mankind. There is no reason for us to accept the hypocritical double standard increasingly prevalent in the United Nations where petty tyrannies berate us for our alleged moral shortcomings. On this issue we are not -- and have no reason to be -- on the defensive. And yet, while human rights must be an essential component of our foreign policy, to pursue it effectively over the long term we must take the measure of the dangers and dilemmas along the way. First, any foreign policy must ultimately be judged by its operational results. To be sure, the advocacy of human rights has in itself a political and even strategic significance. But, in the final reckoning, more than advocacy will be counted. If we universalize our human rights policy, applying it indiscriminatingly and literally to all countries, we run the risk of becoming the world's policeman-an objective the American people may not support. At a minimum we will have to answer what may be the question for several friendly governments: how and to what extent we will support them if they get into difficulties by following our maxims. And we will have to indicate what sanctions we will apply to less well-disposed governments which challenge the very precepts of our policy. (Dobriansky, 1989)

If, on the other hand, we confine ourselves to proclaiming objectives that are not translated into concrete actions and specific results, we run the risk of demonstrating that we are impotent and of evoking a sense of betrayal among those our human rights policy seeks to help.

Such a course could tempt unfriendly governments to crack down all the harder on their dissidents, in order to demonstrate the futility of our proclamations-this indeed has already happened to some extent in the Soviet Union. Nor can we escape from the dilemma by asserting that there is no connection between human rights behavior and our attitude on other foreign policy problems-by "unlinking," as the technical phrase goes, human rights from other issues. For this implies that there is no cost or consequence to the violation of human rights, turning our proclamation of human rights into a liturgical theme -- decoupled, unenforced, and compromised. Or else we will insist on our values only against weaker countries, in Latin America or Asia, many of which may even be conducting foreign policies supportive of our own. This would lead to the paradox that the weaker the nation and the less its importance on the international scene, the firmer and more uncompromising would be our human rights posture. (Forsythe, 1990) Second, precisely because human rights advocacy is a powerful political