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156 6 “TILTING AGAINST GRAY-FLANNEL WINDMILLS” U.S.-Argentine Relations, 1979–1980 Patricia Derian’s frustration was palpable. “Unless things change I’ll probably resign in a few days, over a major policy disagreement,” the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs informed the New York Times reporter Ann Crittenden in late May 1980. Having spearheaded U.S. efforts to promote human rights in Argentina for the previous three years, Derian was outraged when she returned from a brief vacation to discover that the Carter administration had decided to initiate “a major policy shift” toward the South American nation that aimed, in her view, to “normalize relations and end our official criticism of the regime.” Barring a reversal of the decision, Derian told Crittenden with characteristic candor, “I’m leaving, and I won’t say it’s for ‘personal reasons.’”1 It was a remarkable announcement,particularly in light of the publication only a month earlier of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) report on its visit to Argentina in the fall of 1979. In the months leading up to the visit,the protection of human rights in Argentina had improved significantly,and the report itself constituted a landmark condemnation of the Argentine military junta’s terror campaign against perceived subversives. Nonetheless, by the spring of 1980, it was increasingly evident at the State Department Human Rights Bureau that the Carter administration’s success in orchestrating the Argentine military junta’s invitation to the IACHR had come at a heavy political cost. Indeed, the administration’s July 1978 decision to make Export-Import (Exim) Bank approval of the $270 million Allis-Chalmers sale of a hydroelectric turbine factory to Argentina contingent on the junta’s invitation to the IACHR “TILTING AGAINST GRAY-FLANNEL WINDMILLS” 157 sparked a firestorm of criticism from U.S. business leaders and conservative journalists , who accused the Carter administration of obstructing profitable bilateral trade relations in the interest of a poorly defined and badly executed human rights policy. Sympathetic members of Congress quickly followed suit, ratcheting up the pressure on the administration to delink U.S. commercial transfers to Argentina from the human rights policy. Underscoring the political power of the U.S. business community, opposition to the economic dimension of the human rights policy forced the Carter team onto the defensive, threatening to reverse the limited gains Derian’s Human Rights Bureau had achieved over the previous nineteen months. Corresponding with rising domestic resistance to the human rights policy, a resurgence of Cold War tension in the second half of the Carter administration hardened the president’s outlook in foreign affairs, a development that reverberated with particular intensity in the developing world. As the Carter team grew increasingly concerned with Soviet adventurism in the Horn of Africa, rising popular unrest in Iran, and the deteriorating political situation in Nicaragua, human rights increasingly moved to the back burner as a U.S. policy priority. Most significant for U.S.-Argentine relations, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Argentina’s strategic significance for the United States increased dramatically, and in the opening months of 1980 the fear that Argentina would offset the U.S. grain embargo on the Soviet Union had rapidly accelerated rapprochement between Washington and Buenos Aires. “The decision will probably result in Mrs. Derian’s resignation early next week,” Ann Crittenden wrote, “for if Patt Derian was identified with any single issue while in office it was her constant, and generally successful battle to distance the United States from the military regime in Argentina.” That fight, Crittenden concluded,“now seems to have been lost.”2 * * * To a considerable extent, tension between the Carter administration and the U.S. business community was rooted in the contradictory impulses that emerged from Jimmy Carter’s self-avowed social liberalism and fiscal conservatism.3 On the one hand,Carter’s inaugural declaration that the U.S.commitment to human rights would be “absolute” honestly reflected the president’s religious beliefs and moralism, coupled with a keen political sense of the national mood in the postVietnam , post-Watergate era. Although the protracted struggle to transform Carter’s lofty rhetoric into concrete policy prescriptions over the course of 1977 made it clear that the pursuit of human rights would necessarily be conditional on a wide range of additional foreign policy considerations, Carter remained dedicated to infusing U.S. foreign policy with a heavy dose of morality. “My...

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